Although I thought this post was going to be about some notable songs that Woody Guthrie wrote 80 years ago in the Pacific Northwest, it turns out it’s actually about some powerful words spoken today in Atlanta by Vice President Kamala Harris.

So bear with this train of thought. Or put another way, sit down and savor the ride.

On March 22, 1941, the Grand Coulee Dam began producing power. The 500-foot high dam, which is located on the Columbia River about 200 miles east of Seattle, is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp, issued in 1952. The dam takes its name from the Grand Coulee an ancient river bed. Building the dam flooded over 21,000 acres of land; displaced over 3,000 people, many of them Native Americans; and permanently removed over 1,000 miles of river where salmon once spawned. Inexpensive electricity from the dam – which cost about $2 billion in today’s dollars – helped power the US war effort in World War II and fueled many growing industries in the Pacific Northwest in the post-war years. It also provided water to irrigate the arid farmland on the eastern side of the Cascades.

In 1941, Guthrie was hired the Department of the Interior to write songs about the Grand Coulee dam, the Columbia River Valley, and other dams being built, particularly the Bonneville Dam, another massive project on the Columbia River. (Guthrie initially was also hired to narrate the film but federal officials decided he was too progressive and too well-known for that task). Guthrie, who toured the Columbia River and the Pacific Northwest, said he “couldn’t believe it, it’s a paradise.” Inspired, he wrote 26 songs in one month including three particularly well-known pieces: “Roll On, Columbia, Roll On”, “Grand Coulee Dam”, and “Pastures of Plenty”.

The first two songs primarily celebrated the major projects that inspired them. The “Grand Coulee Dam” lyrics, for example, state:

“Well, the world has seven wonders that the trav’lers always tell,
Some gardens and some towers, I guess you know them well,
But now the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam’s fair land,
It’s the big Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam.

…Uncle Sam took up the challenge in the year of ‘thirty-three,
For the farmer and the factory and all of you and me,
He said, “Roll along, Columbia, you can ramble to the sea,
But river, while you’re rambling, you can do some work for me.”

Now in Washington and Oregon you can hear the factories hum,
Making chrome and making manganese and light aluminum,
And there roars the flying fortress now to fight for Uncle Sam,
Spawned upon the King Columbia by the big Grand Coulee Dam.”

While “Grand Coulee Dam” doesn’t focus on those who lost lives and livelihoods to the project, “Pastures of Plenty”, features the Guthrie who, as he did so well, gave voice to the powerless, the disposed, and the downtrodden. He wrote (and sang, as have many others):

“It’s a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed
My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road
Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled
And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold

I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you’ll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind

California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine

Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground
From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters run down
Every state in the Union us migrants have been
We’ll work in this fight and we’ll fight ’til we win

It’s always we rambled, that river and I
All along your green valley, I will work till I die
My land I’ll defend with my life if it be
Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free.”

I heard echoes of Guthrie’s voice tonight when I read what Vice President Harris said earlier today at Emory University where she was speaking about the recent murder of eight people, six of them Asian women. She reminded her listeners of our long history of anti-Asian actions, such as the racism and violence inflicted on the Chinese immigrants who came here to work on the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s, to the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II and violence that greeted many refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s and 1980s. “Racism is real in America, and it has always been,” Harris said. “Xenophobia is real in America and always has been. Sexism, too.”

She added: “Everyone has the right to go to work, to go to school, to walk down the street and be safe, and also the right to be recognized as an American – not as the other, not as them, but as us. A harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us.”

Writing about the remarks in today’s Washington Post, Robin Givhan observed: “This is the America that so often goes undiscussed in mixed company. It’s the America that people of color see and lament – often with wry, self-protective humor – to others who look like them. It’s the America that women know intimately, the one about which they educate and warn their daughters. It’s the America of recent immigrants whose hardship and halting English may belie their tenacity, intelligence and courage – traits for which they are hailed by their loved ones even as they are barely visible to others.”

It’s the America that Woody Guthrie would be writing about if were still alive.

Be well, stay safe, “work in this fight” for justice and “fight ’til we win,” the peace we so badly need.