Roll On, Columbia

DESCRIPTION: Tribute to the Columbia River, the development along it, and the Bonneville Power Administration that manages both: "Roll on Columbia, roll on (x2), Your power is turning our darkness to dawn, So roll on, Columbia, roll on."
AUTHOR: Woody Guthrie
EARLIEST DATE: 1941
KEYWORDS: technology nonballad river
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Mar 26, 1856 - The siege of the Cascades
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (8 citations):
Scott-TheBalladOfAmerica, pp. 348-349, "Roll On, Columbia" (1 text, 1 tune)
Lomax-FolkSongsOfNorthAmerica 233, "Roll On, Columbia" (1 text, 1 tune)
Arnett-IHearAmericaSinging, pp. 166-167, "Roll On, Columbia" (1 text, 1 tune)
Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, p. 62, "Roll on Columbia" (notes only)
DT, ROLCOLUM
ADDITIONAL: Greg Vandy with Daniel Person, _26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie's Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest_, Sasquatch Books, 2016, p. x (copy of one of Woody's own typed texts of his original version); p. 126 (a copy of Michael Loring's version, which cut four of Woody's verses and added two of Loring's own)
Woody Guthrie, __Roll On Columbia: The Columbia River Collection_, collected and edited by Bill Murlin, Sing Out Publications, 1991, pp. 14-15, "Roll On Columbia, Roll On" (1 text, 1 tune)
Tom Nash and Twilo Scofield, _The Well-Travelled Casket: Oregon Folklore_, Meadowlark Press, 1999, p. 41, "Roll On, Columbia" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #17660
RECORDINGS:
Pete Seeger, "Roll On, Columbia" (on AmHist2) (on PeteSeeger41)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Goodnight Irene" (tune)
NOTES [4240 words]: I've seen people claim that the tune Woody used was "Goodnight Irene"; others say it's "My Bonnie." I guess he managed to modify it enough to fool at least a few people.... - RBW
"My Bonnie"? Naah. This is "Goodnight Irene", almost unchanged. - PJS
Obviously true of the chorus. The verse has been altered to a slightly greater degree. But not much, I agree. And it's pretty clear that that the "Irene" melody is what made this by far the most popular of Woody's Bonneville Power Administration songs. (To be fair to Woody, "Irene" had not yet become world-famous, so he wasn't blatantly ripping off a famous melody.)
What we sing today is not exactly Woody's original version, though -- which, like certain others of his songs (e.g. "Reuben James"), started out with too little broad vision and too much nitpicky detail. Vandy/Person lets us see something of how the song came to be as it now is. On p. 10 they reproduce a typed version of one of Woody's texts (dated 5-12-1941). The chorus is there, and there are eight verses. The order of the verses is as follows:
1. The familiar opening verse "Green Douglas Fir"
2. The familiar second verse "Other great rivers lend power to you"
3-6. Four verses about wars with the "Injuns" (yes, it say "Injuns"!), that mentions Sheridan, "Coe's little store," and a genocide of the natives. (Anybody who thinks Guthrie was entirely without prejudice should read this text! -- though it was Guthrie himself who finally cut it; Vandy/Person, p. 110)
7. The familiar verse "At Bonneville now there are ships in the lock"
8. The familiar verse "And on up the river is Grand Coulee Dam"
Note the absence of the often-heard verse "Tom Jefferson's vision would not let him rest" and of the less-common but still widely-known verse "These mighty men labored by day and by night." These verses, as we shall see, are by Michael Loring, not Woody.
Although the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was one of the most important steps toward America becoming a superpower, most historians agree that Thomas Jefferson had had his eyes on "an empire... in the Pacific Northwest" before that, but perhaps as part of a sort of pseudo-Northwest Passage; Jefferson had been interested in that since at least the 1780s. The first American land claims were made by Robert Kendrick in the 1790s, at about the same time as the Columbia River was discovered (and by members of the same expedition), but Kendrick got there by sea, around Cape Horn, and acquired the land (by the sort of fake treaties with the Indians that were already becoming too familiar), and only then wrote to Jefferson about it (Ridley, 287-289).
The Louisiana Purchase was more an attempt to forestall France from building its own empire there (so, e.g., Appleby, p 63) -- though one suspects that had Napoleon managed to survive all the attacks on him, he would have found a way to pressure the Americans to get the Purchase back. But having made the Purchase, Jefferson had to do something with it, and so he sent Lewis and Clark (and Zebulon Pike, although that gets less publicity). Part of the Lewis and Clark expedition's purpose was to explore, but a lot of it was diplomatic, to open relations with the Indians (Appleby, p. 106). One suspects they would have been even less friendly had they known what would happen for the next hundred years....
Lewis and Clark certainly cannot claim to have discovered the Columbia River. In 1787, a group of Boston merchants sent a commercial expedition to the Pacific Northwest -- the edition led by Kendrick. One of the ships they sent was the Columbia, and one of the captains was Robert Gray. The voyage that followed is probably too complicated to explain here (some aspects of it are covered in "The Bold Northwestern Man" [Laws D1]; the Spanish, the English, and Americans under Gray and Robert Kendrick were all looking for land and profits), but the voyage, although not a financial success, was interesting enough that Gray and the Columbia having returned home, went out again in 1790, and Gray located the Columbia River and went a short distance inland (Avery, pp. 83-84; Ridley, p. 285). The river is of course named after his ship. Lewis and Clark do of course get credit for, as it were, mapping the connection between the Columbia and the territories of the United States.
If anyone can claim to have foreseen a Pacific Northwest empire, it was John Jacob Astor, who wanted the lands around the mouth of the Columbia for his fur trade business (Dietrich, p. 86); Jefferson in 1813 wrote to him that "I view it as the germ of a great, free, and independent empire on that side of our continent" (Ridley, p. 200) -- though Astor's attempts to explore and work the region didn't accomplish much. It wasn't until James K. Polk became President that an agreement was reached with Britain that definitively brought the western parts of what became Washington and Oregon into American hands.
The verses Woody originally wrote, that were replaced by the Tom Jefferson verse, refer to the Yakima War of 1855. The event Woody picked was relatively obscure; there were three Indian Wars between 1848 and the Civil War, and the Battle of the Cascades was only a single incident of the second war. But it was closely associated with the Columbia, and indeed with the region above the Bonneville Dam.
The Yakima, like every other native nation, had been abused and cheated by the Americans and forced onto reservations -- and settlers started encroaching on those lands just weeks after the treaty that put the Yakima on that reservation! (Dietrich, p. 158). The Americans had imposed their plans largely by force, but in 1855, the Yakima rebelled over a large part of Washington State.
There is dispute over who started the war. The Americans (who were having a small gold rush) were clearly guilty of invading Indian land -- and some Americans apparently abused and raped Indian women. The first murders came after that, of several miners and of Indian agent A. J. Bolon (Miles, pp. 2-3). Similarly, at the first battle, the Whites fired first, but only after an Indian had made what was interpreted as an intent to fight (Miles, pp. 6-7). And the fighting spread.
Needing troops to deal with the problem, General John E. Wool "removed all but one company of regular troops from Vancouver[, Washington] and left only nine men in the blockhouse at the Cascades on the Columbia River" (Avery, p. 183; according to Dietrich, the blockhouse was known as "Fort Rains"; it is just downstream from where the Bonneville Dam is now. Dietrich, p. 73, has a photo of the blockhouse; it looks like it is two stories, with the second story overhanging the first all around; there are only a few windows in the upper level. It must have been a horrid place to take shelter).
The Cascades was a strategic point, a portage with a White settlement trapped between bluffs (Dietrich, p. 158). It also was the link between two relatively low areas separated by mountains, meaning that the side that controlled it would be able to pass forces back and forth to fight in both places. (Although, as it turned out, internal disputes on the European side made that almost moot; their professional and volunteer armies wouldn't work together.) "[Yakima leader] Kamiakin [Ka-Mi-Akin] therefore decided to attack the Cascades. The Yakima, Klickitat, and Cascade Indians planned to wait until both of the small steamboats which ran between the Cascades and The Dalles were at the Cascades and them sink them so that they could not go for help....
"Fortunately for the whites, when the steamboats were attacked, a crewman of the Mary lay down on the floor of the pilot house to avoid the gunfire and backed the ship out into the river from that position. The Wasco also escaped, and the two ships went for aid" (Avery, p. 183). According to Dietrich, p. 159, the pilot was named Hardin Chenowith. His feat was the more impressive because, according to Miles, p. 35, both the captain and the first mate were away from the boat. When the steamboats reached Vancouver, they brought back a force of soldiers. This is, obviously, the inspiration of Woody's line "We won by the Mary and the soldiers she bore" (Woody did not italicize or underline the ship's name in his submitted copy).
"In the meantime, the Indians killed the member of one family, and many of the remaining settlers took refuge in a store, a two-story log house"; they were besieged and an attempt made to burn them in the building, but the Whites managed to hold them off (Avery, p. 183). Hence Woody's "Our loved ones we lost there at Coe's little store." Dietrich, p. 158, and Mile, p. 35, however, call it "Bradford's store"; more than forty people took shelter in the building, which (fortunately for them) held a few muskets that helped them hold of the attackers (Dietrich, p. 159).
The two attacks were roughly simultaneous and clearly coordinated, but the store and the blockhouse were about a mile and a half apart, so they couldn't help each other or unite their forces.
By the time it was over, 16 Whites and been killed and 12 injured (Dietrich, p. 160; Miles, p. 34, says three soldiers and 14 civilians were killed -- and doubts that Kamiakin ordered the affair, because he didn't attack civilians).
The store, and Fort Rains, were apparently the only places in which people held out. Two forces came to their rescue. One was the force in the steamboats. The other was a group of about forty soldiers under Army Lieutenant Phil Sheridan, who were told of the battle by a solitary refugee; they made it to the blockhouse first. His attack didn't come off as intended, because the other relief force gave things away (Avery, pp. 183-184; Miles, pp. 39-40 says Sheridan's men cheered, the other forces sounded a bugle to say they were coming, and the Indians took off), but his presence explains Woody's lines "It's there on your banks that we fought many a fight / Sheridan's boys in the block house that night." They did fight, without reaching the blockhouse, but their main value may have been that they distracted the Indians while other forces arrived (Miles, p. 37).
The soldiers then went looking for the attacking Indians, who had fled. "A group of Cascade Indians who had taken refuge on the island were all that could be found. Nine of them were hanged because their guns had recently been fired" (Avery, p. 184). Miles, p. 38, says that "Colonel George Wright conducted a military commission examining evidence and hearing testimony from cooperative local Indians. Nine Cascade men, including their chief, Chenowith, were found guilty of murdering civilians and hanged for war crimes." Hence Woody's lines "Remember the trial when the battle was won / The wild Indian warriors to the tall timber run, We hung every Indian with smoke in his gun." (According to Dietrich, p. 160, at least some of the nine men executed were probably innocent.)
According to Miles, p. xii, "At least 370 victims died violently in Washington Territory between September of 1855 and November of 1758 including soldiers, chiefs, warriors, volunteers, civilians, non-combatants, women and children." That, to be sure, was nothing like the Indian losses in the previous few decades; the reason the Americans were able to win the war was that over ninety percent of the original inhabitants ha died of the white men's diseases over the previous decades (Dietrich, p. 161).
Incidentally, the Cascades fight wasn't Sheridan's first action in the Yakima War; he had been leading dragoons from the beginning of the conflict (Miles, p. 15).
Although the Grand Coulee Dam is no longer "the biggest thing built by the hand of a man," more than three quarters of a century after Woody wrote this song, it is still reported (in 2019) to be the single most productive hydroelectric plant in the world, and Dietrich, p. 311, says that it produces nearly three times as much power as the next-most-productive dam on the Columbia. (The Bonneville Dam, by contrast, isn't a particularly big power producer, although the fact that it has covered the Cascades of the Columbia has made the river more navigable; prior to that, it had been almost murderous to use the river. The Columbia became the main hub of the northwest fur trade only because every other river was worse. According to Dietrich, p. 310, the Grand Coulee Dam "impounds sixty times as much water as Bonneville Dam." It's so big that the BPA operators actually have to time its releases to maximize not only its power output but those of the other Columbia dams!)
Woody said he wrote 26 songs for the Bonneville Power Administration (a couple of which have not been identified with certainty), but since this is the most famous, it's probably the best place to tell the story of Woody and the BPA. I probably should have asked Ed Cray to write this account, but I didn't know in time how complex the story was. So you'll have to accept me writing it...
The idea of damming the Columbia first came up when Woody was still very young, and the main goal wasn't electricity; it was irrigation. The Grand Coulee Dam is named for the Grand Coulee, which is a valley which would allow irrigation water to be brought to a lot of fertile soil in the northwest. The Grand Coulee is a northern extension of the Great Basin, the level region between the Rockies and the Pacific Coast ranges (Dietrich, pp. 28-29); the region is fertile but dry; by the 1930s, the region was losing population because there just wasn't enough water to support farming there (Dietrich, p. 31). The idea of a Grand Coulee Dam was first proposed in 1918 as a way to collect water which could be sent through the Grand Coulee (Vandy/Person, pp. 76-77).
In 1925, the Army Corps of Engineers came in and looked around, and realized the power potential of the area -- but the federal government wasn't going to interfere with the local power companies (Vandy/Person, p. 78). It wasn't until Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president that Washington got involved (Vandy/Person, pp. 78-79). But he moved quickly to get the project started, and by 1938 the Bonneville Dam was working (Dietrich, p. 407); Roosevelt himself flipped the switch that put it in operation (Vandy/Person, pp. 84-85). Hence Woody's line that the "at Bonneville now there are ships in the locks, The waters have risen and cleared all the rocks" (making the Cascades of the Columbia much more navigable).
In 1940, transmission lines were completed between Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams, and the Bonneville Power Administration was truly in business (Vandy/Person, p. 87); the Grand Coulee Dam itself went into operation in 1941, about the time Woody was writing about it (Dietrich, p. 407). Many, many more dams would be built in the decades to come (there are now fourteen dams on the Columbia alone, twenty on the Snake, and hundreds of others elsewhere in the system; Dietrich, p. 42. Because of its large volume and sharp fall, the Columbia is thought to have 40% of the hydroelectric capacity of the United States!), but those two were the lynchpins of the whole system.
The Grand Coulee Dam was truly the Big One. As originally conceived, "The dam would create the world's largest artificial lake, require the world's largest concrete mixing plant, pour water down the world's biggest spillway, and lift water into the coulee with the world's most powerful pumps. It would be three times more massive than Boulder Dam (later renamed Hoover) rising on the Colorado River near Las Vegas. It would have three times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Cheops" (Dietrich, p. 32).
Woody ended up working for the Bonneville Power Administration for typical Woody reasons. He had just quit the best job he would ever have -- a radio gig,"Pipe Smoking Time," in which he played, joked, and sometimes got to bring in guests like Lead Belly -- though the producers didn't like Lead Belly at all (Cray, pp. 191-192, 194-195). He made between $180 and $350 a week at this time, which was an upper-middle to upper-class income (Cray, p. 197). But the radio people wanted Woody to restrain himself and follow the dictates of the sponsor. And, of course, he had that desperate urge to ramble One night he came home to his wife, ordered her to pack up, and headed off for California (Cray, pp. 198-200). At least, that was his destination. But what he was really driving toward was poverty. (Also divorce; according to Cray, pp. 201-207, this was the trip that caused his first wife, Mary, to finally give up on Woody -- who may have been a genius, but he was also incredibly irritating and unwilling to do real work to support his family. Woody's behavior in this time was actually criminal in several regards -- illegal occupancy, vandalism of property, absconding without paying debts; Cray, pp. 203-204, 206-207. He didn't see it that way, but that's what the law would have said.)
The Bonneville Power Administration people had decided to make a movie to publicize what they were doing, and they wanted a musician to fill in the gaps and (initially) to be the narrator. They applied to Alan Lomax in Washington for someone who could write the songs, and he suggested Woody (Cray, pp. 207-208).
Woody did his best to blow it. For starters, he had skipped town to escape his debts, so it took quite some time for the formal invitation to apply to rech him. Then he showed unannounced, with a beard, a work shirt, and work pants (Vandy/Person, p. 91). That alone would have given the producers a pretty good clue that he was a radical. They had wanted him for a year, but because of his politics, they didn't think they could bring him on as a permanent hire; the higher-ups simply wouldn't go for it. The rules allowed them to make temporary hires, for no more than a month, without going to the people in charge. So Woody, instead of getting a one-year job for $3200 or so, became a contract songwriter for one month for pay of $266 (Cray, pp. 208-209; his official title, according to Vandy/Person, p. 94, was "Information Consultant"). Woody still had to fill out enough paperwork to make him cranky, but the application, shown on pp. 96-97 of Vandy/Person, is interesting -- e.g. it gives proof that Woody left school after the tenth grade.
Although Stephen Kahn, the BPA publicity person who had dreamed all this up, had cut back Woody's role, he wanted to help Woody in every way he could. He had a man named Elmer Buehler drive Woody all over the Columbia Valley to get a picture of what he was to write about (Cray, p. 209; given what Woody had done to his own car, they didn't want to risk letting him drive a government vehicle! -- Vandy/Person, p. 101. It had advantages anyway, since it let Woody sit in the back seat and take notes or scribble lyrics or even play the guitar to try things out -- though it was hard on the driver, since Woody would not stay clean; Vandy/Person, pp. 102-103).
They visited one of the local Hoovervilles, to show how the dam projects would create jobs and also allow improvements to the shantytowns based on affordable electricity. They saw the Grand Coulee Dam being built. They visited the farm fields (Cray, pp. 209-210). Then Kahn, in effect, sat Woody down and told him to start writing, not realizing how quickly Woody could crank stuff out. Kahn also retained the right to edit the finished products (Cray, p. 210).
In the three weeks after he finished seeing the area, Woody cranked out 26 songs (Vandy/Person, p. 99, claim that this was the most productive period of his life, although given how much of Woody's work is lost, this is probably beyond proof), although some of them were rewrites of songs he had earlier written and some were relatively minor riffs on traditional ideas (Cray, p. 211). Not all were great, of course, but Kahn felt that ten to twelve were good enough to put in the film.
"Roll On, Columbia" was arguably the first of the bunch; Woody wrote part of it on his very first day on the job (Vandy/Person, p. 100).
Having a job didn't exactly solve Woody's financial problems; his almost-new car, which he had all but ruined with his careless ways, was repossessed (Vandy/Person, p. 100). In a way, this was almost an improvement -- he no longer had a way to pack up the entire family on some insane quest. But at least the family had enough to live on while he was working on the job (Vandy/Person, p. 99).
Once Woody's contract was up, he abandoned his wife and children and set off to hitchhike to New York, with no money except a gift of $20 from one of his co-workers. He and Mary Guthrie were formally separated by that fall and officially divorced by 1943 (Vandy/Person, pp. 112-113). Mary Guthrie by then had a better job than anything Woody ever managed; Woody had one of his various New Cookies, the future Marjorie Guthrie (Cray, pp. 266-267).
Woody had made low-quality recordings of his songs during his time in the Pacific Northwest, but no high-quality recordings were made. Kahn in 1942 caught up with Woody in New York and paid him $20 (plus a $10 tip out of his own pocket) to record three songs, but ironically, "Roll On, Columbia" was not one of them; the three were "Roll, Columbia, Roll," "Pastures of Plenty," and "The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done." The idea was to use them in the film -- but the film was on hold, because of the war and because there was no longer much question but that the war effort needed Columbia River electricity (Vandy/Person, pp. 115-117).
As it turned out, the film was not released until 1949, in much-reduced form and with a different purpose; World War II had changed everything, with Columbia River power being essential to the war effort. Woody recorded a dozen songs in 1942, but they were not released at the time (Cray, pp. 212-213 note). Kahn finally was able to make "The Columbia" in 1948, though it used only a few of Woody's songs and was taken largely from an earlier film, "Hydro," rather than being the big production Kahn had hoped for. Still, it was shown around the region (Dietrich, p. 302)
But not for long. Local power interests didn't want the government interfering with their program, and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were not as interested in hydroelectric power as FDR had been. Eisenhower's Interior Secretary in fact ordered the film destroyed. But Kahn -- who had quit the Bonneville Power Administration a few years earlier when it was clear that he was not popular -- kept a copy, and Woody's old driver Elmer Bueler also salvaged a copy, and eventually a man named Bill Murlin managed to recover and fix up the hidden films and reccordings (Dietrich, pp. 302-303).
Ironically, even Woody seems to have forgotten about this song for a while. He didn't include it on his 1947 Disc recording of Columbia River songs, peculiarly titled "Songs from the Dust Bowl" (Vandy/Person, p. 124). When Pete Seeger wanted the text for People's Songs, Woody had to write to Michael Loring of the BPA to get the lyrics! (Vandy/Person, pp. 124-125). The copy that Loring sent to Seeger is reproduced on p. 126 of Vandy/Person; it has a hand-scribbled note saying that Loring had cut Woody's four Yakima War verses and added the "Tom Jefferson's vision" and "These mighty men labored" verses, which are by Loring (Vandy/Parson, p. 125). There is also a note from Loring to Pete explaining what he had done. There are a few other minor differences from Woody's version, e.g. in the list of rivers, he has "Sandy, Willamette, and Hood River, too" for Woody's "Williamette, Sandy, and Hood River, too."
I'm not sure Loring's "Tom Jefferson" verse makes the song better than just leaving it out, but it is definitely an improvement over Woody's Yakima War verses! Loring's version is effectively the canonical one, so in a way, this composed song has been folk processed. Vandy/Parson, p. 127, also note that the song became widespread even though there was no commercial recording until 1960; it was passed by oral transmission. It's just that we know that we know who it was that first started the process.
Even though they had gone into hiding for a time, the BPA songs represent an important part of Woody's legacy: "Pastures of Plenty," "Hard Traveling," "Grand Coulee Dam," and, of course, "Roll On, Columbia," one of Woody's half dozen or so greatest hits. And Cray, at least, think working on the project had helped Woody get out of a rut.
And eventually the state of Washington came around. It is not technically correct to say that "Roll On, Columbia" is the Washington State Song; they have an anthem called "Washington, My Home." But "Roll On, Columbia" is the "State *folk* song."
There has been dispute about the ownership of this and the other Columbia River songs. The federal government claimed them -- on its face, rightly, since the songs were written for them. But the Guthrie heirs were not ready to concede the point. A settlement was reached under which the Guthrie estate has copyright but the government can use the songs relatively freely (Vandy/Person, p. 140). Also, no one knew the tunes for four of them (though none of them very well known); Pete Seeger conjectured the tunes for four of them, probably correctly, and simply wrote his own for "Lumber Is King" (Vandy/Person, p. 142). My guess, based on only the briefest glance, is that the tune should be "Money Is King" or a variation on it. - RBW
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