Next year, an East Portland community development agency will honor Woody Guthrie by naming a new affordable-housing complex in Lents after the legendary songwriter and champion of the downtrodden.

"I've been thinking for a long time that celebrating and acknowledging history is important for the neighborhood," said Nick Sauvie, ROSE Community Development's executive director. "Woody Guthrie's story is really significant for Lents. And we haven't done enough to say he was here."

At a time when skyrocketing rents are pushing low-income residents to the city's edges, ROSE's multifamily Woody Guthrie Apartments will actually go up a few blocks from the address where the guitar-strumming Bernie Sanders of his day lived in May of 1941.

The old four-plex at 6111 S.E. 92nd Ave., located on the cusp of Interstate 205, still stands. Ironically, nothing outside the building acknowledges that one of America's greatest songwriters created some of his greatest work with three children at his feet in a cramped apartment on the second floor.

"Seriously? I had no idea Woody Guthrie lived here," a surprised property manager with Interwest Properties remarked as I walked around the 400-foot living space. "Had no idea."

Yes, the Okie drifter most famous for writing "This Land is Your Land" and eventually inspiring Dylan, Springsteen and Wilco was a Portlander -- if only for four weeks when he was restless and 28.

Desperate for work in the dust storm of the Great Depression, Guthrie arrived in Portland 75 years ago this month with his wife, Mary, their three children and a well-used guitar with "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS" scribbled on the front.

Guthrie had been hired by the Bonneville Power Administration to write songs promoting the building of new dams along the Columbia. In 30 frantic days, he wrote 26 songs and recorded nine of them, earning $266.66 -- or $10 a song.

And Guthrie's young brood ate, slept, sang and struggled to make ends meet in that tiny space.

Greg Vandy, a Seattle radio host and author of the new book "26 songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie's Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest," said Guthrie worked on some of his most iconic songs in the apartment.

They included the classics "Roll On, Columbia," "Grand Coulee Dam" and "Pastures of Plenty."

"Woody wrote in the back seat of a car when they were driving him around," Vandy said. "He'd also write on a typewriter at the BPA offices. Then he'd take them home and work on the songs in the apartment in the evening hours, testing them out on Mary there."

At $795 a month, a struggling musician today might be able to afford to rent the place.

Vandy said Guthrie's 30 days in Portland was one of the artist's most productive periods.

But it almost didn't happen because BPA bosses weren't sure an avowed socialist was the best person to write songs selling hydropower, irrigation and the Grand Coulee Dam to the masses.

Guthrie had already laid down recordings at the Smithsonian and hosted a show on CBS Radio. But Guthrie's application could have just as easily been for a jack-of-all-trades seeking work.

Woody Guthrie's BPA application.

The document, featuring Guthrie's near perfect penmanship, is one of the few remaining from Guthrie's employment in the BPA archives. Among previous employment, he also listed jobs as a sign painter, delivery truck driver, hotel night clerk and playing in a cowboy band, making no more than $45 a month.

Unemployed for four months and living in Los Angeles, he jumped in his Pontiac and made the long drive to Portland, where he talked his way into the BPA deal. He promised to behave himself. No politics. He said he just needed to feed his family.

In January, when the apartment on 92nd Avenue was between tenants, the manager let me in to snoop around. I brought a portable record player and the "Columbia River Collection" on vinyl.

In the middle of the living room, I dropped the needle on "Pastures of Plenty," a subversive ballad about migrant farm workers in America's bread basket. The ghostly echo of Woody's rambling, chant-like drawl bounced off the plaster walls, throwing out lyrics that still speak truth to power.

"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 till 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."

It was the closest thing to hearing the troubadour working through the tune with a cigarette dangling from his lips on a spring night in 1941.

Vandy calls the songs on the record "love letters" to the Northwest.

Of course, the truth is Guthrie wasn't fond of Portland. In the late 1930s, while hopping trains and looking for work with his road buddies, he was arrested for vagrancy in the city.

In a 1937 Library of Congress recording, Guthrie remembered Portland this way:

"Portland is a place where rich ones run away to settle down and grow flowers and shrubbery to hide them from the massacres they've caused. Portland is the rose garden town where the red, brown, blackshirt cops ride up and down to show you their finest horses and saddles and gunmetal. Mentally Portland is the deadest spot you ever walked through. She's a good 30 years behind Seattle"

If a BPA photographer took pictures of Guthrie in Oregon, they're nowhere to be found. One story says photos were destroyed with other documents connected to Guthrie's employment in reaction to the Red Scare and McCarthyism.

But Libby Burke, a BPA librarian and archivist who has spent hours aggregating the history of Guthrie's single month working for the agency, said there's no evidence photos were taken with an agency camera. Any missing documents, including unofficial photos, could have easily been tossed as an act of bureaucracy, she said.

"Woody Guthrie's relevance at the time may not have been appreciated when they disposed of his employee records," Burke said.

After all, the Columbia River songs recorded on acetate were forgotten until a BPA employee named Bill Murlin discovered them in the 1980s. In fact, much of Guthrie's BPA work would have been lost were it not for Murlin snooping around file cabinets and attics.

At 8:30 a.m. on June 11, 1941, the BPA gave Guthrie Form BP-79, terminating his employment.

It also turned out to be the end of his marriage to Mary.

With guitar slung over his shoulder, the folk singer walked out of 6111 S.E. 92nd Ave. alone and started hitchhiking east. Portland lawyer Gus Solomon, namesake of Portland's federal courthouse, picked up the hitchhiker and drove Guthrie as far as The Dalles. Guthrie eventually made it to New York City, where he joined a leftist folk music community that included Pete Seeger.

Mary and the children lived in the apartment through the summer.

Guthrie, who died of Huntington's Disease in 1967, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 21 years later. "This Land is Your Land," Guthrie's populist response to the syrupy Depression-era jingoism of "God Bless America," regularly shows up at the top of critics' lists of history's greatest songs.

"If Woody Guthrie had been alive during the founding of the U.S., 'This Land Is Your Land' would probably be our national anthem," wrote Time magazine's Josh Sanburn in 2011.

Ultimately, Sauvie hopes the city or the state renames a street or landmark in Lents to recognize the neighborhood's role in the Guthrie legacy.

For years, he has lobbied the Oregon Transportation Commission to change the name of the car-free I-205 Multi-use Path a couple blocks from the apartment to Woody Guthrie Trail.

The state has been resistant, saying it rarely names transportation routes after people and, besides, those people must have made a lasting and significant contribution to Oregon. Guthrie's wildly productive 30 days in Portland don't fit neatly into that criteria, the bureaucrats say.

Sauvie disagrees.

"A lot of people already call it the Woody Guthrie Trail," Sauvie said. "The 'I-205 Multi-use Path' doesn't exactly drip off the tongue."

Should the state change the name of East Portland's I-205 Multi-use Path to "Woody Guthrie Trail." Yes No Do Quizzes

-- Joseph Rose

503-221-8029

jrose@oregonian.com

@josephjrose