The folk singer’s 30 days at BPA is considered one of the 

single most productive bursts in his fruitful songwriting career.

An unlikely collaboration

Woody

 Guthrie 

&BPA

BONNEVILLE POWER ADMINISTRATION
Cost.” “So they hired him for 30 days. And he 

wrote a song a day.” 

It’s an odd professional 

combination by today’s 

standards: a Dust Bowlborn radical songwriter 

and a Northwest-bred 

federal power agency.

But when Woody Guthrie met BPA in 1941, 

creative sparks flew. 

The musical electricity that resulted is still 

heard, thanks to a former BPA employee 

named Bill Murlin and his quest in the 1980s 

to rekindle the embers of a lost legend.

The story began in May 1941, when Guthrie 

was hired on a one-month contract to 

speed-write music for a BPA film on the 

new Columbia River hydroelectric system.

“They couldn’t get him on the (permanent) 

payroll,” says Gene Tollefson, BPA retiree and 

author of “BPA & the Struggle for Power at 

Bonneville Dam under construction. “My children won’t run away to town / Since Bonneville brung the 

’lectric lights around,” Guthrie wrote in “Out Past the End of the Line.” 

Guthrie’s well-traveled guitar bore a sticker that 

famously proclaimed “This Machine Kills Fascists.”

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The month’s work paid only $266.66, a 

monumental bargain for hiring a 28-yearold songwriter at the peak of his powers. 

It was the year after Guthrie had written a 

song he renamed and released in 1944 as 

“This Land Is Your Land,” America’s 

unofficial anthem.

With a BPA driver at the wheel of a black 

Hudson, the tumbleweed troubadour swept 

up and down the Columbia Gorge, a dust 

storm of song ideas billowing behind him. 

The mind-boggling sight and story of the 

two new dams — whose gray, elephantine 

sides crawled with workers in an era of 

desperate unemployment — set Guthrie’s 

songwriter brain afire. 

For 30 days, he sang, he smoked, he 

toured, he typed. His legendary creative 

turbines spun at full capacity as he 

witnessed first hand the ways hydroelectricity 

would elevate a hard-scrabble life for so 

many in the Northwest. 

The pictures and words from that trip were 

“faster to come and dance in my ears than 

I could ever get them wrote down,” he said.

Indeed, BPA information officer Steve Kahn 

said Guthrie almost vibrated as the ideas 

flowed through him — he’d clasp a metal 

disc and beat out rhythms on the leg of his 

desk at the old Northeast Oregon Street 

headquarters as he wrote. (It’s said he got 

relocated from the second floor to the 

basement early on for disturbing others.)

When Guthrie was done, he’d fulfilled his 

contract with 26 sets of song lyrics, 

including a dozen recordings and new 

arrangements of old American melodies 

put to colorful original lyrics — “Roll On, 

Columbia,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Grand 

Coulee Dam.” He recorded 11 of the songs 

in BPA’s basement; three songs he recorded 

in a New York studio eventually appeared in 

the agency documentary “The Columbia.” 

In an era of desperate unemployment, Guthrie was 

inspired by the hive of activity on the new dams. 

“When I seen that great big Bonneville Dam / Well, 

I wish’t I’d a been workin’ makin’ somethin’ for 

Uncle Sam,” he wrote in “Ramblin’ Blues (Portland 

Town).”

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“The Pacific Northwest is one of my favorite 

spots in this world,” he declared.

Then he was gone as quickly as he’d come, 

off to New York, his car repossessed, 

marriage in shreds, wife and kids going 

back to Texas without him, his focus 

turning to using his guitar as a “machine to 

kill fascists” in a world war.

The story of Guthrie’s wildly productive 

month along the Columbia was forgotten. 

After the war and the political tensions of 

the McCarthy era, his stint at BPA shrank 

in the rearview mirror to a few grainy words 

at the end of an old government film in a 

file cabinet.

Four decades later, that’s where Bill Murlin 

came across it. His workplace epiphany 

would raise the agency’s profile around the 

world and draw two of Guthrie’s children to 

BPA to honor their father’s work. 

If you were going to order the perfect 

Woody Guthrie detective, the lanky, laconic 

Spokane native would be straight from 

Witnessing labor like this at Grand Coulee Dam inspired Guthrie to write “Jackhammer Blues” during his 

month as an information specialist at BPA.

While laying the groundwork for the film “The 

Columbia,” director Gunther von Fritsch snapped 

this shot of Guthrie; his wife, Mary; and children 

in Los Angeles before they traveled to Portland for 

Guthrie’s song-writing stint at BPA in May 1941.

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central casting. Murlin combined the chops 

of a professional folk singer with the skill 

set of a broadcaster — an ear for sound 

coupled with a nose for news. He’d been 

performing Woody Guthrie songs since 

college in the 1960s, the perfect 

preparation for his starring role in 

uncovering a wealth of missing material.

By the time Murlin came to BPA in 1979, 

he’d already spent half a lifetime with the 

tools of a traveling storyteller on his 

shoulder — from radio recorders to film 

cameras to his oversized folk guitar (“the 

dreadnought,” he says, “one of the biggest 

damn guitars out there”).

So if Guthrie’s iconic presence slid past 

everyone at BPA for decades, it wouldn’t 

elude Bill Murlin.

Murlin’s first job at BPA was running the 

“radio boiler room,” a one-man operation to 

produce, narrate and deliver BPA news by 

telephone (with the help of 20 volunteers) to 

300 radio stations in four Northwest states. 

He worked with Ann Skalicky, a Public 

Affairs staffer who kept early BPA films, 

many depicting construction projects, in 

her tall metal file cabinet. Murlin liked to 

open it and “look at the movies every once 

in a while.” 

One day he was screening the 1948 film 

“The Columbia” as background for his own 

BPA film work. Professional curiosity made 

him watch it to the very end, where he 

encountered one name he never expected 

to see on a government movie.

He halted the reel for a second look and 

thought, “Cool! I didn’t know that Woody 

Guthrie had worked for the government — 

or BPA.”

Workers hitch a ride on a pipe being hoisted by 

crane at Grand Coulee Dam. “Woody saw the 

majestic Grand Coulee Dam as the creation of the 

common man to harness the river for the common 

good,” wrote folk historian Alan Lomax in the 

1987 songbook of Guthrie’s BPA work that Murlin 

produced.

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wrote an article on his find for BPA’s Circuit 

newspaper, and the news suddenly leapt 

far beyond the agency. 

“On a Monday morning, the story turned up on 

the cover of The Oregonian above the fold,” 

Murlin says. From there, it swept across the 

country, and to Europe via the BBC.

The quest for any trace of Guthrie singing 

his BPA songs became a labor of love, 

which Murlin kept alive via snail mail and 

landline. Although it proved painfully slow 

going, with many false leads and dead 

ends, he picked up the assistance of folk 

legend and Guthrie friend Pete Seeger 

along the way.

Eventually, their persistence paid off — 

Murlin hit pay dirt, turning up recordings 

of Guthrie’s voice from his BPA sessions 

at opposite ends of the West Coast. One 

He rummaged through another cabinet and 

found a file labeled “The Columbia.” Inside 

were 40-year-old documents and employment records — “the first solid clues to 

Guthrie’s BPA employment,” Murlin says.

The next breakthrough came when Murlin 

located a music scholar in Michigan, who 

provided a copy of a 1945 letter from BPA 

to Guthrie’s family that contained the lyrics 

to 22 of the lost songs. In 1983, Murlin 

Bill Murlin, in the Woody Guthrie Circle at BPA 

headquarters on his 2005 retirement day, says, 

“If we hired Woody Guthrie today, we’d have him 

singing about saving salmon and conserving 

energy, instead of using him to sell power.”

Nora Guthrie greets Elmer Buehler, the BPA driver 

who toured her father around the region in 1941, 

during her 2004 visit to BPA. 

Murlin, a professional folk singer, performed with 

Arlo Guthrie (left) at BPA headquarters in April 

1985. Several hundred employees joined them in 

“Roll On, Columbia, Roll On,” Washington state’s 

official folk song.

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came from a San Diego newspaper editor 

who had worked at BPA a few years after 

Guthrie (and nearly lost his Guthrie collection 

in the 1948 Vanport flood that hit the 

Portland area). The other key discoveries 

came from a fan on Washington’s Olympic 

Peninsula and an Associated Press reporter 

in Portland. Each of the three had the rarest 

of the rare, a vinyl or acetate disk bearing a 

different assortment of the missing cuts — 

among them, the only recording of Guthrie 

singing “Roll On, Columbia.”

“I said, ‘Manna from heaven, a gold mine,’” 

Murlin says. “I never anticipated that I would 

find unpublished recordings of Woody Guthrie 

singing his own Columbia River songs.”

In spite of media attention, those three 

records — none commercially made, but 

each like a mix tape of its time — were the 

only copies that ever surfaced of Guthrie 

performing selections from his BPA 

songbook. 

Murlin achieved his goal, and the recovered 

music was widely shared for BPA’s 50th 

anniversary in 1987. A commemorative 

album of Guthrie performing 17 of the 

songs was released, later accompanied by 

a songbook containing a lovingly written 

forward by folk historian Alan Lomax, 

Guthrie’s dear friend and admirer who had 

recommended him for the job at BPA.

The unearthing of a pop-culture icon in BPA 

history gave people inside and out new 

cause for pride. 

“That’s one of my favorite stories of my life 

at Bonneville,” says former acting 

Administrator Jack Robertson, who in 1987 

accompanied Murlin to present the six fragile 

copies of Guthrie’s BPA recordings to the 

National Archives in Washington, D.C. 

“I don’t think the government has ever gotten 

a better investment for its money,” BPA’s 

Kahn told The New York Times.

BPA’s most famous film, which was not completed 

until 1949, includes three of Guthrie’s songs.

After leaving Portland, Guthrie moved on to New 

York, where this photo was taken in 1943. Born 

July 14, 1912, he died in New York at age 55 in 1967.

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www.bpa.gov

BONNEVILLE POWER ADMINISTRATION

DOE/BP-4768 • July 2016

Excerpted from “The Power of the River: The continuing legacy of the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest” (2012)

(Image of Woody Guthrie with family © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. Courtesy of the Woody Guthrie Archive/Woody Guthrie Center)