Travelogue: Woody Guthrie Along the Columbia River

In 1941 Woody Guthrie was hired by the Bonneville Power Administration to write songs for a documentary designed to promote the BPA's dam-building projects. This turned out to be a very great thing for both the BPA and Guthrie's productivity. He wrote 26 songs in that one month (at least, he wrote as much multiple times, I can't quite find 'em all). A few of them you have probably heard somewheres. The more famous ones are "Roll On, Columbia," "Pastures of Plenty," and "Hard Travelin'". In my humble opinion, one of the three talking blues he wrote at the time, "Columbia Talkin' Blues", is one of the finest examples of the talking blues ever written (You can hear echoes of it in multiple talkin' blues by Dylan).

I grew up on homegrown Northwest folk music, and this drew me to the story of the spiritual dynamo that was Woody Guthrie spending one of the most productive months of his life in the very town where I was born.

So, I made a grant proposal to the Woody Guthrie Foundation back in 2007. They accepted my proposal, which was that I would research this month of Guthrie's life at the Woody Guthrie Archives in NYC, and then create a travelogue website documenting the facts and story of that fertile month along the Columbia. Luckily, the fella who put together the one and only songbook devoted to Guthrie's NW creations is a jovial man named Bill Murlin, who I'm proud to now call a friend. Bill and my friend Hobe Kytr (who also contributed a short essay and transciptions of melodies to The Columbia River Collection) both helped me out by editing and writing formal recommendations for my proposal.

Last year I got a letter tellin' me they were actually taking me up on my offer, I received a Woody Guthrie Fellowship from what is technically the BMI Foundation. It amounted to a $500 grant to "defray travel expenses" to NYC, and even better, the honest ability to tell people that I'm "A Woody Guthrie Fellow."

I flew there and spent 2 weeks flipping over thousands of manuscript pages in the Archives, an exhilarating, exhausting, exhaustive, exuberant experience. Woody left over 3000 pages of song lyrics--and that's just the ones that survived. Then there's the letters, newspaper columns, and various other random manuscripts and drawings he produced. Somewhere I read him write something to the effect that "blank paper ain't safe around me"--it all got eatin up by his hungry typewriter.

Anyways, there's no way to describe how amazing it is to read the breadth and depth of the man's work--I was on a mission. I sifted and sorted and made notes and requested a whole stack 'o papers related to Woody's Northwest Stint. Months later I received photocopies of these requests in the mail, which are currently strewn all around me for the hundredth time since that lovely package arrived.

So I'm working to synthesize the letters and NW song manuscripts into a coherent story told in travelogue website form. I aim for it to be the end all and be all info repository of facts and myth-bustings detailing the real deal regarding Woody's time in Portland town and the region in general. When finished, I will post a link to the site on this site. You should scope it out at that time. I aim to have a Beta version up and running by the day before Halloween.

The Travelogue website will eventually contain a Calendar that lists all events taking place in the NW that are relevant to Woody's legacy in the region. It will tell you where we know he went, and the few instances of when we knew where he was when. It's a helluva story, and you're going to dig it, I just know it.

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Bill Murlin is part of a folk duo called The Wanderers (this link will play music on yer computer). On their site you'll hear multiple examples of Woody's NW creations. Check 'em out.

Hobe Kytr doesn't currently have a web presence. I intend to pester him about this.