How Times Change

Recently, I was listening to some Woody Guthrie songs sung by Cisco Houston, and thinking about how our view of taming nature has changed over time. I'm not going to comment about the details: the point seems obvious in these, the final verses from "Grand Coulee Dam," which Guthrie wrote in 1941:

At Bonneville on the river

there's a green and beautiful sight,

See the Bonneville Dam a-rising

in the sun so clear and white,

While the leaping salmon play along 

the ladder and the rocks,

There's a steamboat load of gasoline

a-whistling in the locks.

Uncle Sam took up the challenge

in the year of 'thirty-three,

For the farmer and the factory

and for all of you and me,

He said, "Roll along, Columbia,

you can ramble to the sea,

But river, while you're rolling,

you can do a little work for me."

Now in Oregon and Washington

you can hear the factories hum,

Making chrome and making manganese

and light aluminum,

When you see that flying fortress

wing her way across the land,

Spawned upon the King Columbia

by the big Grand Coulee Dam.

A 1940s post card of the Bonneville Dam. (For a complete summary
of the history of the dam, see this website: source)

Guthrie wrote quite a few songs about the Coulee Dam project -- hired and paid by the Bonneville Power Administration, builder of the dam. Last year for the seventy-fifth anniversary of these songs, the BPA sponsored a celebration.

From the BPA website:

"During his month of employment in the spring of 1941, Guthrie traveled across Oregon and Washington and visited towns, farms, Native American locales and the construction site of Grand Coulee Dam in northeast Washington. Inspired by the people he met and his own observations and experiences, Guthrie wrote a collection of songs about the Columbia River and the benefits new federal hydroelectric dams would bring to the people of the Northwest." 

Here are verses from "Roll on, Columbia," another of the 26 songs which he wrote for them:

At Bonneville now there are ships in the locks

The waters have risen and cleared all the rocks

Shiploads of plenty will steam past the docks

So roll on, Columbia, roll on.

And on up the river is Grand Coulee Dam

The mightiest thing ever built by a man

To run the great factories and water the land

So roll on, Columbia, roll on.

These mighty men labored by day and by night

Matching their strength 'gainst the river's wild flight

Through rapids and falls, they won the hard fight

So roll on, Columbia, roll on.

Another postcard view of the dam, also from the 1940s.

An NPR story about Guthrie's Columbia River songs summarizes the point of view during the time he wrote them: "Guthrie's songs echoed this optimistic period in the West. Few were thinking of the salmon the dams would sacrifice. Instead, it was all about harnessing nature's power to help people."

While the song lyrics praised the technology of man harnessing the river, Guthrie himself was an embarrassment to the government agency that had hired him. During the anti-communist witch hunts of post-World-War-II era, the BPA destroyed much of the evidence that they had hired Guthrie and paid him $266.66 for his 30 days of work -- including a documentary film with Guthrie singing his songs. However, in the 1980s, a BPA employee retrieved some of the material, described in another post on their website here.