Hop in: We’re taking a pop culture road trip on Route 66 : NPR

Route 66 is celebrating 100 years of being the country’s most famous highway, an icon of American culture.

As it passes through eight states — from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif. — its charm is all about driving on the open road, through the plains and prairies, canyons and deserts. Past big cities, cow towns and ghost towns, stopping at roadside motels, retro diners and kitschy tourist traps.

Like every good road trip, Route 66 has a soundtrack — starting with the famous anthem sung by Nat King Cole (and later, his daughter Natalie).

If you ever plan to motor West/
travel my way, take the highway that’s the best/
Get your kicks on Route 66…

Bobby Troupthen an aspiring songwriter and jazz pianist, wrote that 1946 song during a road trip he took to California. Over the years, many others have recorded their own versions, including Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters.

It winds from Chicago to L.A/
More than 2,000 miles all the way/
Get your kicks on Route 66…

The famous thoroughfare was created in 1926, and three years later, the Depression hit, followed by the Dust Bowl — when drought and dust storms devastated farmland.

A family in Pittsburg County, Okla., is forced to leave their home in June 1938 due to a serious drought in the region.

Dorothea Lange/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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Dorothea Lange/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

“The Dust Bowl drove thousands of families away from their farms in the Midwest and southwest states,” said Jim Ross, who has written nine books about Route 66. He lives on an original section of the highway. “Most of them headed for California, because that’s where the jobs were, or so they thought.”

For the Farm Security Administration Project, Dorothea Lange photographed displaced families as they traveled West. The migrants drove in covered jalopies, hitchhiked and walked barefoot with their belongings along the highways.

Route 66 expert Michael Wallis says their trek was heartbreaking — “Following the scent of citrus out to California to rebuild their lives, they were hooked into that old dream, the land of milk and honey, which let them down.

Writer John Steinbeck chronicle the migration along Route 66 – which he named “The Mother Road” — in The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck’s 1939 novel won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a now classic film. It starred Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, an ex-con traveling from Oklahoma with his sharecropper family.

“Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can’t eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad,” he said in a monologue that would later inspire songwriters Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen.

And legends of Route 66 shifted gears with the times.

After World War II, cars and Route 66 tourism were heavily marketed. Families began taking road trips around the country. And by the early 1960s, their spirit of adventure was captured by rock and rollers Chuck Berry and The Rolling Stones.