Old Willamina
"Old Willamina" is about Willamina, Oregon — the timber town at the edge of the , the trains and the trucks on Highway 18, the mill, the river, and most of all, the people who keep its spirit alive.
I started writing this song in 2015, while I was living there.
Willamina isn't a town you pass through and forget. It's a town that takes you in. I came from somewhere else — most of us did — and that's actually the first thing the song says, because it's the first thing you learn there:
We come from different places,
We've travelled all around,
As long as earth keeps turnin'
We'll be right here in town.
That was the feeling. Wherever you started, once Willamina becomes home, you're home.
This is a timber town, and the song sounds like one.
The train keeps coming through, loads and loads abound, hauling that timber many miles round. The mill keeps working. The lumber trucks roll down Highway 18 — early in the morning, dead into the night — blowing steam, moving sure as the sunrise. If you've ever driven that stretch, you know: visitors take caution. Those trucks own the road, and honestly, they've earned it. The lumber has been rolling through Willamina for well over a century, and the whole valley was built on it.
Lumber trucks are rolling
Down High 18,
Visitors take caution,
These trucks are blowin' steam.
But the history isn't what makes the town. The people are.
Saturday comes, and the people gather round — telling stories about fishing, adding a few pounds to every fish with every telling. The farmers market growing. The campus full of pride. Clothes on the line, crops on the rise, everybody working. The song even puts the townsfolk right in the lyric, sung exactly the way the town says it:
Will-uh-MINE-ee-ans will be workin'
Till the end of time.
Willaminians. That's who this song belongs to.
That pronunciation in the chorus — Will-uh-MINE-uh — is on purpose. It's how you know somebody actually lives there. You can spot an out-of-towner by how they say it, and this song wanted there to be no doubt.
The chorus is a prayer for a small town.
Small timber towns have been squeezed for decades. Mills close. Young people leave. Rivers run low. So the chorus doesn't brag — it asks. It asks the river not to dry, the mill to keep working, the crops to keep rising. And then it asks the only thing that really matters:
Old Will-uh-MINE-uh,
Don't let your river dry…
Old Will-uh-MINE-uh,
Don't let your spirit die.
Because that's the truth about towns like this: the buildings can be rebuilt and the mill can change hands, but if the spirit goes, the town goes. And Willamina's spirit — stubborn, warm, hardworking, gathered around on a Saturday — is the strongest thing it's got.
The heart of the song is gratitude.
I started it in 2015 as a resident, but I finished it as something more than that — as somebody the town had made its own. Willamina gave me a home when I was one of those people who'd come from different places, travelled all around. This song is my thank-you note, written in the town's own voice, meant to be sung the way Willaminians tell their fishing stories: loud, proud, and a little bigger every time.
Farmers will be growin';
The crops are on the rise…
Don't let your spirit die,
Keep your spirit high.
"Old Willamina" is about that town.
Willamina, Oregon. The train hauling timber. The mill working. The clothes on the line. Lumber trucks steaming down Highway 18 from first light to dead of night. Saturday stories and farmers market mornings. Willaminians, working till the end of time. A river that better not dry, and a spirit that never will.
And for a few minutes, the song stands right on .
Trains rolling.
Mill humming.
People gathering round.
Still working.
Still singing.
Still Old Will-uh-MINE-uh — spirit high.
—