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community
june2
2016
Roll On Columbia
songs about loggers, fisherman and liv-
ing in the Northwest. Kytr became a
mentor and major musical influence
for Seamons. Later Seamons, recorded
some of Kytr’s music, along with the
music of John and Kim Cunnick, songs
written in and about the Vernonia area.
Seamons recorded and performs some
of those songs with his band “Timber-
bound.”
Those explorations of regional
music led Seamons to wonder, “What
else is out there that constitutes North-
west folk music? And Woody Guthrie’s
songs are what people point to when you
ask that question,” says Seamons.
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was
born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1912. He
grew up in Oklahoma and Texas dur-
ing the dustbowl years and the Great
Depression. He traveled the country,
seeing firsthand the devastation, and
writing songs about the people, social
events, and politics of this difficult time.
The Bonneville Power Project,
as it was originally called, was set up in
continued from front page
1937 to distribute electricity produced by
the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams
on the Columbia River. It was renamed
the Bonneville Power Administration in
1940. BPA public information officer
Stephan Kahn wanted to produce a film
to help sell the idea of publicly produced
electric power to the local population.
He felt having a folk singer involved
might make the story more accessible to
the common folks.
Kahn contacted Allen Lomax,
head of the Archive of Folk Song at the
Library of Congress, who recommended
his friend Guthrie.
“The goal was to tell the story of
the work being done to create jobs, irri-
gate land, and deliver cheap, public elec-
tricity to people across the Northwest,”
explains Seamons.
Guthrie, who had recently left
his job in New York City as a radio per-
sonality, had moved with his wife Mary
and three small children to California.
In late March of 1941, the BPA
sent photographer Gunther Von Fritsch
Vernonia
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to meet with Guthrie, who was unem-
ployed at the time. They discussed the
project and took some photos, but appar-
ently no promises were made. Excited
about the prospects, Guthrie immediate-
ly packed up his family and headed for
Portland.
In a 2007 NPR interview, Elmer
Buehler, who was Guthrie’s driver and
guide for the month, remembers Guth-
rie’s audition for Paul Raver at the BPA.
“He sat there on the administrator’s
desk,” Buehler recalls, “and strummed
on his ‘gee-tar,’ as he always said. I don’t
think he was there over half an hour and
Dr. Raver said, ‘Well, you’re hired.’”
Guthrie got right to work and
was paid $266.66 for the 26 songs he
completed.
“It’s very significant that one of
America’s greatest folk balladeers wrote
some of his best material in this very
short and very productive month of his
life here in Oregon,” says Seamons. “If
you look at his body of work and when
he wrote things, this was kind of the
apex of his creative life. He had done a
lot of song writing up to that point and
all the skills he had been honing as a
writer and as a storyteller came together
to allow him to write this fantastic batch
of music.”
In 2009 Seamons was awarded
a “Woody Guthrie Fellowship” by the
BMI Foundation, which made it possible
for him to travel to New York City and
spend two weeks exploring the Woody
Guthrie Archives.
Since then Seamons, a graduate
of Lewis and Clark College, has been
interpreting Guthrie’s work, along with
the music of Kytr and the Cunnicks, and
has engaged in several other music proj-
ects with collaborator Ben Hunter. Tim-
berbound has performed several times in
Vernonia, most notably at the Vernonia
Friendship Jamboree, and also at the
Vernonia Grange.
Seamons and Hunter perform
an eclectic mix of bluegrass, old time,
folk and blues tunes. Among his many
musical projects, Seamons and Hunter
recently traveled along the Mississippi
River, performing music and document-
ing the blues songs of the deep south and
the stories of the people they met along
the way. In January of 2016 Seamons
and Hunter won first place in the solo/
duo category at the prestigious 33rd
International Blues Challenge in Mem-
phis, Tennessee.
Murlin has a special interest in
seeing this new project of Guthrie mu-
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sic reach fruition. He is the one who
found, collected and published, inciden-
tally with the help of Hobe Kytr, all of
Guthrie’s Columbia River songs in the
Columbia River Songbook, when he
worked for the BPA in the 1980s. 17
songs had been recorded by Guthrie,
but nine others have never before been
recorded. “It’s time all 26 songs had a
voice,” says Murlin.
Seamons and Murlin have
teamed with Portland-based musician
and producer Jon Neufeld and have
gathered a host of other Northwest based
musicians to record the songs. Neufeld
is best known for his work with the
band Black Prairie, which includes sev-
eral members of The Decemberists, and
is also an original member of Portland
bluegrass stalwarts Jackstraw.
Among the incredibly talented
performers invited to help Seamons
and Murlin bring all of Guthrie’s songs
back to life are Michael Hurley, Tony
Furtado, Kate Power and Steve Einhorn,
John Moen of the Decemberists, Black
Prairie’s Annalisa Tornfelt, and Martha
Scanlon. Hunter and Seamons, Timber-
bound and Murlin will also perform.
“It’s been interesting to see all
the different musical connections and
collaborations that are happening,” says
Seamons.
Acclaimed Pacific Northwest
artist Erik Sandgren will provide origi-
nal artwork for the album. Recording
sessions were held in Portland and Seat-
tle during March of 2016, with an album
release planned for October, the 75th an-
niversary of Guthrie’s work for the BPA.
Also of interest, Greg Vandy has
published a new book, 26 Songs in 30
Days: Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River
Songs and the Planned Promised Land
in the Pacific Northwest, which takes
readers inside the unusual partnership
between one of America’s great folk art-
ists and the federal government.
Guthrie’s famous Columbia
River songs look to be making quite a
revival and will hopefully find a new au-
dience in the process.
“There are some very obscure
lyrics and songs included here that
we’re very excited to be playing,” says
Seamons. “They are being performed
in the recording studio for the first time
ever. That makes it pretty special.”
For more information on the Woody’s
26 Northwest Songs Project go to www.
benjoemusic.com or “Roll Columbia”
on Facebook.
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