Columbia River

Columbia River, we meet again! For this roadside waystation, I played a tune from Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River Ballads. In 1941, Guthrie wrote these 26 songs in a single month on a commission from the US Government. It was for a documentary about the construction of dams in Oregon and Washington (the doc was never completed, the dams were). Pastures of Plenty is one of my favorites from this collection: it tells the story of farmers migrating to the Pacific Northwest after the Dust Bowl. Alternate title, “Pastures of Plenty (of Milkweed).”