Vandy Greg - 26 Songs in 30 Days Woody Guthries Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest

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Copyright 2016 by Greg Vandy

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by Sasquatch Books

Editor: Gary Luke
Production editor: Em Gale
Hardcover design by: Anna Goldstein
Copyeditor: Elizabeth Johnson
Map on endsheets: Drew Christie

Front cover photographs:
Photo of Woody Guthrie, circa 1939 from the Daily Worker/Daily World Photo Collection in box 36, folder 7113; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
Photo of dam courtesy of the Bureau of Land Reclamation
Back cover texture: Vadim Georgiev/Shutterstock.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-57061-971-7
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-57061-970-0

Sasquatch Books
1904 Third Avenue, Suite 710
Seattle, WA 98101
(206) 467-4300
www.sasquatchbooks.com

v3.1

This book is dedicated to my lovely wife, Jana, for her
amazing patience and support of this effort and all my
passion projects over the years. And to my brother Mark,
who was my first inspiration on the path of music discovery
and the experience of being a fan, always and forever .

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Roll On, Columbia Words by Woody Guthrie, Music based on Goodnight, Irene by Huddie Ledbetter and John Lomax, WGP/TRO-Ludlow Music Inc. 1936, 1957, 1963 (copyrights renewed). Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY (administered by Ludlow Music, Inc.)

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he story of Woody Guthrie and the Columbia River is now in its fourth generation. In its first iterationdirectly after Guthrie visited the Northwest and wrote his songsit seemed a story hardly worth telling. Guthrie wasnt 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 Guthries 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 Guthries 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 Guthries time in our region. Murlin conducted extensive interviews with people who worked with Woody at the BPAthe 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 BPAs 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 Murlins discovery, it was assumed that there was no recording of Guthrie singing that song. It isnt 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 Guthries Columbia River story firsthand have passed away. Greg was fortunate to interview Elmer Buehler in 2008, for a radio special on Seattles KEXP, but we have had to partially rely on interviews conducted by others, including Bill Murlin and documentary filmmakers Michael Madjic and Michael ORourke. 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 Guthries 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 dont 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 somebodys 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.