Woody Guthrie wrote “Pastures of Plenty” in 1941 as part of a paid commission from the Bonneville Power Administration: the United States Department of the Interior hired him for one month to write songs for a documentary about the Columbia River and its dams. In that single contracted month Guthrie produced twenty-six songs, among them “Roll On, Columbia,” “Grand Coulee Dam,” and “Pastures of Plenty.” The song depicts the migrant agricultural workers of the Dust Bowl diaspora following the harvest through the American West — California, Arizona, Colorado, the Dakotas — framing their labor as the engine of national abundance they never share in. The melody was adapted from the traditional tune “Pretty Polly.”
The lyric belongs to the same project of working-class documentation that defined Guthrie’s entire career — the same impulse behind “This Land Is Your Land” and the Dust Bowl ballads recorded for Alan Lomax. “Pastures of Plenty” is among the most musically direct of his labor songs: the melody is strong, the images concrete, and the political argument embedded in the geography rather than stated explicitly.
Alison Krauss and Union Station recorded it for Lonely Runs Both Ways (Rounder Records, November 23, 2004), with Dan Tyminski singing lead. The album won three Grammy Awards in 2006, including Best Country Album. Tyminski’s plain-spoken vocal gave Guthrie’s labor narrative an Appalachian gravity that connected the song’s Okie-migration subject matter to the mountain-music tradition Krauss and Union Station inhabit.
