Courtesy of npr.org/THE REVIEW
“This Land is Your Land” is an oft-remembered patriotic tune. But how much do you really know about it?
BY Editor-in-Chief
Can you fill in the blank?
“This land is your land, this land is __ ___.”
If you have lived in the United States of America for a certain amount of time, it is likely that you can recognize this song at the drop of a hat. Ingrained into memories with each passing Independence Day barbecue, political rally and campfire sing-along, “This land is your land” by Woody Guthrie seemingly seeps with American patriotism … or does it? The history behind one of America’s favorite songs is far more complex than it may seem.
While politics and music have frequently overlapped throughout American history, according to university professor Philip Gentry, the trend of writing overtly political or partisan folk style music started roughly in the 1930s. It emerged out of what is called the Popular Front — a broad coalition of different political groups, some being communists, socialists and liberals.
“The American left had made a concerted effort to adopt more populist aesthetics and culture as part of their organizing efforts,” Gentry says.
According to Gentry, it was around this time that the left side of the political spectrum very purposely took advantage of “populist” music, that being folk music, in order to relate to the “average” American.
The most famous example of this would be the Seeger family. Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger were modernist American musicians who composed in what Gentry called an “ultra modern, avante garde fashion.” Being the committed leftists they were, they made a shift away from modernism into folk music. Charles Seeger’s son is Pete Seeger, famed American folk singer and friend to the late Woody Guthrie. Another example would be Aaron Copeland, who also started his career in a very extravagant, modernist style. When the 1930s hit, his style shifted into something that, while not folk, was far more populist.
To be clear, the left’s shift into populist music was not something necessarily welcomed by society. It was during this time that WWII was still ongoing and America had allied itself with the USSR in order to defeat Nazi Germany. According to Gentry, this allyship was a tenuous relationship at its very best. As WWII came to a close, there was what Gentry described as a “sense of dividing the world between these two superpowers.”
“They were worried that there were too many left wing people in the American government and that they were secretly working for the Soviet Union,” Gentry says of the perspective of most anti-communists at the time.
Gentry made clear that while this may have been the case for some people in the U.S. government, the government mostly consisted of leftover liberals from the Roosevelt administration who were uninvolved in any sort of treason. Gentry also states that this feeling of paranoia of communism was further perpetuated in reaction against the New Deal, put forward by Franklin Roosevelt, and by the fact that in the late 1940s, the communists achieved victory in China.
“So if there was sort of a feeling amongst the United States of ‘losing parts of the world’ to communism,” Gentry says. “And there was this sort of sense that communism was insidious. That it wasn’t like fighting the Nazis where you went into battle. It was something that would sneak in and come to you and your home. That it might brainwash you in some fashion.”
And from this fear rose McCarthyism, a campaign against alleged communists in the U.S. government and other institutions carried out under Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was during this time that McCarthy, as well as numerous other government officials, produced a series of hearings and investigations.
Various famed actors, authors, producers, entertainers and musicians — especially folk singers — were blacklisted during this time for suspected communist involvement.
Given that the folk music scene was an extremely political space at the time, the mainstream music industry tried to distance itself from folk music out of fear of persecution and stigmatization. It was during the 1940s that the mainstream music industry started going through a transition of which folk music, which varied stylistically across the country, would undergo a process of consolidation, so that, essentially, all music consumed by more rural audiences would be put into one category.
In fact, according to Gentry, prior to 1949, Billboard had a music chart titled “Hillbilly Records.” In search for a less offensive and more inclusive name, the company briefly considered coming up with a name that included the word “folk” in it. However, out of a desire to distance themselves from the left, they titled it “Country and Western,” giving rise to the popular music genre many know today.
Folk singers, including Guthrie, emerged from the aforementioned Popular Front. As times passed in the 1940s, the folk revival moved to very urban areas, creating a juxtaposition between a very liberal movement and McCarthyism.
“The folk revival moves to very urban areas,” Gentry says. “Woody Guthrie himself moved to New York City because he’s having trouble getting played on radio stations and other markets. So he ends up as part of this revival in New York City with people like Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, the Lomax family and all those sorts of people. So it’s really out of that that ‘This Land Is Your Land’ merges.”
Woody Guthrie originally wrote “This Land is Your Land” in 1940 when he first arrived in New York City from Oklahoma. The song was written as a parody of “God Bless America,” which dominated the airwaves at the time.
“God Bless America” was written by Irving Berlin, famed composer and lyricist of many smash hits such as “White Christmas” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
He was also part of what was called Tin Pan Alley, a collection of New York City music publishers and songwriters who dominated the airwaves at the time.
According to Gentry, Guthrie and many of his folk acquaintances most likely took issue with the commercialized and “jingle-ized” form of music that was “God Bless America,” inspiring him to parody it.
“I think they found it kind of nativist and jingle-istic in a lot of ways,” Gentry says. “I think it was also just really omnipresent — as a form of commercial pop music that you couldn’t escape.”
According to Gentry, Guthrie never necessarily prescribed a political alliance that in turn inspired him to parody the song.
“[Guthrie] was never actually like a doctrinaire ideological member of a specific organization or something like that,” Gentry says. “I think it was more intuitive to sort of like anger at the nationalism of ‘rah rah’ America.”
Gentry went on to explain that another issue that people on the left seemed to take with the song was the blatant nationalism of the song in combination with the religious message.
“The left position on that is, first of all, often anti-nationalist,” Gentry says, describing the left political perspective of the time. “Like God doesn’t bless countries. [Like even] if you’re religious, he doesn’t bless specific countries in that sense. It’s like nation states are not exactly a spiritual formation.”
Some of the lyrics to Guthrie’s original version of the song included:
“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.”
While this verse was recorded in 1944 by Moses Asch, it was never released. In fact, this version of the song was almost lost until it was once again unearthed in 1997.
Additionally, there were even more radical verses that Guthrie wrote but never officially recorded. This verse was scribbled on a loose-leaf sheet of paper found in the archives of Guthrie’s daughter:
“One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple,
by the relief office I saw my people.
As they stood hungry,
I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.”
Additional removed lyrics include:
“Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.”
Gentry explains that these lyrics may not have been necessarily removed for a nefarious reason. At the time, folk music was being adopted as children’s music for educational purposes — a process that the Seegers were involved in. Therefore, in order to be more child-friendly and universal, it could be likely that these verses were naturally phased out of the song.
However, later in Guthrie’s life, he was blacklisted just as he began experiencing symptoms of Huntington’s Disease — an illness that would lead to his demise. His close friend, Pete Seeger, was denounced as a communist and blacklisted as well. The Weavers, a folk quartet, lost their recording contract, could not book concerts and their recordings could not be played on the radio.
Treatment of folk singers at the time had a deep impact on the folk revival — with groups such as the Kingston Trio trying to avoid any political or social commentary in an attempt to achieve success without being labeled as communists.
Guthrie died in 1967 from complications of Huntington’s Disease. In the time since, Pete Seeger, alongside Guthrie’s son, Arlo, have made a point of singing “This Land is Your Land’s” more radical verses. In fact, at the 2008 inauguration of President Obama, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger and Tao Rodríguez-Seeger sung this song with many of its “radical” verses intact.
Gentry explained that even today, many political campaigns will identify with music, though partisanship may not be as obvious from the lyrics of the song.
“But I think it is sometimes not legible in interesting ways,” Gentry says, explaining that partisanship of the music may not be obvious to various audiences.
However, some songs are so closely affiliated with campaigns that it is hard to ignore the correlation. For example, when Hilary Clinton campaigned in 2016, a song that played frequently at her events was “Fight Song” by Rachel Platten. When Bill Clinton ran for office in 1992, “Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac was often played at his events.
“So there is tons of political music happening out there,” Gentry says. “I think it suffuses the popular music charts in a lot of ways. But it doesn’t always mark itself legibly in the way that a left wing folk ballad of the ‘60s said ‘I am political,’ but there’s lots of other ways for music to be political.”
Gentry also makes an interesting point about music once it leaves its maker. He notes that the Trump campaign has recently been playing Macho Man by the Village People — a gay club anthem from the ‘70s — at their rallies. Another song often played at Republican rallies is “Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen, which takes a very critical look at the de-industrialization of the Reagan era. The original intent by the creators of either of these songs do not necessarily correlate with the message of the campaigns but are nonetheless frequently played.
“That’s how music works,” Gentry says. “The people who write them aren’t in charge of them after they’re done.”
