Woodie Guthrie celebrated at Thank-You concert June 6

In spring 1941, on the cusp of the Great Depression and Pearl Harbor, a 28-year-old, unemployed Dust Bowl balladeer, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, took a temporary job with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) on the Columbia River. The BPA needed a folksinger to promote the benefits of building dams to produce cheap electricity. Guthrie, his wife and three kids needed the paycheck.

The story of that one-month experience 65 years ago was the focus of Spokane Public Radio’s Underwriter and Volunteer Thank-You Concert, June 6 at the Met in Downtown Spokane. The evening began at 7 p.m. with Woody Guthrie songs performed by Dan Maher, Carlos Alden, and the Blue Ribbon Tea Company. After a reception, the award-winning documentary Roll On Columbia was shown.

The popular song the documentary takes its name from was one of 26 songs written in 30 days. The federal Bonneville Power Administration hired Guthrie to write “a song a day” as part of a movie focused on the newly-built Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams on the Columbia River. The film was intended to encouraging rural residents in the Pacific Northwest to electrify their homes and farms. “Roll On, Columbia, Roll On” was an ode to the harnessing of Washington’s mightiest river, and was approved as the official state folk song in 1987.

The folk musicians performing at the Woodie Guthrie tribute concert have all felt the influence of Guthrie’s music.

Dan Maher has hosted Inland Folk for more than 20 years. In recent years it expanded to three hours – one hour Sundays at 3 p.m., and the rest of the program Sundays from 8-10 p.m.

Dan is a strong performer, with a biting wit and the ability to get folks to sing along. Although he has several CDs, his best energy flows with an audience and his between-song patter is engaging, often hilarious.

Carlos Alden is host of The Nacho Celtic Hour, a mix of folk music and kid songs airing Sundays at 2 p.m. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that its host Carlos Alden entered the world of Woody Guthrie through the balladeer’s children’s songs: specifically, a charming song called “I’m Gonna Mail Myself to You.”

“It’s deceptively charming and simple. I never get tired of it, and that speaks to me of his genius,” Carlos says. “Then I learned more about him and all his work with political songs and being in touch with what was going on with people’s lives. It’s a cliché, I know, but it’s true: he really did have his finger on the pulse of the American people.”

Back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, Alden says children’s music was either nursery rhymes or old-time folk music. “People think that most folk musicians did some folk for kids along the way, but Guthrie did more than that. He understood the power and strength of music to reach people at all levels.”

Carlos plays cittern, banjo, and guitar with the Celtic Nots, but performs contemporary kid songs and leads sing-alongs for children and their adults.

Bill Kostelec carries on the tradition of Woody Guthrie in his modern folk songs with strong lyrics and memorable melodies. With his wife Kathy, they make up the backbone of the Blue Ribbon Tea Company, which has performed in various groupings with other excellent folk musicians of the Inland Northwest. They last performed for KPBX audiences on the Fall Folk Festival broadcast in November.

One day, Kostelec says he came across a tribute album to Woody Guthrie. “It was a revelation, I was hooked,” he says. “I come from a blue collar town, worked in the blue collar refineries and chemical plants and I built earthmover parts. I have not lost the feel of the factory and what it means to be in a union nor forgotten just how dirty and tired a man can get. I try to keep that in my songs. It’s an age of the demise of the American worker, the loss of corporate values and the stealing away of basic freedoms. We’ve all got to do what we can to fight these things and I try to use music and rhymes; another legacy from Woody Guthrie and all the other men and women who complained in song and story.”

Event donors were Vino! A Wine Shop, Windermere Real Estate, Dr. David Cohen Eye M.D. Thanks also to KSPS (public television, not associated with Spokane Public Radio) for transferring the documentary to film, Dan Treecraft for providing the trees on stage, and Thomas Hammer Coffee for refreshments.

Woody Guthrie, fighter

Woody Guthrie (1912- 1967) was born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie in Okemah, OK. His father was a land speculator whose fortunes fluctuated with the oil booms. Guthrie’s family experienced a series of hardships that tied Guthrie’s sympathies with the poor and downtrodden. His family lost several homes and fortunes to fires; his older sister Clara died in a fire, and his father was severely injured and put out of work by another one. Guthrie’s mother suffered a number of breakdowns before the family was forced to send her to an asylum where she would spend the rest of her life. Guthrie always claimed that his family was responsible for all the traits for which he became legendary. His father was fighter, who never stopped working, dreaming, or fighting despite all his setbacks, and his mother taught him the songs that he would sing, adapt, or borrow.

Around 1923 when his mother was sent away, Guthrie’s father left for west Texas and another oil boom. Guthrie remained in Oklahoma with his brother but soon set off on his own. As he wrote in his autobiography Bound for Glory, “I was going on fifteen when I got me a job shining shoes, washing spittoons, meeting the night trains in a hotel uptown. I was a little past sixteen when I first hit the highway and took a trip down around the Gulf of Mexico, hoeing figs, watering strawberries, picking mustang grapes, helping carpenters and well drillers, cleaning yards, chopping weeds, and moving garbage cans.”

In 1926 after returning briefly to Okemah, Guthrie set out for Pampa, TX to join his father. There he began painting signs, but an uncle bought him a guitar and taught him to play.

“And there on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up songs about…. I never did make up any songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs or songs about what all’s wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in the country was thinking. And this has held me ever since.”

During the 1930s, Guthrie set off hitch-hiking and riding the rails through the West on his way to California. In 1938, Guthrie arrived in Redding, CA to work on the Kenneth Dam; the order never came, and he set off traveling again. He got a daily radio show on KFVD, a progressive radio station in L.A.

In 1939 he moved to NYC; a friend introduced him to Alan Lomax who put him on his CBS “Folk School on the Air” show. Lomax recorded Guthrie’s songs and stories for the Archive of Folk Songs at the Library of Congress; Lomax also recommended Guthrie to an executive at RCA Victor who was looking for someone to record. In 1940, Guthrie recorded and RCA released Guthrie’s “dust bowl ballads”- including “I Ain’t Got No Home,” “Tom Joad,” and “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Ya.”

Woody and the Dams

Guthrie never needed much of an excuse to take to the road. Becoming increasingly restless and disillusioned with New York’s radio and entertainment industry, Guthrie wrotes, “I got disgusted with the whole sissified and nervous rules of censorship on all my songs and ballads, and drove off down the road across the southern states again.” With wife Mary and three kids, it was a risky adventure, and Guthrie was soon penniless again.

He heard about a proposed film on the Bonneville Power Project. The BPA had made a public relations short film about the dams, “Hydro,” but the BPA was still trying to win the approval of the Northwest voter to distribute electric power. The BPA considered using considered a feature-length musical film to show the public how federally-controlled hydroelectric power could better the lives of the average citizen in the Pacific Northwest.

Even though there was no guarantee of a film project, the family drove north to Portland. BPA didn’t want a film anymore, but Guthrie did win a “temporary laborer” job for one month, at the rate of $266.66. He was expected to write a song every day.

He traveled from construction site to construction site in a BPA automobile, visiting with workers and writing the lyrics that praised the project’s promise of delivering cheap water and electricity throughout the region. Songs such as “Roll On, Columbia,” “Columbia’s Waters,” “Grand Coulee Dam,” and “Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done” described the mighty river’s beauty and the magnitude of the engineering effort.

The BPA did eventually make a film called “The Columbia” in 1948, but destroyed most of its copies. A BPA employee who drove Guthrie around the Northwest hid one copy, which eventually made its way to Michael Majdic and Denise Matthews, who created the Roll On Columbia documentary to be shown at the KPBX event.

The film’s story is told by those who were there - Guthrie’s BPA boss, Stephen Kahn; his first wife, Mary; and Elmer Buehler, BPA employee who drive Guthrie to see the dams, the workers and the farmers. There are also interviews from fellow songster Pete Seeger, who waited for Guthrie back in NYC; his friend Studs Turkel, who recognized Guthrie’s genius; and his children, Arlo and Nora Guthrie.

Sixty-five years after Guthrie’s job with the BPA, those same dams are the subject of environmental debates. Scientists estimate that each dam on the Columbia and Snake Rivers kills five to 15 percent of the salmon migrating through it. Millions of fish once ran each year in the Columbia Basin, but today less than two percent of wild salmon remain. Twenty-six Pacific salmon and steelhead populations are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

Some environmentalists believe that if Guthrie were alive today, he would be upset by the repercussions of damming the Columbia. In the song, “Talkin’ Columbia Blues,” he wrote “Figured all them salmon couldn’t be wrong,” possibly referring to the fish ladder at Bonneville that allows adult salmon to pass upstream to spawn.

Bill Murlin, the Woody Guthrie expert at the BPA in Portland, agrees that Guthrie might not take the same job today, but the songs should be considered a snapshot of the time and place. “Guthrie’s focus was on what the jobs would mean for individual people, and what electricity [provided by the dams] would mean for poor farmers. He was in favor of whatever was being done for the individual, especially those who couldn’t get a break. That’s what Woody was about.”

Father of American Folk

After his days in the Pacific Northwest, Guthrie continued his wandering ways until he was hospitalized in 1954 with Huntington’s Disease. He continued to receive visitors, including Bob Dylan in the early ’60s. Through the efforts of Dylan and other performers such as Joan Baez and Tom Paxton, Guthrie’s songs achieved a wider audience than ever before. Finally, after almost two decades of suffering, he died on October 3, 1967.

Guthrie is still considered the original folk hero, transforming the ballad into a medium for social protest. Recognition of Woody Guthrie’s work lives on. He has been inducted into The Songwriters’ Hall of Fame (1971), the Nashville Songwriters’ Hall of Fame (1977), and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (1988). He has received numerous awards, including the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Conservation Award (1966), The Folk Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award (1996), and a Grammy from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (1999).

Countless popular and folk musicians ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Ani DiFranco continue to credit Guthrie as their inspiration, re-interpreting and re-invigorating his songs for new audiences.