Beech Tree News Network

Deep in a secure, temperature-controlled vault at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, high on a shelf, sits a relic.  The Smithsonian has listed this relic among the top 101 objects that made America.  It’s the test pressing of a song recorded way back in 1940 that, years later, went onto become one of this country’s patriotic standards: “This Land Is Your Land” by folk singer Woody Guthrie.

The song turns 85 this year and has aged well.  Lady Gaga made it part of her 2017 Superbowl halftime show.  It was the very first song sung in the Oscar-nominated biopic, not about Guthrie, but about Bob Dylan.  We all know the words.  Most of us of a certain age learned the song in school.  Still, there are some of Guthrie’s original lyrics that are often left out today.  One such lyric is “There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.  A sign painted said private property.  But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.  This land was made for you and me”.

Maureen Loughran, director and curator of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, sees Guthrie’s song as historic because it’s a commentary on the responsibilities of democracy.  By most accounts, Guthrie wrote the song as a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”.  Trivia: the original title of that song was “God Blessed America”.

“One(song) is in the past with perhaps frustration, anger, all these emotions vs “This land is made for you and me”.  “This is a positive way forward”, says Woody’s granddaughter Anna Canoni.  She continues, “there is a power to the original document that I find very moving.  He hit a topic and nerve that we feel needs to be said again”.  Her grandfather didn’t dislike “God Bless America” but he worried it was too broad a brush, one that bypassed the less-traveled roads that Guthrie had travelled.  

He saw a lot of people crying, struggling, hungry, and he was just very hurt”, says Guthrie’s youngest daughter Norah.  “He said it’s because I love the pretty parts that I want to fix the dirty parts”.  He wrote about sharecroppers fleeing the dustbowl.  He sang about migrants and the marginalized and laborers struggling to unionize.  He was a wandering wordsmith.  Born in Okema, Oklahoma in 1912, the town still proudly bears his name everywhere you look.  He was a folk hero for people around there.  One might think he wrote “This Land is Your Land” in the back of a pickup truck in the dusty plains.  He wrote the song in a New York City hotel room near Times Square.  That location is now a showroom for Steinway pianos.

The hotel was steps from Bryant Park, where a conversation Guthrie heard inspired him to write even more, even while getting his shoes shined.  Bruce Springsteen once called “This Land” one of the greatest songs ever written about our nation.  He played it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial alongside Pete Seeger in 2009 for the inauguration of President Obama.  

Woody Guthrie’s idea that the promise of this land was indeed for everyone was on display that day.  His granddaughter, present at the inauguration, closed the conversation this way, “I looked up and said, so that’s why you wrote it”.  It may not be our official national anthem, but it has become an anthem, nonetheless.  (CBS Sunday Morning, 8-10-25, Lee Cowan reporting).  

Here is the link to my latest vlog: https://youtu.be/EbRM6Z77ADc?feature=shared