Roll on Columbia: The Story of Woody Guthrie in the Pacific Northwest; Part 2; The Story of the Columbia River Collection

[Music] Roll on Columbia. Woody Guthrie in the Pacific Northwest, part 2. The story of the Columbia River collection. [Music] In May 1941, Woody Guthrie came to the Pacific Northwest to work for 30 days as a songwriter for the Bonneville Power Administration. Woody made several trips up the Columbia Gorge and to other parts of the region from his home base in Portland, Oregon. When his 30 day contract was up, he had written 26 songs about the development of the Columbia River and public power. Woody also recorded 12 of the songs when he was in Portland. It was in the words of Guthrie biographer Joe Klein, the most productive month of Woody's life. [Music] [Woody singing]

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[Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Narrator] Woody Guthrie left Portland. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The war interrupted the

BPA's plans to use Woody's songs in the production of their promotional movie "The Columbia". Some of Guthrie's songs were used in the movie when it was finally produced eight years later, but many were lost, including all 12 of the original recordings made by Woody at the BPA in 1941. Most of the materials produced by Woody had simply been thrown away during an agency housecleaning in the 50's. But one file on Guthrie survived. The file caught the attention attention of Bill Merlin shortly after he came to work for the BPA in 1979. [Bill] and in going through the old files I discovered a file called Woody Guthrie. And started reading in that file and discovered that Woody Guthrie had worked for the Bonneville Power Administration in May of 1941. Which I found relatively amazing, seeing as how I had been a folk singer in college and had stolen a great deal of material from Woody Guthrie. Including Roll On Columbia and other things like that, but I didn't know that he had worked in the Pacific Northwest. Didn't know why he had written Roll On Columbia. Never even

thought about researching it. Until I found that file. Well, I never did anything with the information other than 'gee, isn't that interesting' until 1983. And in '83, the committee that was planning for our 50th anniversary celebration started getting together. One of the suggestions that I made to the committee was why don't we tell our story by using Woody Guthrie's songs. And they said 'hey, that's not a bad idea. Do you have them?' Ah, well no. no. [music] I didn't know at that time I didn't know at that time that I would be able to find anything. There were a few songs in the file that I had looked at in 1979. You know a couple copies of lyrics. Woody said that he wrote 26 songs for the BPA. Well knowing that Woody Guthrie spent more time probably on the typewriter than he did on the guitar, I might be able to find something, it was also, I thought, going to be easy to go through the government files

and find stuff that would go clear back to the beginning days of the Bonneville Power Administration. But this particular portion of the file. 1941, '42 era is almost totally missing. Including everything that Woody Guthrie ever did for the Bonneville Power Administration. It's not there. [Woody Singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing]

[Woody singing] [Narrator] Bill Merlin started his search for the lost Columbia River songs by contacting Steve Conn, the man who hired Woody Guthrie in 1941. [Bill] I contacted Steve Conn and I said, there is evidence in these files that demonstrates that Woody Guthrie recorded some of the songs that he wrote. Did he? Conn said yes. Where are the recordings, I asked Steve. Well he didn't have any of them. Nor did he have copies of any of the lyrics that were written. But he gave me the name of a man that had worked at Bonneville Power Administration in 1947, Ralph Bennett, who was also in the Information Office. And he said, 'Ralph is the kind of guy that keep things. Maybe Ralph has got what you're lookin' for.' And I got ahold of Ralph and I said, 'Do you have any of this stuff?' And he wrote back and said, 'I've got eight acetate disks.

with these songs on them.' And he sent me a cassette tape. And after I got that cassette tape I was going nuts. It was great. It was like uncovering gold. Because some of the songs were unpublished songs. Never heard before, never released before, never anything. [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing]

[Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Narrator] Sun burned up my first crop of wheat. The river down the canyon just 500 feet. He mentions that in several of the songs about burned over land that was just as bad as the land that he had left. Because there wasn't any water available to it. But the promise of the Grand Coulee project was irrigation. The promise of the Bonneville project was electricity. And he sings in his songs about the promise of rural electrification. What that will do for the farmers. A number of his songs speak about the

promise of electricity. [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing]

[Woody singing] [Narrator] Washington Talking Blues is one of the recordings Bill Merlin recovered from Ralph Bennett. The song had never been recorded or published before. By mid 1983, Merlin's search had attracted the attention of the

local and national media. Newspapers, television, and radio stations throughout the country carried the story. The publicity helped Merlin in his search. [Historical Radio] From National Public Radio, I'm Robert Siegel. And I'm Renee Montagne with All Things Considered. [Narrator] The broadcast on National Public Radio was heard by Merle Meachum, Chimakum, Washington, which is a little town North of Seattle. Meacham, listening to NPR heard the story, called me and said I've got some of those discs. And he sent me a cassette tape. And he did have some of those discs. So as a direct result of the NPR broadcast, I filled in some of the gaps that Bennett had left. Meachum had Columbia Waters, Jack Hammer John, The Grand Coulee Dam

[Woody Singing] [Narrator] With the addition of Jack Hammer John and two other songs from Merle Beachum's collection, Bill Merlin had located ten songs recorded by Woody Guthrie

in 1941. Merlin had also located written lyrics for a few songs, but he was still a long way from uncovering all 26 songs. He continued his search, checking out all leads no matter how unlikely they seemed. One lead was Gordon McNabb, a retired reporter for The Associated Press who had been based in Portland. McNabb had written a story about Woody Guthrie and the BPA back in 1963. I called him. and I asked him about it. And he said "Oh yeah, I've got lots of Woody Guthrie stuff over here at the house. So I went over to the house and he had 33 vinyl record of three BPA Columbia River songs. Roll Columbia Roll, Masters Aplenty, and Roll on Columbia. [Gordon] I told him he was welcome to it. And he did come and borrow what I had and made copies and then returned it. They were quite delighted. And particularly delighted when he found there were one or two songs that he had not run across before. And he was very pleased about that.

[Narrator] Gordon McNabb, like Ralph Bennet, had originally copied the recordings from Steve Conn. He had interviewed Conn in 1963 for his story on Woody and he had convinced Conn to loan him the Guthrie recordings. [Gordon] And he brought them up and I took them out to a recording studio out near the old Montgomery Ward building. [Narrator] Roll Columbia Roll was one of the songs Bill Merlin got from Gordon McNabb. [Woody singing] [Woody singing]

[Woody singing] [Narrrator] Merlin had now located 17 songs. 12 in recorded form, and written lyrics for five others. He didn't know it, but his search was nearly over. His next find would complete the collection. [Merlin] I think I was up to about 17 at that point and didn't know where the rest were. There were 10 missing. Nine, either, whatever. So I started digging around for other people and I had been given the name of Richard Royce in Michigan, who had been a professor of folklore. And had written a bibliography of works

that had been written about Woody Guthrie. So I wrote to 'em and got a letter back from the guy that said you obviously don't know about his package of material. And he sent me back a copy of the same letter that BPA had written to Woody Guthrie in 1945 that I had seen in our files. But attached to it were the lyrics of twenty-four songs. Ha, ha, we had a goldmine thanks to Richard Royce. [Narrator] With the discovery of the Royce file, Bill Merlin successfully completed his search. He had located 26 26 songs, which were almost certainly the ones Woody wrote for the BPA in 1941. Not only that, Merlin had found recordings of 12 of the songs. They had been recorded in 1941 in the basement of the headquarters of the Bonneville Power Administration. I think I have recovered all of the recordings that were made at or by BPA, which is 12 songs. [Woody singing]

[Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Narrator]Now that the Columbia River collection had been located the next decision Bill Merlin faced was how to use the material. One of the suggestions that I had made was

that because Woody's songs were for the people, Woody's songs were for the people that he represented and for all the people really. All the people of the world. Everyone should benefit. Everyone should be able to hear these songs. Everyone who's a Guthrie fan or is just simply curious about the historic nature of these materials that they should be available for the general public to get a hold of. And so I said, in addition to what we're doing for our 50th anniversary, telling our story directly, let's put all the songs that we recover out, publicly. And the committee said fine. In mid-1986, the BPA gave Bill Merlin approval, and a budget to publish the Columbia River songs in a songbook and to produce the record album from the recordings he had located. For a few songs, only lyrics were found. Merlin contacted Pete Seeger the recreate the missing music. In some cases, Seeger remembered hearing Woody singing the songs and was able to supply the

exact tune. For one or two songs, Pete made an educated guess. The first step in producing the record was to clean up the Bonneville recordings. Acetate discs are like old 78 recoerds. Well, this acetate material that's on the surface of these particular discs is very soft. Everytime the needle plays it, it peels off another layer. And they get pretty thin after awhile. Not to mention that the grooves are pretty narrow and very shallow anyway. So a normal 78 record needle can't play these without doing a great deal of damage to 'em. These discs were pretty well taken care of by their owners. But in some cases they were played heavily because they were good songs. Well some damage was done. Merlin sent the 12 discs that he recovered to a company that specialized in restoring old recordings. When restoration was complete, 11 of the 12 BPA recordings were usable. Merlin then contacted Folkways Records, who had commercially recorded some of Woody's Columbia River songs in the '50's.

Folkways sent back a tape of six more songs from the collection that had not been recorded by the BPA. A master tape of all 17 songs was produced and the project was put out to bid to several record companies. And Rounder Records, one of the best known labels in the folk music business was the successful winner of this project. So Rounder Records is producing this album for us. And they are distributing it commercially. [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing]

[Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Narrator] We're about to make a contribution to folk music history here. Lot's of people turned up old Woody Guthrie songs, lyrics, because Woody

was a prolific prodigious writer. He probably threw away more stuff than most folk musicians have every written. So finding old Woody Guthrie song collections, while it is rare, is not not terribly unusual. Nobody has turned up all recordings of Woody Guthrie. We've got some unique materials that nobody else has. Woody Guthrie never commercially record the song Roll on Columbia. He wrote it, and it has been performed by numerous artists. But Woody never recorded it commercially that we've been able to locate. It's on our album. Woody Guthrie singing that song. [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Narrator] The discovery of the Columbia River collection fills in a missing chapter in the life of Woody Guthrie, America's best known folk composer. Some of Woody's best songs are part of the collection

and many people think that Guthrie's talent was at its peak when the songs were written. Woody Guthrie speaks for himself, and his talent speaks for itself and his ability, which may have been at its peak at that particular time here in 1941 speaks for itself. [Music] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing]

[Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Woody singing]. [Narrator] He didn't have make new tunes. He could take an old tune, a dependable one that had worked

in other situations, and make a parody of it that would make you forget the song that it had made use of. Folklorist Alan Lomax, [Alan] Woody had depth, and an unbelievable feeling playing ????, lived between text and tune. And knew how to tell a story, but also how to make it burn, with the fire that emerges when the text is struck by the tune. That's what a song is. Woody had that gift. [Woody singing] [Woody singing] [Narrator] Roll on Columbia, The story of the Columbia River Collection, is a special presentation of Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The program was written, produced, and narrated by Michael O'Rourke.

Production assistance was by Mary Ore. All of the music heard in this program is part of the Columbia River collection, created by Woody Guthrie for the Bonneville Power Administration in 1941. Archival recordings were provided courtesy of the Bonneville Power Administration. Special thanks to Bill Merlin. [Music] [Music]