 wanted to produce a film documentary explaining the benefits of the Grand Coulee Dam and the Bonneville Dam farther downstream. In search of someone who could write songs on the theme, BPA public information officer Stephen Kahn reached out to Alan Lomax, the ethnomusicologist wunderkind at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Lomax, 26 at the time, was just one of many heavy hitters that Woody Guthrie had impressed during his brief time on the East Coast, and, would later say he nearly jumped through the line to recommend the folk singer, who was by then back in California scraping together a meager living for his family after abandoning his burgeoning career in New York.
Kahn reached out to Guthrie about the job. However, as Kahn would later tell it, Guthrie hadn’t yet been hired when he showed up unannounced in the Portland offices carrying a guitar. Still, recognizing an opportunity, Kahn arranged an audition then and there with the agency’s administrator. Kahn told him to just sing, not talk. “If you talk, you’ll lose the battle.”
About 30 minutes later, he walked out with the job: a one-month stint as an “informational consultant” for the Bonneville Power Administration.
Guthrie, who would become, arguably, the most influential folk singer of the 20th century, had a particularly fortuitous relationship with the Pacific Northwest throughout his career. In one trip through the region shortly after his employment with the government, he and Pete Seeger stayed with Ivar Haglund in Seattle, and Seeger claimed the duo taught Ivar the old folk tune “Acres of Clams,” which would later become the name of Ivar’s famous restaurant. It was also in Seattle that Guthrie and Seeger learned the word “hootenanny,” which they brought back to New York and popularized as a term for rowdy, folky get-togethers. Guthrie opens his semifictional autobiography Bound for Glory on a freight train headed for Seattle; there’s no evidence he ever actually hopped a train to our city, but the passage shows his affinity for the place.
However, none of these experiences compared to his brief time with the BPA, which would prove one of the most fertile months of the prolific songwriter’s career, and leave an indelible mark on our region’s music history.
He was all but forced to make music. One term of his employment was that he was required to produce a song a day—weekends not included—which his boss Kahn justified by saying it was comparable to Hollywood’s requirements that screenwriters turn three pages a day into the studio. Guthrie came away with 26 songs, many of which turned out to be among his most enduring: “Roll On, Columbia,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “The Grand Coulee Dam.”
Guthrie’s son Arlo Guthrie told documentary filmmaker Michael Madjic that 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.”
The Grand Coulee Dam was indeed a big deal, and continues to be an integral element of life in the Pacific Northwest by producing an enormous amount of electricity for the region and helping to irrigate more than 600,000 acres of farmland. However, it is also today recognized as part of a troubled legacy of stopping up America’s wild rivers, much to the detriment of the wildlife and first peoples who have coexisted with the natural streams for millennia. The effect of the Grand Coulee Dam has been particularly acute, as it cut off 1,100 miles of the river’s salmon spawning habitat. As environmentalists have pressed for the removal of dams in the Pacific Northwest, business organizations—whic