Music was one of many attractions at Expo '74, with big-name artists including Gordon Lightfoot, Helen Reddy and Buck Owens, among countless others entertaining visitors throughout its six-month run. While those performers and their work remain popular to this day, the songs written for Expo '74, and the people behind them, have largely fallen into obscurity.
To help promote the fair — a fair which many outside of the region felt too ambitious for a city of Spokane's modest size — organizers turned to music to get the word out.
Promotional records were pressed and a contest for an official theme song was launched. Bob Bellows and Dale Miller, who recorded the promotional records, and Jean Anthony Greif, who composed the contest-winning theme song, were some of the musicians behind the sound of Expo '74.
Their work set the sonic scene for Spokane's moment on the world's stage.
RAINBOWS PLAY IN SILVER SPRAY
The contest to find an official theme song for Expo '74 garnered two-dozen submissions, with entries touching on everything from topics of the day like Vietnam to the timeless subject of love, but ultimately the winning submission focused intently on Spokane's sense of place."Meet Me by the River" by local organist and composer Jean Anthony Greif, a lively marching tune, portrayed the site of the fair as organizers hoped it would be seen with a call to action hard to refuse.
Meet me by the river,
At the International Exposition,
Meet me at the Spokane Falls,
Expo Seventy-Four!
With imagery of rainbows in the spray of the falls under open skies of clean Western air, Greif's composition tied the locale together with the environmental purpose of Expo '74. Local high school marching bands and choirs performed the tune during the opening ceremony, just after President Richard Nixon declared the fair "officially open to all the citizens of the world" from the floating dock next to the then-brand-new Opera House.
Born in 1898, Greif grew up around the Inland Northwest, from Walla Walla to Uniontown and Missoula, before heading east to study the organ in Chicago. By the time he settled in Spokane, Greif was an established organist who would play during the silent film era at the Liberty and Fox theaters downtown.
After the silent era, Greif became a composer and publisher of religious music through his Vernacular Hymns Publishing Company on Northwest Boulevard. His 1966 composition, "We are the Light of the World," became popular in churches around the country and is still sung and covered to this day. Greif died in Spokane in 1981.
THE CITY WHERE YOU CAN
In Santa Fe, they'll "get nervous and run away," while around San Francisco Bay they'll consider it but ultimately "flit away." In "old St. Lou" you'll be met with a frown while up in Duluth it's "more or less considered couth.""But you can, yes you can, in Spokane."
Even though his rhyming of "can" with "Spokane" isn't exactly clever, it was certainly helpful for visitors unsure of the proper pronunciation.
An ad in the Spokane Chronicle promoted an appearance by the "national recording artist" at the fair, where spectators could hear Bellows perform his two "hits" about Expo '74, "Stranger at the Fair" and "Yes, You Can in Spokane" and pick up a signed copy of the record.
The songs were pressed onto a souvenir vinyl 45 with a sleeve featuring a portrait of Bellows, an image of the skyline, and a box to write "to" and "from" for those who wanted to spread the word about Expo. Fifty thousand copies were produced, but fewer than 2,000 had sold by fair's end.
Bob Bellows was born Robert Brusen in Menomonie, Wisconsin, in 1926. A veteran of World War II, he found mild success as a touring vocalist in the decades that followed before having his life transformed by the Baha'i faith in 1970. Bellows continued recording music, including his pair of songs for Expo '74, after his conversion. He died in 2020 at the age of 93.
TEACHING ABOUT ECOLOGY
While not the official theme song nor as promoted as the Bellows' record, guitarist Dale Miller's pair of songs about Expo '74 captured the environmental impetus behind the fair better than any other.The $2 souvenir record Dale Sings Songs of the Fair City was packaged in a sleek, modern sleeve in the colors of the fair — green for plants, blue for water and white for air.
Its two tracks, in a classic country-western style with acoustic guitar melodies and steel guitar accompaniment, laid out Expo's promise of "teaching the world about ecology."
Born in 1935, Miller grew up in Priest River before moving to the nearby town of Clark Fork in his early adult years. It was there that the small record label Alpine pressed his promotional record for Expo. Miller died in 2011 at the age of 75.
In "Expo '74," Miller sings of how "Spokane will show the world how we're clearing up the land." His music may have faded into relative obscurity — a video on YouTube misidentifies a different song for his Expo record — but his subject matter certainly has not.
That land Miller sang of, now Riverfront Park, remains to this day closer to nature and cleaner than it was during its industrial past life, all thanks to the work of Expo '74. ♦
Search YouTube for "EXPO 74 Theme Song - by Dale Miller (Spokane World's Fair 1974)."
