Portland/PNW
Woody Guthrie's Portland Paycheck
Yesterday while listening to a Great Courses (Great Rivers That Shaped History, Episode 16: The Columbia, Once Wild, Now Tame) episode I learned something about Portland that I did not know. It has to do with the great folk singer Woody Guthrie. Apparently, in 1941, when he was still in his twenties (and financially struggling), he was hired by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) to be an early version of an influencer. They called him an ‘information consultant’ and paid him $267 for the month of work.
The BPA was new and controversial. Some on the right called it–wait for it….socialism! (Once a boogyman, always a boogyman!) They hired Guthrie to write music for a documentary about the building of the dam, and to obviously build support for the government’s effort to provide cheaper electricity in the Pacific Northwest, and he holed up Portland where he wrote 26 songs in 30 days, including “Roll On, Columbia,” “Grand Coulee Dam,” “Pastures of Plenty,” and “The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done.”
The dam wasn’t completed until the end of the decade and the film once it was released was not a success. Indeed, only a few of Guthrie’s songs made it into the final production. Ironically, the government under Eisenhower ordered all copies of the film and its songs destroyed once officials learned about Guthrie’s leftist associations. This makes sense in light of the second Red Scare that was ongoing in the early 1950s. However, it is weird and sad that our government ordered the destruction of art it had commissioned itself.
It is always good to learn a bit of lore about your hometown!
