act touted by New Dealers as proof that the government took better care of the people than the free market did. Beyond the power, the dam would also create a reservoir large enough to irrigate 2.5 million acres of dry Central Washington scrubland, potential homesteads for the hordes of dispossessed Dust Bowl farmers then wandering the land; the reservoir itself would measure 150 miles long, stretching all the way to the Canadian border.
The Government means business, and how.
It was into this tableau—of Rockefeller wheeler-dealers vs. Roosevelt New Dealers, of wasteland imagined as farmland, of unabashed propaganda being staged to packed playhouses—that Woody Guthrie would enter, driving a busted up Pontiac. It was 1941, and the folk singer was 28. He’d already lived a hard life that that wasn’t without its charmed moments. Born and raised in Oklahoma, he experienced firsthand the ravages of the Dust Bowl and began writing songs about it. He eventually decamped from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, where he found some success on the radio. His knack for homespun folkisms was a hit at a time when the country was hungry to better understand the plight of America’s migrant masses. He left L.A. for New York around the time that John Ford’s film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath was released, and to many in Manhattan he was an irresistible species: a real-life Okie, seemingly blown right off the pages of a great American novel. The stuff of the heartland was under the fingernails of his songs: the wind, the land, the dust.
Before long, he was a known face around CBS studios, and was soon given his own national radio show. But he promptly gave the show up because of what he considered the overbearing commercialism of the enterprise. The radio show, and his abandonment of it, explained his possession of a late-model sedan, and his inability to keep up with the payments, when he eventually arrived in Portland to write songs for the Bonneville Power Administration.
Much as the musical Power made the TVA case through song, the BPA 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.