Way back in 1940 or ’41, I made a fast walking trip up and down the basin of the Columbia River and its tributaries, the Snake, the Hood, Willamette, Yakima and the Klickitat, making up little songs about what I seen. I made up 26 songs about the Bonneville Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, and the thunderous foamy waters of the rapids and cascades, the wild and windward water sprays from the high Ceilio [Celilo] Falls, and the folks living in thee little shack house just about a mile from the end of the line. The Department of Interior folks got ahold of me and took me into a clothes closet there at the Bonneville Power Administration house in Portland and melted my songs down onto records.
oody walked in wearing the khaki work shirt and matching work pants that he seemed to wear every day. He was bearded, unkempt, and reporting for a job that wasn’t exactly his yet. It had been twelve days since the Bonneville Power Administration had sent him a letter stating that it was interested in hiring him to write songs for the agency and asking him to fill out paperwork to facilitate the hiring process. Instead, there he was, unannounced, holding a guitar and eating an apple, at the BPA headquarters at 811 NE Oregon Street in Portland, with his wife and three kids waiting outside in the car. The blue Pontiac was now in even worse shape than when it was used to haul firewood in the Sierra Nevadas. Guthrie had busted a window when he’d locked the keys inside, the upholstery was ripped, and the vehicle looked generally lived-in.
The 811 NE Oregon Street building in which Woody Guthrie worked; one of many BPA buildings in Portland at the time
His hobo-beatnik style wasn’t exactly what employees at the government agency were used to seeing. The BPA, just four years old at that point, was made up of engineers and bureaucrats. The only people who could have any use for a dusty folksinger were in the public information office, the head of which soon fetched Woody and shepherded him to his desk.
Stephen Kahn had heard of Woody Guthrie but had never heard his music, let alone met the man. He’d gotten his name from Alan Lomax, who had recommended Guthrie for Kahn’s documentary project with a flow of superlatives over the phone from Washington, DC. “The idea that Woody would actually get a job writing ballads was just an inconceivable stroke, I felt like shouting over the telephone line, it was a laughing conversation all the way. I can remember the delight and (sense) of triumph I felt that Woody would get a chance to do this,” Lomax recollected later.
The job Lomax recommended Guthrie for was a yearlong gig to be an actor, narrator, and singer in the documentary The Columbia: America’s Greatest Power Stream. That was still the job description when Gunther von Fritsch visited Guthrie to take some photos in Los Angeles. And it was even the job description mentioned in the letter the BPA sent to Woody on the first of May—“Narrator-Actor, $3200 per annum.” However, the May 1 letter also stated that the Department of Interior in Washington, DC, needed to approve the one-year contract. That, Kahn sensed from the start, could be a problem. The film’s budget was tenuous, and war was looming. Then there was Woody’s background. Even though Kahn was clearly a liberal himself and an activist for public power, hiring another activist who wrote columns for a communist newspaper, a known agitator and sometimes radical, was a whole other deal.
Still, while Kahn hadn’t officially offered Guthrie a job in the first place, now that he was standing in front of him, he didn’t want to let an opportunity pass.
“He had his guitar, and I said, ‘Play me something,’ ” Kahn recalled. “And I listened. And I said, ‘Woody, I think you have the common touch.’ ”
The solution Kahn came up with right then and there was an emergency appointment, for one month. Such an appointment required approval only from within the agency, by the BPA’s administrator, Paul Raver. Kahn set up an impromptu audition with the boss.
Raver had taken over the BPA shortly after J. D. Ross’s untimely death in 1939. A gaunt, bespectacled former Northwest University professor, Raver wasn’t the enthusiastic public-power advocate that Ross had been. He considered it inappropriate, for example, for the agency to get too involved in local PUD elections.
Perhaps anticipating Raver’s conservative tendencies and fearing that Woody might start spouting ideology, Kahn gave the singer a warning. “Just play your guitar and sing your songs,” he said. “If you talk, you’ll lose the battle.”
Woody sat on Raver’s desk and did his best version of himself—“the man who told you something you already know” with the Will Rogers charm. He played songs for Raver and kept his talking to a minimum.
About thirty minutes later, Woody walked out with the job. An employment sheet calls him an “information consultant.” His job description suggests that during his one-month employment, he would research the Columbia, study farmers’ use of electricity, and determine the feasibility of creating a documentary and radio programs about it all. Only in the last sentence does it add “narrating and arrangement of musical accompaniment.”
Guthrie later complained to friends that he had to fill out “five-feet of paperwork” when being hired on by the federal government. In that paperwork, which still exists in BPA archives, he wrote that he’d completed only through the eighth grade in school, that sign painting was one of his technical skills, and that he’d been unemployed since January.
The $3,200 annual salary listed for the original job was prorated, working out to $266.66 for the month he was there. Guthrie was disappointed at not having a full year’s wages secured, but work was work.
And it would be work: one song for each day he was on the clock.
“I wanted to make sure that every day he produced,” Kahn recalled. “Like in Hollywood, they require a scriptwriter to turn out three pages a day—or something, you know, no matter how good or bad it is. He had to bring in three pages.”
Kahn told Woody he would be “over him with a stick” and require him to play the new music for him every day.
To prime Guthrie for the project, Kahn gave him three books: a history of Lewis and Clark, a history of the Columbia River, and a copy of The Grapes of Wrath, which Guthrie claimed to have not yet read.* Kahn also gave Guthrie a broad overview of PUDs, irrigation, and cheap electricity.
“He said, ‘What kinda songs you want, Steve?’ ” Kahn recounted. “I said, ‘Well, the purpose of the development of this river is to raise the standards of living for the people around here by giving them water and power and navigation and flood control and the whole bit.’ He said, ‘Geez, that’s a big order.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s why we got you.’
“Woody was thrilled with the prospect,” Kahn continued, “and he saw it was more than a power or a reclamation or a navigation project but something that could touch the lives of people of four or five states and set a pattern for how democracy could function in this country with the government doing something constructive to improve the conditions of people.”
Guthrie’s BPA job application
Signed on to the project, Guthrie asked for one more thing: fifty cents to buy a hamburger. Kahn obliged.
Guthrie thrived in the framework laid out for him. He had an assignment, a purpose, doing what he did best—writing topical songs about things he cared about. He considered it a patriotic effort to promote something he deeply believed in: the government by the people, working for the people.
Guthrie instantly fell in love with both the Columbia River Gorge and the New Deal vision he was writing about. The sheer ruggedness of the region made it a far cry from the flat, dry plains of his upbringing. In a letter dated June 10, twenty-seven days into his assignment, he wrote friends in New York: “This Pacific Northwest is a country of wild rivers and rocky canyons and is one of the prettiest places you ever looked at. Uncle Sam is putting big power dams all along the rivers to produce electricity for public ownership and distribution through the people’s utility districts in every town and countryside and the main job is to force the private-owned concerns to sell out to the government by selling power at lower rates.”
Arlo Guthrie said the project was life-changing for his father. “He saw himself for the first time as being on the inside of a worthwhile, monumental, world-changing, nature-challenging, huge-beyond-belief thing. It was bigger than him, and frankly there weren’t many things he considered bigger than him. Most people are the center of their own universe, and it’s rare you get a chance to participate in something that you know is bigger than you and your country. He saw this as a big deal.
“He felt there was a real purpose here, an urgency,” Arlo Guthrie said. “He believed what was happening here was not only good, but needed.”
Beautiful country, an idealistic vision, and a demanding boss—it worked out to a perfect combination for Woody Guthrie. That month proved to be the most productive of his life: he wrote twenty-six songs in thirty days.
The monthlong job didn’t make the Guthrie family flush, but it allowed them to rent a place with electricity and buy groceries—both improvements over their situation for the first part of the year so far. To get at the money in advance, Guthrie borrowed half of his coming wage from a federal employee loan office, which he said “only charged me $2.00 for a loan of $112.10.”
“The ten bucks a day has enabled my wife and kids to exist on a status similar to humans and has produced for me the wherewithal to break quite a good number of the usual run of good health, good housekeeping and good behavior rules of accepted book learnt society,” he wrote to friends that June.
He was apparently so taken with having his money that he made an odd show of it. One BPA employee recalled seeing him take a pencil rubbing of a silver dollar, then writing beneath it: “This dollar once belonged to Woody Guthrie.”
The family spent a week in a cheap Portland auto camp before renting the northwest corner apartment on the bottom floor of a house at 6111 SE Ninety-Second Street for the rest of their stay. The house was in the working-class Lents neighborhood of Portland, and a full six miles from downtown Portland. Mary made fast friends with some neighbors, probably relieved to be around regular folks rather than the artistic class that made up the Guthries’ social circle in Los Angeles and New York.
While Woody bragged to his friends that he was raising some hell with his newfound income, Mary Guthrie—who had every reason to cast Woody in the worst light possible—said he was particularly well behaved during his time in Portland, so consumed he was by his work.
“He wrote at night,” Mary Guthrie said. “When Woody would come home, he always had notebooks and songs with him. He would go over these songs many times and I’m sure add more to them before the day was over.” She added, “I was happy to be with him and enjoy a rather normal standard of living for a while.”
But the job didn’t solve all of Woody’s money troubles.
One day, that blue Pontiac—bought on credit back when Woody Guthrie was a host on national radio not six months prior—turned up missing. When Guthrie told Kahn, Kahn asked him if he’d made payments on it.
“Well, I put a down payment,” Guthrie responded.
“I can tell ya where that car is,” Kahn said.
Kahn convinced Woody to shave off his beard to look more presentable to the finance company that had repossessed the beat-up sedan. However, when they spoke to the officer, he demanded $1,000, and with all the damage to the car, it was worth only half that much.
“You got that [much money], Woody?” Kahn asked. Upon hearing the answer, he tried to comfort the folksinger: “You didn’t really want that car anyways, do ya?”
Guthrie said he didn’t.
Despite Woody’s colorful character traits, he gave Kahn little reason to regret his decision to put this “scruffy songwriter” on the government payroll.
From the outset, Guthrie showed an uncanny ability to absorb the complex history of and plans for the Columbia Basin and to distill it all into simple, catchy stanzas of verse.
“I gave him a book on the Columbia River and he produced two songs like you’d snap your fingers,” Kahn recalled. Among those was the song “Roll On, Columbia,” which he started writing his first day on the job, using the melody from Lead Belly’s “Good Night Irene.”
Buehler with state motor pool truck, 1972
“ ‘Sheridan’s boys in the blockhouse that night,’ was a line telling of Indian troubles at Cascade Rapids and Phil Sheridan coming with troops from Vancouver Barracks,” Kahn said of the third stanza of that famous song.
Guthrie later cut out the stanzas that glorified American military triumph over the indigenous peoples of the Northwest, but the point remains: within twenty-four hours of arriving in town and being handed a heavy tome about the history of the area, he was putting the information into rhyming lyrics that have endured for seventy-five years.
Of course, Guthrie didn’t simply sit in Portland, read books, and write songs based on what the BPA told him. He struck out into the country to see what all the fuss was about.
He wasn’t trusted with a government car, Kahn said, considering the sorry state of his Pontiac upon his arrival. Instead he was assigned a driver—a man named Elmer Buehler.
Postcard of Lost Lake, Oregon
Buehler, thirty, worked for Kahn in the public information office. One of his jobs was to drive around Washington and Oregon screening Hydro—the documentary Kahn had made for the BPA in 1939—at Grange halls, county fairs, and other public meetings. The job taught Buehler a strong sense of local geography. “It got to be that I knew every post office town in the Columbia Basin,” he later said.
For the rest of his life, Buehler remembered those days on the road with Woody Guthrie. They were in a “shiny 1940 black Hudson Hornet,” with Buehler at the wheel and Guthrie working on songs in the backseat.
“We didn’t talk much, because he was always strumming his guitar and jotting notes,” Buehler said. “He had a job to do.”
Interestingly, one of the songs Buehler insisted he heard Guthrie play in the backseat was the ballad “This Land Is Your Land.” Guthrie had written much of that song the year before, in 1940, while in New York, but he didn’t put it into finished form until 1944, when he made his famous recording of it. Though it is not officially counted as one of the Columbia River ballads, Buehler’s account suggests that the open roads of the Pacific Northwest prompted Guthrie to revisit the song extolling land for the people.
The Northwest was a wild country, like nothing Woody had ever seen, and the beauty had him awestruck. Buehler drove him east along the river and through the orchards of the Willamette Valley, then to visit the already-fading timber towns of Dee and Parkdale. But it was a side trip to Lost Lake, in the shadow of Mount Hood, that had perhaps the biggest impact. Surrounded on all sides by thick virgin forests, the lake was a revelation for Guthrie. “He just stood there in awe,” Buehler recalled, “and he said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. I am in paradise.’ ”
Woody worked what he saw into his new songs—cherries, peaches, apples, wheat, and other crops. He also saw hops for the first time, which must have thrilled him, considering how often he consumed its by-product.
As they drove along, they kept the windows down—Buehler said Guthrie had body odor, noting several times in his various interviews that his stench was often overpowering. As they traveled along the Columbia River Gorge and into the wide desert plains of Eastern Washington, Guthrie picked away at his songs. “He would play his guitar, apparently composing things as we drove along,” Buehler said.
No definitive itinerary of Guthrie and Buehler’s road trip exists, but they most likely followed the Columbia River into South-Central Washington, then crossed what was still an unirrigated expanse of desert to Spokane. From Spokane, it was a straight shot west to the Grand Coulee Dam site, where they could pick the river back up and follow it, more or less, all the way to Portland. With Buehler as guide, Guthrie saw the bucolic Willamette Valley; picturesque Hood River, in the gorge; Lake Chelan (Guthrie thought the Chelan River would be a great place for another dam); the apple orchards of Wenatchee; and, of course, Grand Coulee. Prior to the advent of the Interstate Highway System, it could be slowgoing on two-lane roads through the parched dun-colored country around the Columbia River, and they made many stops. Buehler took Woody to see factories and logging yards along the way. As planned, they also dropped in at Grange meetings and other gatherings, allowing Woody to meet the people and experience what they did.
“Rural people appealed to him,” Buehler said. “Typically at a meeting, someone would come up and speak with Woody. Woody would listen and encourage the person.”
In the tiny farm community of Arlington, Oregon, the two stopped for dinner at the local café. Presumably, Woody had his customary bowl of chili and leaned his guitar up against the counter. The sight of strangers in town—especially one with a guitar—was a curiosity, and soon Woody was singing to a small crowd. According to Buehler, this turned into an impromptu performance across the street at the local Grange hall. Soon word of mouth had the whole town coming down for a free night of entertainment.
Guthrie didn’t extend such courtesies to everyone he met, however. In Spokane, he was asked to play “background music” for the local chamber of commerce. “I wouldn’t play background music for any chamber of commerce, let alone foreground music,” he sniffed.
Woody never wavered in his contempt for money traders, but this new “planned promised land” appealed to him. The tangible benefits of jobs, farming opportunities, and better living conditions were inspiring to him, and sparked a creative impulse.
Buehler’s tour was effective in educating Guthrie not only about the landscape and the people, but also about the projects. He would later write, “I saw the Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam from just about every cliff, mountain, tree and post from which it can be seen.”
As he rode around the basin, the songs poured forth. “Some most fertile and pregnant ideas have occurred to me here,” he wrote to friends.
1940 black Hudson, similar to the one Guthrie and Buehler drove in the Columbia Basin
It was just a year before that he’d recorded his Dust Bowl Ballads album, and the imagery of drought-stricken Oklahoma was never far from Woody’s mind. The Dust Bowl or the plight of migrant workers plays a role in at least twelve of the twenty-six Columbia River songs.
By Woody’s telling, the Columbia Basin was the Eden folks had been “wastin’ gasoline a’chasin’ around.” As he put it in “Washington Talkin’ Blues”:
Now what we need is a great big dam
To throw a lot of water out acrost that land,
People could work and the stuff would grow
And you could wave goodbye to the old Skid Row.
As it happened, on one of their trips they came upon a “vanguard of autos,” as Buehler called it, carrying Dust Bowl refugees. There were “license plates from as far away as North and South Dakota driving toward the Willamette Valley, looking to get a better home. It was like seeing poverty on wheels.” Guthrie was moved by the sight, telling his driver that those were “his people.”
While Woody wisely followed Kahn’s request in avoiding overtly political messages in his songs, perhaps the greatest song from his time on the Columbia River captures the bitterness held by the migrant farmers who had been destitute for nearly a decade: “Pastures of Plenty.” From the outset of the song, he casts the American continent not as a land of promise, but as a harsh and indifferent world.
Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled
And your deserts are hot and your mountains were cold
It’s from this perspective that the hope of transforming a dry basin into productive farmland truly comes through in Guthrie’s work.
The version of the song recorded for the BPA film is a minor-key adaptation of the traditional standard “Pretty Polly,” which, Alan Lomax wrote, has a “starkly brooding melody” that “endows ‘Pastures of Plenty’ with somber melancholy.”
Look down in the canyon and there you will see
The Grand Coulee showers her blessings on me;
The lights for the city, for factory, and mill
Green pastures of plenty from dry barren hills.
Arguably, no government report, study, or memo ever captured the intent of the Columbia Basin Project better than “Pastures of Plenty.”
In a similar vein, Guthrie found hope in the Grand Coulee Dam.
Grand Coulee powder monkeys and jackhammer johns at work, 1930s
Mary Guthrie said that Woody was “fascinated by the dam,” an assertion clearly backed up by his songs. Guthrie broke into hyperbole when singing about the enormous structure, in one song calling it “the biggest thing that man has ever done” and in another, “the mightiest thing ever built by man.”
The dam was a perfect backdrop for Guthrie to tell the story of the common workers: the “powder monkeys,” the jackhammer men, the drillers. “We come a long ways, it was looking for work, all along down the wide highway you see, and this loafing ’round idle is really what hurts,” he writes in “Guys on the Grand Coulee Dam.”
As the nation emerged from the worst depression in its history, Guthrie saw the Grand Coulee as irrefutable proof of the value and might of the American worker. That this work was going toward providing electricity to factories producing war materials that would soon be taking on Nazi forces lent a patriotic flavor to many of the songs, such as “Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done”:
There’s a man across the ocean, boys, I guess you know him well
His name is Adolf Hitler, we’ll blow his soul to hell;
We’ll kick him in the panzers and put him on the run,
And that’ll be the biggest thing that man has ever done.
Little about the federal programs along the river went unmentioned by Guthrie in his twenty-six songs. He addresses rural electrification in “End of My Line” (“But there ain’t no country extra fine, / If you’re just a mile from the end o’ the line”); trade being facilitated by the locks at the Bonneville Dam in “Talking Columbia” (“Gasoline a goin’ up. Wheat a-comin’ down”); and, of course, electricity itself in “Eleckatricity and All.”
In his ballads, little distinction is drawn between hydropower and the river itself. Rather, the electricity “Uncle Sam” was harnessing from the Columbia was a pure manifestation of nature being used to improve citizens’ lives.
There’s undoubtedly a something-for-nothing quality to Guthrie’s Columbia River work, a suggestion that damming the Columbia wouldn’t diminish the wild character of the river he was clearly in love with. “Now river, you can ramble where the sun sets in the sea / But while you’re rambling, river, you can do some work for me,” Guthrie sings in “Roll, Columbia, Roll.” At the same time, one has to marvel at the way Guthrie’s driving ballads so clearly convey the simple truth of the matter: that one of the great forces of nature on the North American continent was now channeling the miracle of electricity across a huge swath of the Pacific Northwest. The driving waltz of “Roll On, Columbia” clearly invokes the cascading waters of the river itself: “Your power is turning our darkness to dawn, / Roll on, Columbia, roll on!”
Of course, some lyrics don’t stand up to modern scrutiny, specifically, the celebration of the Native American wars in “Roll On, Columbia” that today are recognized as a near-genocidal government policy. In addressing the controversial lyrics, Arlo Guthrie said his father later “scratched them out and didn’t use them.” Buehler’s account of Woody’s time in the Northwest suggests he didn’t hold any ill will toward Native Americans. Rather, one of his favorite parts of the trip was meeting tribal members at Celilo Falls, which was an even larger salmon-fishing area than Kettle Falls was. At the falls, fishermen would perch precariously over the raging waters on what looked like rickety wooden docks in order to snag salmon with dip nets. Celilo Falls was eventually drowned by the completion of The Dalles Dam in 1957, but at the time it was still an important gathering spot.
Celilo Falls before The Dalles Dam submerged the ancient fishing and trading post in 1957
“He was very much interested in the Indians that were up there. He looked upon them as the common people too,” said Buehler.
Guthrie also expressed sympathy for Native Americans in personal correspondence. If he was ignorant of the effects government development on the river was having on salmon, he was keen to its industrial harms. “Some factories are dumping refuse & chemical garbage into the nation’s greatest salmon, power stream, the Columbia River,” he wrote. “Millions of fish are destroyed and the Indians are plenty sore. The dried salmon mean grub for the hard winter.… All running water is public property under federal law—why this poisoning of the river?”
When he wasn’t on the road, Guthrie was given a desk in the corner of the BPA’s public information office. He was generally well liked in the office. According to witnesses, he was “free and easy in his conversation with everybody and was completely uninhibited—but he was diamond sharp.”
Still, the unusual nature of Guthrie’s work led to unusual scenes there. He banged out rhythms on his metal desk, quite a distraction to other employees, and his body odor remained an issue; Buehler claimed several of the BPA secretaries complained about the stench that emanated from the new employee. Guthrie didn’t hesitate to strike up conversations around the office. And he’d sometimes sit on the corner of Kahn’s desk and hash out folk tunes, Kahn humming along as Guthrie strummed his guitar.
Pete Seeger called his way of writing music the “scatteration technique.”
“His method of composition was to pound out verse after verse on the typewriter or in his precise country-style handwriting, and try it out on his guitar as he went along,” Seeger said.
That was definitely the case with the Columbia River ballads.
Like he always did, Guthrie used existing melodies to write his new topical songs—about the Columbia, the New Deal, the Oregon Trail, “eleckatricity,” and migrants trying to get a little piece of land of their own. Not to mention “them salmon fish,” which are “mighty shrewd.” “Just like a president, they run ever’ four years,” he says in “Talking Columbia.”
Kahn didn’t mind that the melodies weren’t new, nor did he mind if Woody turned in a new version of a song he had written previously. There were many of them—including “Hard Travelin’,” “It Takes a Married Man,” and “Jackhammer Blues”—in which Woody altered the lyrics and wrote in some local color. It was the folk process, which came in handy.
“He could write a song about a subject and do it in the styles of the old songs, so people could play along almost instantly. This was the great feature about this stuff,” said Arlo Guthrie. “And that’s what my dad did with these Columbia River songs. He took these old tunes and styles and put new words in them, and they were sort of instantly fit in your ear.”
When a song was finished, Woody went into the closet in the BPA’s basement and recorded low-quality demos.
Kahn wasn’t impressed with all the work, saying that “some of them were pretty poor.”
Still, in sum he was happy with the product—if a bit unappreciative of how far the music would travel outside Portland.
“I thought Woody’s songs would be very effective in reaching the common man,” Kahn said. “I didn’t envision that they would become nationally popular, because I was not aware fully of what the people were listening to or what they were singing, but I recognized talent there, originality and personality.”
Guthrie, too, seemed happy with his work. On June 10, he wrote to friends that while the job wasn’t going to last as long as he wanted, it was still very productive. He seemed particularly excited to have started writing about electricity, along with his more standard Dust Bowl fare.
“My visit to Oregon and Washington has not been of no avail but on the contrary has furnished me with not only an array of scenic material equal to an ordinary book but has also supplied me with five or six new ballads of an electrical, I mean industrial character,” he wrote.
Notably, in the same letter he wrote that he’d filled out his military draft papers—another premonition of war to come.
In another letter, he wrote to his future collaborators in the Almanac Singers about how adding details of labor would authenticate such “work songs.”
“You ought to throw in more wheels, triggers, springs, bearings, motors, engines, boilers, and factories,” he said, “because these are the things that arm the workers and these are the source of the final victory of Public Ownership.”
Guthrie was seemingly sold not only on the project and the future of public utilities, but on the idea that working men and women were going to get the country out of Depression living, fight fascism, and win the ensuing war.
On May 28, 1941, paperwork was filed to establish Guthrie’s last time of employment with the BPA as noon on June 13. The files show he’d accrued “2 days, 3 hours and 30 minutes” of leave time and specify that he would begin taking his leave at eight thirty a.m. on June 11.
On June 10, Guthrie wrote friends in New York that he’d be heading their way soon. With his car still in the impound lot, his plan was to hitchhike.
Caring for their three kids, ages eighteen months to five years, Mary was staying put in Portland. She kept their 6111 SE Ninety-Second Street place for the rest of the summer, which she looked back upon as thoroughly enjoyable.
“We had a pretty good time,” she’d later recall. When it got close to the beginning of the school year, she and the kids headed to Los Angeles, and from there to El Paso. While there, she pawned Woody’s typewriter for five dollars.
“I had to have money for my kids,” she said, explaining her reasoning.
She and Woody never lived under the same roof again, and by the fall they were officially separated. They divorced in March of 1943.
On June 11, Guthrie started walking down the highway that followed the course of the river that he now knew so well, a guitar over his back and a thumb in the air. Just outside Portland, a young lawyer named Gus Solomon pulled up alongside the folksinger. He was the BPA’s lawyer at the time and had met Guthrie at the offices. “Woody, where are you going?” Solomon asked.
“I’m going to New York,” he said.
“How will you get there?”
“I’m going to hitchhike,” Guthrie said without any note of irony.
“Do you have any money?” Solomon asked.
Guthrie said he did not.
Broke as the day he got there, Guthrie accepted twenty dollars and a ride to The Dalles. From there, he continued on east, where there were more songs to be sung.
So long, it’s been good to know yuh.
*In our research we discovered many, mostly oral, interviews of Stephen Kahn. In the videos and tapes dating back to the 1980s, he proves to be a man of high integrity and character, and we consider his memory of events forty-plus years prior reliable. He mentioned giving Guthrie a copy of The Grapes of Wrath upon hiring him to write songs for his film. Throughout our research it was hard to confirm whether Woody had read the 1939 book by May of 1941. He accepted the book from Kahn, and in a December 12, 1940, WNYC radio performance with Lead Belly, Woody introduces his new song “Tom Joad” by saying, “I didn’t read the book, but then I seen the picture three times.” The question is, did Guthrie deny reading the book in his determination to maintain his country rube persona? An interesting theory is suggested by BPA librarian Libby Burke; the combination of receiving the book from Kahn and driving those long road trips in the Columbia basin most likely resulted in Guthrie’s writing of “Pastures of Plenty”—the ultimate song of the migrant experience with a promise of a better life in the new “promised land” that the Columbia waters could provide.
“Roll, Columbia, Roll” Words and Music by Woody Guthrie. WGP/TRO – © 1958, 1963, 1984 (copyrights renewed) Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY (administered by Ludlow Music, Inc.)
