Sunday, May 18, 1980

When Mt. St. Helens blew they heard it 200 miles away

I’m just a tad bit late in commemorating this anniversary. Last Sunday, May 18, 2025 was the 45th anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, which was also on a Sunday.

I was living in Portland, Oregon at the time, and I’ve written about it before, particularly in “Dog Forced to Wear Pantyhose,” which also appeared in my self-published little book of “Favorite Dog Stories.”

For this commemoration I’m going include a song about the event. It’s a song written and originally performed by my dear departed friend, Lonesome Steve Mitchell, and it’s a ballad that could’ve and should’ve been a monster hit on the scale of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

The song is “The Ballad of Harry Truman,” the other Harry Truman, an old man who lived at Spirit Lake on Mt. St. Helens and refused to leave when everyone else on the mountain was evacuated, and who presumably perished in the eruption.

It’s one of any number of Steve Mitchell songs I still love to sing. Steve was a fine singer, guitarist and songwriter, but never achieved the recognition he deserved. I once tried to pitch a couple of his songs in Nashville; I thought they had the makings of a couple of great Country hits, but I guess I just didn’t find the right people to talk to.

You can listen to him performing a couple of his other songs (far from his best ones) here and here.

Steve often sang this ballad and accompanied himself on his trademark National steel guitar, but also recorded it with his band on his one album, “What Do I Know?,” produced by another friend, Bob Krinsky of Vashon Island, WA after I introduced them.

Since I don’t play an instrument, I sang it a cappella. This doesn't really do the song justice, but here it is:

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