he story of Woody Guthrie and the Columbia River is now in its fourth generation. In its first iteration—directly after Guthrie visited the Northwest and wrote his songs—it seemed a story hardly worth telling. Guthrie wasn’t well-known, and the film that his songs were supposed to be used for ended up being postponed on account of World War II.
The second generation of the story came of age in the early 1960s, when several of Guthrie’s Columbia River ballads entered mainstream culture via the folk-music revival sweeping the nation. The fact that folkies across the country were singing about the Grand Coulee Dam in songs like “Pastures of Plenty” spurred an Associated Press writer in Portland named Gordon Macnab to do some digging at the headquarters of the Bonneville Power Administration, resulting in a national wire story relating that Guthrie had been hired by the agency to write ballads about the river for a film it was making. But the story of Woody and the BPA soon fell back into obscurity.
The third generation came about in the 1980s, when an audiovisual specialist for the BPA named Bill Murlin happened upon the documentary the agency eventually made using Guthrie’s songs. A folksinger himself, Murlin was surprised to see in the credits that the public information office he was employed by had once had the preeminent folksinger of the twentieth century on the payroll.
Over the next decade, Murlin completed invaluable research that significantly augmented what we now know about Guthrie’s time in our region. Murlin conducted extensive interviews with people who worked with Woody at the BPA—the most important being his boss, Stephen Kahn, and Elmer Buehler, who drove the folksinger up and down the Columbia River. Murlin also completed the previously neglected task of tracking down the recordings Guthrie had made in the BPA’s basement-closet studio. That effort uncovered several never-before-heard recordings, including one of him singing his most famous Columbia River ballad, “Roll On, Columbia.” Until Murlin’s discovery, it was assumed that there was no recording of Guthrie singing that song. It isn’t a stretch to suggest that had Murlin not discovered it, the single copy that existed in 1985 would have been lost to history.
Today, all of the people who knew Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River story firsthand have passed away. Greg was fortunate to interview Elmer Buehler in 2008, for a radio special on Seattle’s KEXP, but we have had to partially rely on interviews conducted by others, including Bill Murlin and documentary filmmakers Michael Madjic and Michael O’Rourke. For us and our editor, this raised the obvious questions: What did we have to add? Why tell the story yet another time?
Two answers emerged. First, while extensive research into Guthrie’s time in the Northwest had been conducted, we found that all the books about the singer to date offer scant treatment of the material. Guthrie lived a full life, and we don’t fault his biographers for not dwelling on his monthlong sojourn in our region. Rather, we are indebted to them for their excellent scholarship, especially Ed Cray and Joe Klein. However, as Guthrie himself put it, “When a song or a ballad mentions the name of a river, a town, a spot, a fight, or the sound of somebody’s name that you know and are familiar with, there is a sort of quiet kind of pride come up through your blood.” As writers who sang “Roll On, Columbia” in grade school and have bundled up to watch the laser light show at the Grand Coulee Dam, we feel that quiet pride every time we hear Guthrie sing “In the misty crystal glitter of the wild and wind ward spray,” and we wanted to share it.
More importantly, seventy-five years after Woody Guthrie was hired by the BPA, the impulse behind his Columbia River ballads is deeply misunderstood, if understood at all. Today, the engineering of the Columbia Basin that was just beginning during Guthrie’s trip to the region is considered a mixed blessing at best. The decimation of the once-bountiful salmon runs and the disposition of Native American culture and land rightly cast a pall over the dams. While it’s wise to occasionally reassess the value of any human endeavor, hindsight can also distort history, and this seems to be the case with Guthrie’s legacy in the Northwest.
When he was employed by the BPA, he was less than a year removed from his stint writing for a Communist Party newspaper. And according to Elmer Buehler, he colorfully shunned an invitation from the chamber of commerce in Spokane, stating that he’d never support such an organization.
Yet today, Guthrie’s songs are apt to be celebrated by pro-dam business interests and dismissed by environmentalists as propaganda for an ecological disaster. Best-selling author David James Duncan, in his 2002 book of essays, My Story as Told by Water, writes that Guthrie was “dutifully whipping off a few industrial river ditties … never once suspecting the rash of Manifest Destinarian bronzes and Tourist Brainwashing kiosks that would one day immortalize his sweet face and no-brainer lyrics.”
The record needs correcting. Guthrie wasn’t a pro-business hack; he didn’t set out to write “industrial river ditties,” and his lyrics are certainly not “no-brainers.” This book doesn’t seek to either defend or condemn the Columbia River projects. But it does attempt to prove beyond a doubt to twenty-first-century readers that Woody Guthrie’s enthusiasm for the Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams was genuine and, indeed, inspiring.
Like the Columbia itself, this story starts in many streams: the fight for public power in Washington and Oregon; the plight of farmers in the drought-stricken Dust Bowl; a crazy scheme to irrigate the Washington desert; and the sudden rise of World War II industries in Seattle and Portland. Where they all converge is a collection of twenty-six songs written in thirty days that attest to the worth and aspirations of the American workingman. Put in their proper context, songs like “Pasture of Plenty” and “Grand Coulee Dam” cease to be merely catchy folk tunes. Instead, they present a powerful thesis: that the American worker, given the opportunity, has the power to turn deserts into orchards, and rivers into a force strong enough to defeat Nazi Germany. They are a deeply patriotic salvo from a man whose patriotism would wrongly be questioned. They are a refutation to anyone who suggests that the government doesn’t have any business helping the common man. The songs are also an optimistic answer to the despairing questions that arose from the Dust Bowl. In fact, what we have come to realize is that Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River songs are a direct answer to his Dust Bowl ballads.
We feel deeply that this is a story worth telling again because Woody’s message is one worth hearing again.
—GREG VANDY AND DANIEL PERSON, SEATTLE, 2016
“Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done” Words and Music by Woody Guthrie. WGP/TRO-Ludlow Music Inc. © Copyright 1961, 1963, 1976 (copyrights renewed). Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY (administered by Ludlow Music, Inc.)
