Grand Coulee Dam
Idiot Wind / Blood On The Tracks / 1975
Idiot Wind, blowing like a circle around my skull
Idiot Wind, from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
yunker@ms.uky.edu (Katie) / jlynch@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (Jack Lynch):
Woody Guthrie wrote the Ballad of the Great Grand Coulee
("And on up the river at Grand Coulee Dam/the mightiest thing ever built by man/to run the great factories for old Uncle Sam/
it's roll on, Columbia, roll on!") as an employee of its owner-
operator, the Bonneville Power Administration (a federal entity
similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority):
It was 1941, and Guthrie had been hired for $266.66 to
spend a month writing songs for the fledgling Bonneville
Power Administration in praise of the development of
water. "Jackhammer Blues," "New Found Land," "Pastures
of Plenty," "Eleckatricity and All," "Ballad of the
Great Grand Coulee."
It was a time of almost mystical enthusiasm. The
young engineers ... were going to wrestle the energy
from rivers, cultivate the deserts, and put American to
work. And after years of dustblown expectations, young
Americans could suddenly be part of the mightiest thing.
Concrete! Work! Adventure! Power!
....
.... The Allies' air superiority in World War II was
built in part by new aluminum plants in the region, which
were fired by Columbia River dams.
- Michael Parfit, "When Humans Harness Nature's Forces,"
1993:13 _National Geographic_ 56
So Woody was a kind of poet laureate of a mammoth public works
project. His role and the result reminds me of the 1930s' Social
Realism art that adorns so many government buildings of that era:
muscular Everymen and -women in heroic tributes to industry and
agriculture. The ties of the Columbia River system of dams to
industrial output and, thence, to military materiel make Woody's
efforts paens to the building blocks of a military-industrial
complex.