folk revival fully exploded in the late ’50s and early ’60s in urban centers and on college campuses around the country. A new generation of postwar “boomers” seeking an identity to separate themselves from 1950s conservatism had discovered authenticity in America’s native sounds. It was essentially a continuation of the 1930s folk revival, which had been interrupted by war and a political backlash against the far-left strains of the earlier cultural movement, but this secondary revival gained momentum from the advance of mass media. Folk music really took off the day the Kingston Trio, a clean-cut group popular with college students, released the old ballad “Tom Dooley” in 1958. With the help of prime-time TV and the Billboard charts, the folk sound dominated the music scene for years, as this revival produced some of the most enduring folk artists of the twentieth century.
Woody Guthrie did not participate in the second revival, but he was its father figure. As early as the late 1940s, Guthrie began suffering from the same hereditary condition with which his mother had been diagnosed, Huntington’s chorea. The degenerative nerve disease left him unable to control his motion, his speech, his memory, and his moods. Ralph Bennett, the BPA employee who’d escorted Woody around the NRECA conference in Spokane in 1947, later said that it was clear even then that Guthrie was exhibiting a change in demeanor. He suffered largely out of the public eye. He stopped performing. By the early 1950s, Guthrie was too sick to record any music effectively. In the studio, he forgot words and chords. In fits of self-medication, he drank himself into either rages or stupors. He was eventually hospitalized for more than twelve years, a prisoner of his condition until he died in 1967.*
Washington Square Park in the early ’60s
But in the man’s absence, his legend only grew as his biography was subject to ever-greater mythmaking and hyperbole. His songs—from a singer who’d had no real commercial success, who didn’t sell many records, and who in fact had rarely recorded—began to take on a life of their own. In England, a Scottish skiffle singer named Lonnie Donegan reached number six on the British charts with his version of “Grand Coulee Dam” in 1958. Between 1961 and 1964, twenty-seven artists released versions of “Pastures of Plenty.” Woody’s traveling partners Cisco Houston and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott were also instrumental in spreading his songs.
Woody was like a ghost. His songs were being sung by fans who idolized him but really didn’t know him. Some did come looking. In 1961, a young Minnesotan folksinger named Bob Zimmerman visited Guthrie in the hospital and shared some of his songs. Soon after the visit, he included “Song to Woody” on his first album, self-titled after his stage name: Bob Dylan.
In 1976, nine years after Guthrie’s death, a biopic about him, Bound for Glory, was released (always confirmation of iconic status), and Guthrie’s legend had peaked. He was no longer simply a folksinger who wrote about the people. Critics were beginning to view him “as some western Chaucer,” America’s folk poet laureate, a seminal songster who showed a singular ability to capture the American experience in verse. But as Woody Guthrie’s fame increased over the decades, the knowledge of his songwriting for the government seemed to run in the inverse. That’s a bit surprising, since Guthrie himself wrote about it, it was the subject of an AP wire story in 1963, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott impersonated Guthrie saying “I wrote twenty-six songs in thirty days” on an intro to his version of “Talking Columbia.” Joe Klein also briefly mentions Guthrie’s work for the BPA in his definitive 1980 biography, Woody Guthrie: A Life.
However, the story had faded enough into obscurity that by 1979, one Pacific Northwest folksinger had no idea of the history of Guthrie on the Columbia River—nor did his supervisors at the BPA.
It was a damp day in Portland when thirty-eight-year-old Bill Murlin sat watching movies in the fourth-floor film library of the BPA’s headquarters at 911 NE Eleventh Avenue.
Murlin spent most of his childhood in the Spokane valley. Then in 1959 he attended Washington State University in Pullman, to study broadcasting, where he got caught up in the folk craze sweeping the country. He and two other guys started a folk trio, which became a folk duo when one the members was accepted to law school. Murlin and Carl Allen called themselves the Wanderers. Being a resident of the region, Murlin was always curious about why folksingers sang so much about the Pacific Northwest. But it was an idle sort of curiosity—nothing to spur any serious investigation into the matter. After graduating, his family relocated to Salem, Oregon, and he kept playing folk music while holding a series of jobs at radio and television stations around the region, before being hired on by the BPA’s public information office.
One of Murlin’s jobs at the BPA was assisting at the film library, which loaned out movies the agency had gathered over its forty-plus-year history. As Murlin recalled, it was a surprisingly extensive collection. Among the titles produced by the agency were Hydro, Power Builds Ships, and, of course, The Columbia. Out of curiosity, he started screening some of the sixteen-millimeter films. In the opening credits of The Columbia, he saw Guthrie’s name. He nearly jumped out of his seat.
“I just didn’t know much about Woody Guthrie’s history at all, and I had no clue he’d been up in the Northwest,” he recalled.
He did a little bit of digging and found a folder of production notes about The Columbia that included some of Guthrie’s personnel papers. That was an even bigger surprise.
“Woody Guthrie worked here?” he remembered thinking in shock.
“Turns out, of course, that he’s spent quite a lot of time out here, but I had to find that out for myself,” Murlin said. “How long was he here? What did he do? How did he do it, and why, and so forth? And I started digging around to see what I could find within the confines of the Bonneville Power Administration.”
The BPA’s records were woefully incomplete. Beyond the personnel records, no evidence existed of Guthrie’s actual work there, be it written lyrics or recordings of him singing his Columbia River songs. His boss was intrigued by Murlin’s initial research enough, however, to allow him to travel to Seattle for three days to pull some files housed at the National Archives there, and to write to some Woody Guthrie experts to gain a better understanding of the agency’s history with him. Among those he wrote was Richard Reuss,* a folklorist who had compiled the definitive collection of Guthrie’s writings to that point.
Reuss soon wrote back: “The songs Woody wrote for the BPA are indeed among his greatest, and also best known. Unlike other periods when he wrote batches of songs around a single theme or topic, almost every effort was a good if not outstanding composition.”
Responding to Murlin’s question as to whether a recording existed of Guthrie singing the most famous Columbia River song, Reuss suggested that it did not.
“Unfortunately, I can’t help you with a recorded version of ‘Roll On, Columbia’ by Woody Guthrie.… Actually, it isn’t too surprising; there are quite a few of his well-known songs which he personally didn’t record (or at least they were not released).”
Reuss also provided Murlin with an invaluable document: a 1945 letter from the BPA to Bess Lomax Hawes, Alan’s sister, who at the time worked for the Office of War Information. With it were twenty-four manuscripts of songs Guthrie wrote for the BPA. That letter—Reuss’s copy may have been the last in existence, as neither the BPA nor Bess Lomax Hawes had retained copies of it—remains today as the most definitive proof of which songs Guthrie wrote while in Portland.
Thrilled by his fast progress, Murlin went to his supervisor with a proposition to make a new documentary about Guthrie’s time at the agency—something that would “include part of this story, and include some of Woody Guthrie’s music as part of the soundtrack,” Murlin recalled. “And the bosses basically said, ‘Nah, that’s not part of your job. It’s not a big deal.… Just put it aside.’ So I did.”
That could have been the end of Murlin’s research, but in 1984 the BPA began making plans to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, coming in 1987. Put on the committee to plan the celebration, Murlin saw the opportunity to pick up the trail again. He first suggested that the agency hire a Woody Guthrie look-alike to drive up and down the river singing Guthrie’s songs. That idea was turned down, but an even more compelling one was suggested by Murlin: a twenty-six-song songbook that would represent the first-ever full compilation of all the music Guthrie wrote for the BPA.
Bill Murlin, right, audiovisual specialist for the BPA, with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, left, during the BPA’s fiftieth anniversary at Bonneville Dam, 1987
Figuring out the details of Woody Guthrie’s time at the BPA was challenging from the start. Among Guthrie’s own archives, no detailed journals of his time in Portland survived—an anomaly for a person who constantly wrote down his experiences. Nor did he seem to have ever put the Columbia River song cycle into a songbook, also strange for Guthrie. At the BPA, poor record-keeping also left a lot of questions. Guthrie had repeatedly said he wrote twenty-six songs during his month in Portland, a figure that was confirmed by Kahn. However, the letter Reuss gave Murlin contained only twenty-four songs. That left two to be found—if Guthrie was to be believed on his twenty-six-song figure.
In search of answers, Murlin wrote an article in the BPA’s employee newsletter asking workers and retirees who’d been around in 1941 if they had any information about Guthrie’s tenure at the agency. That article found its way to the Oregonian, Portland’s largest daily paper, which ran an article about Murlin’s search on the front page of a Monday edition.
Murlin had hit a nerve. The response was immediate. The long-forgotten story of Woody Guthrie on the Columbia River was too good for news editors across the country to resist. Soon after the big splash in the local paper, interview requests from across the country inundated Murlin. Over three days, he appeared on CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS. He was also interviewed by a German magazine.
“Sometimes I got hoarse answering the interviews, but I did them all,” he said.
With his search for Guthrie material now national news, Murlin began receiving bits of information from across the country. Most of it wasn’t very useful—people writing to say they had a studio version of some of the Grand Coulee Dam songs, for example. Then he got a letter from Ralph Bennett, who at that point was the managing editor at the San Diego Tribune, saying that he had some acetate copies of the original basement recordings Guthrie made at the BPA.
At Murlin’s request, Bennett transferred his recordings onto a cassette tape and mailed it to him. Bennett also suggested that Murlin get hold of his friend Merle Meacham, for whom he’d made some copies. Meacham indeed still had them, and sent those to Murlin as well. Meanwhile, Gordon Macnab, now retired from reporting for AP, shared with Murlin a 33⅓ rpm record dubbed from three recordings he’d gotten directly from Kahn in the early 1960s when working on a story about Guthrie at the BPA.
Murlin could hardly believe what he had received: in search of information simply on what songs Guthrie had written, Murlin was suddenly listening to recordings that had long been considered lost.
Among them was something that Murlin recognized as a true prize for the Guthrie discography: the recording of Guthrie singing “Roll On, Columbia”—the recording that all Guthrie experts believed did not exist.
“It was just like manna dropping out of heaven,” Murlin said. “It was just like digging in an old played-out gold mine and suddenly discovering a new vein.”
In total, there were six discs containing a total of fourteen songs, two of which were duplicates.* On Macnab’s 33⅓ rpm piece of vinyl, there were the three recordings used in The Columbia: “Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done,” “Roll, Columbia, Roll,” and the cherished minor-key modal version of “Pastures of Plenty”—which in the movie had been cut into three parts in order to fit the script. This full-length version was a revelation.
Meacham supplied “Jackhammer Blues,” “The Song of the Grand Coulee Dam” (a.k.a. “Way Up in That Northwest), “Columbia Waters” (a.k.a. “Good Morning, Mr. Captain”), and “Columbia Talking Blues.”
Bennett supplied a demo version of “Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done,” “Washington Talkin’ Blues,” “Ramblin’ Blues” (a.k.a. “Portland Town”), “Grand Coulee Dam,” “Roll On, Columbia,” “It Takes a Married Man” and a different version of “The Song of the Grand Coulee Dam.”
It was a good thing Murlin got the “Roll On, Columbia” recording when he did. Bennett had often thought about getting rid of the old acetate discs, and had done very little to preserve them over the years. When Murlin learned of their existence, he flew to San Diego to retrieve the originals. He was so concerned with preserving them—especially the recording of Guthrie singing one of his most famous songs—that he had a special box made that kept the discs separated from each other to preserve their quality. In later research, Bill Murlin learned that Guthrie did try to record “Roll On, Columbia” in the 1950s, but by that time he was too sick to remember the lyrics or record effectively. Thus, the surviving studio demo is not considered a part of the Woody Guthrie discography.
Murlin estimates that the time between the Oregonian article appearing and his having all the recordings in hand was less than a year. He immediately recognized that he had more than just the makings of a nice songbook for the BPA, but an album made up largely of never-before-heard Guthrie material. The BPA quickly agreed to underwrite a record for its fiftieth anniversary.
Murlin and his bosses made the assumption that since Guthrie wrote the songs while employed by the federal government, the songs were in the public domain. In fact, the question of who owned the Columbia River songs had never been explored: Woody, a consummate folksinger, never concerned himself with licensing or copyrights. He had freely used the songs for the rest of his career, and the BPA had never objected.
But from the BPA’s standpoint, the documents clearly showed that he produced them at taxpayers’ expense, so the public should not have to pay again, for the song rights.
The Guthrie estate didn’t agree. As Woody Guthrie’s stature grew over the decades, his management and heirs became stalwarts for their father’s legacy. They not only wanted copyright control over all of his songs, but they didn’t want his music used for any commercial purposes that the singer wouldn’t have believed in. Were the Columbia River songs to enter the public domain, every chamber of commerce and bank in the country could conceivably use his songs in their marketing.
Staring down the road to a lawsuit—which both sides feared would reflect poorly on them—they struck an agreement. The songs would remain the property of the Guthrie estate, and the BPA could use them for the princely sum of one dollar.
With Murlin’s discoveries, there were now a total of seventeen Columbia River songs recorded by Guthrie known to be in existence. When putting together his record, Murlin wanted to use as many of the newly discovered versions as possible. But that proved to be impossible in the case of “Pastures of Plenty,” which had lost a great deal of quality when dubbed. All told, the BPA released twelve never-before-provided Guthrie recordings, supplemented with five commercial recordings Guthrie made with Moe Asch in New York after leaving Portland.
Meanwhile, Murlin was still putting together the songbook.
While the recordings had incalculable value, they did not help in Murlin’s quest to find the missing songs. In consultation with Guthrie experts including Pete Seeger, Murlin determined that the never-recorded song “Grand Coulee Powder Monkey” (found in the songbook The Nearly Complete Collection of Woody Guthrie Folk Songs) must have been written by Guthrie while at the BPA. Another one, “New Found Land,” touches on many of the same themes of a “planned promised land” that informed other Columbia River songs and appeared on Moe Asch’s first collection of Guthrie Columbia River songs (that curiously titled Ballads from the Dust Bowl). Because of that information, Murlin felt comfortable including “New Found Land” in his tally.
It is important to emphasize that no evidence has been found to directly tie these two songs to Guthrie’s BPA employment, a frustrating fact for historical completists. However, given the fact that Guthrie repeatedly cited the twenty-six figure, and the fact that all of these songs clearly deal with Columbia River subjects, Murlin’s conclusion has never been questioned.
Columbia River Collection album cover, Rounder Records, 1987
The next challenge for the songbook was that there were five songs in which only the lyrics survived—with no melody to accompany them. The songs were “Lumber Is King,” “Guys on the Grand Coulee Dam,” “Portland Town to Klamath,” “White Ghost Train,” and “Ballad of Jackhammer John.” On account of the tradition of folk music, this wasn’t as big of a problem as it may seem: Guthrie modeled many of his Columbia River songs on existing folk melodies, and Murlin surmised that someone with a sharp ear for traditional songs could identify which tune he had in mind when he wrote the remaining lyrics. The sharp ear Murlin decided to enlist was that of Seeger.
Seeger proved to be a very willing participant, and he figured out most of the folk melodies. For example, he determined that “Guys on the Grand Coulee Dam” fit the tune of “Widdicombe Fair”; “White Ghost Train” used “Wabash Cannonball”; “Portland Town to Klamath” was based on “Crawdad Song”; and “The Ballad of Jackhammer John” adapted “House of the Rising Sun.” However, Seeger was stumped by “Lumber Is King,” so in classic folk tradition, he wrote a new melody himself. More than forty years after Seeger and Guthrie met at the Forrest Theatre, the two were still collaborating on music.
The album of seventeen recordings was released by Rounder Records as the Columbia River Collection in 1987 on the day of the BPA’s fiftieth anniversary. The songbook, Roll On Columbia: The Columbia River Songs—delayed on account of a tardy yet fantastically extensive introduction written by Alan Lomax—came out later in 1988.
But that wasn’t the end of Murlin’s journey.
Throughout the process, he was bothered by how little information remained in BPA files about Guthrie. Recordings, photographs, raw footage, and paperwork all seemed to have disappeared. “The government doesn’t throw anything away,” Murlin remarked.*
One explanation for this came by way of an incredible story told to him by Elmer Buehler, the man who’d driven Guthrie around during his month on the Columbia.
In the late 1940s, anti-public-power Republicans in Washington slashed the BPA’s budget, which caused Buehler to lose his job. Because of his tenure, he was able to take a new job in the organization if he so chose, and he decided to go to work in its maintenance-and-gardening department. One of the duties this new position carried was operation of the BPA’s incinerator in Vancouver, Washington. For the rest of his life, Buehler asserted that in the early 1950s—under the Eisenhower administration, which had installed former Oregon governor and public-power foe Douglas McKay as secretary of the interior—orders came down to destroy material related to public-power advocacy, including the movie The Columbia. Buehler insists that he was given nitrate film to burn in the incinerator.
“We were told to burn it,” Buehler said under oath. “Well, I had just been in the Army, and I took my orders from people above me, of course, and I always did in the government but I said I’m not going to destroy this nitro film, because it will blow up the incinerator.”
He was told to burn the film anyway, and said he burned a total of twenty-five copies of The Columbia and its predecessor, Hydro. However, in fear of losing the Guthrie material forever, he secreted a couple of copies away.
“I hid them in the basement behind a woodpile and I didn’t even dare talk to anybody about it,” he said. “Figured that I’d be crucified.”
It wasn’t until the 1970s that Buehler handed his copies over to an Oklahoma film historian named Harry Menig, who wanted to screen the film.
“I can’t write a book, but I sure can save a film,” he later said.
Murlin investigated Buehler’s claim, conducting interviews with everyone still alive in the 1980s who may have known about an anti-public-power purge at the BPA. No one corroborated nor refuted Buehler’s claim, though several expressed generally negative opinions about Woody Guthrie’s work at the agency.
A 1980 investigation into the claims by the BPA administrator concluded that Buehler’s story “has remained consistent over a significant number of years and has never been refuted. It is part of the official records in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and appears destined to become a permanent part of the BPA’s history, though it may never be verified by other witnesses.”
It is conceivable that a purge during the height of the Cold War—which included blacklisting in other sections of the government, media, and the entertainment industry—could have taken place at the BPA. Many of the New Dealers, including Kahn, did not stay beyond 1950, and many of the public-utility efforts were becoming private-public partnerships under the new administration. But if true, it was most likely a minor effort, since copies of The Columbia still existed in schools, stock houses, and movie theater archives.
Still, whether intentional purge or simply carelessness, the loss of recordings and work by Woody Guthrie at the BPA leaves a regrettable hole in our current understanding of his time in the Northwest. Among the material lost forever seems to be the raw footage of The Columbia, the original basement recordings Guthrie made at the BPA, and the original recordings that Kahn made of Guthrie in New York for the movie’s soundtrack.
The holes might have been even larger if it weren’t for a final, dramatic act by Murlin in his quest to resurrect the story of Guthrie at the BPA. In 1991, Murlin discovered that federal law required that employee records be retained for fifty years after their term of employment, and 1991 marked fifty years for Guthrie. So he renewed his search for the folksinger’s employment records and was told that anything about him would have been sent to a central repository in Saint Louis, Missouri. Calling the National Archives office there, he was told they did indeed have the file.
“The people in Saint Louis said, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s here. It’s on our conveyor belt headed for the shredder,’ ” Murlin recalled. “I said, ‘Get that thing off the conveyor belt, now!’ So they did.”
The fiftieth anniversary of Guthrie’s time at the BPA prompted another series of news articles about the event—greatly elucidated by Murlin’s research. The recovered acetate recordings of Meacham, Macnab, and Bennett were inducted into the National Archives in 1987.
Speaking to the New York Times in 1991, Stephen Kahn reflected on the contributions that Guthrie made to the BPA during his one month with the agency. All things considered, he noted, “I don’t think the Government has ever gotten a better investment on its money.”
*Guthrie’s erratic behavior in the early 1950s was mistakenly diagnosed as alcoholism and/or schizophrenia until 1952 when he was correctly diagnosed with Huntington’s chorea, the incurable degenerative nerve disorder now known as Huntington’s disease or HD. He was admitted to Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in 1954, and during the last decade of his life, Guthrie was a prisoner in his own body, unable to write and play yet, according to those near him, still mentally sharp and cognizant. He was visited by many of the new folk artists of the time, who paid homage to Woody and played songs for him. His second wife, Marjorie, and his family continued to visit and bring him home for weekends until he died on October 3, 1967, at Creedmoor State Hospital. Phillip Buehler’s excellent Woody Guthrie’s Wardy Forty: Greystone Park State Hospital Revisited chronicles these last years.
*Reuss was one of the foremost Guthrie scholars, and he published A Woody Guthrie Bibliography: 1912–1967 in 1968. A folklorist and historian, his 1971 dissertation “American Folklore and Left Wing Politics 1927–1957” was eventually published in 2000. He was primarily a collector and documenter who provided first-hand accounts of the folk revival as a participant in the 1960s via interviews, along with exhaustive note-taking at concerts and performances. He passed away in 1986 at age forty-six, shortly after making contact with Bill Murlin regarding Guthrie’s Columbia songs. It’s unclear if he ever heard Woody Guthrie singing “Roll On, Columbia” from the recording discovered by Murlin in 1985.
*The six discs with the names of the donors are housed in the National Archives in Washington, DC, and represent twelve unique Woody Guthrie recordings not heard before. Of the twelve recordings, six of them were Guthrie songs never heard before and six were songs recorded either by Woody himself, or others, after his 1941 BPA experience. The 1987 Rounder album The Columbia River Collection represents eleven of these twelve recordings—“Pastures of Plenty” was considered too poor in sound quality to be included on the collection, but does appear on Rounder’s 2013 release American Radical Patriot.
*The government actually does dispose of records, employment papers, and other materials in accordance to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Thus records are appraised and then disposed of—or kept—regularly, depending on the determination of their permanent value.
“Columbia Talking Blues” (Talking Columbia) Words and Music by Woody Guthrie. WGP/TRO-Ludlow Music Inc. © 1961 and 1963 (renewed). Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY (administered by Ludlow Music, Inc.)
