Whose Land is This?

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

I was born in 1956. Firstborn of my parents. Old enough to be drafted 18 years later, but young enough to watch the last helicopter leave Saigon while still in college.

Like every public-school kid of my era, I pledged allegiance every school day without any real idea what I was reciting.

From about third grade onward, I also sang Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” along with the American the Beautiful, God Bless America, America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee), and, of course, the Star-Spangled Banner. From music classes and school assemblies, I’ll bet I sang those songs a couple of hundred times each.

Never much thinking about what they meant or what they were all about.

I Remember that Song!

The story would stop and start there, except one day in 2018, I stumbled across a subversive version of Guthrie’s anthem. Laid down by a group called Chicano Batman and recorded in the service of Johnny Walker.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway;
I saw below me that golden valley;
This land was made for you and me.

Walking. Johnny Walker. Get it?

The whole thing is a bit surreal. You can listen to it here. Ignore the product placement.

Chicano Batman

Now there were two versions playing in my head. The vaguely recalled school assembly version, a bit screechy, backed by some music teacher pounding out the chords, and now this.

And then a third foggy recollection of Peter, Paul and Mary. And yeah, there was of course Pete Seeger. And Dylan.

It was like the whole 60’s protest song thing telescoped in on me, so it was off to YouTube I went, there to discover and listen to every cover I could find. The ones I just mentioned, but also Springsteen, the whole damn crew from the first Farm Aid concert. Trini Lopez. The Six String Soldiers. Others.

To the extent I had ever thought about Woody Guthrie, it was probably because he was Arlo Guthrie’s dad, him of the so-so voice and the silly Alice’s Restaurant song.

That’s not really true.

I was a political science major in college and have read a lot of American history, so I had him reasonably well placed on the nation’s timeline. His story and songwriting fit alongside the writings of John Steinbeck and the haunting photography of Dorthea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and others. These I knew well.

Like many others, he told and showed the story of the interwar years. Like almost nobody else, he did it in verse that danced the line between patriotism and protest. Ok, a bit of the first and a lot of the second. A foreshadowing of the social commentary of Pete Seeger, Dylan, Joan Baez, and later the harder-edged protest-meets-patriotism of John Fogerty, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen, Marvin Gaye, and, and, and . . .

Digging Further . . .

Guthrie wrote This Land (he originally titled it “God Bless America for Me” but later changed it) as a reaction and response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. First written during the Great War, Berlin rebooted the song in 1938, and Kate Smith made a career belting it out.

Guthrie found it all too much. It was too saccharine and too detached from the country he saw every day while hoboing along the highways, byways, and railways.

So, in 1940, he wrote This Land as a counterpoint.

The story risks ending right there. Like so many of Guthrie’s Dust Bowl era songs, This Land existed on paper and in memory, but not on vinyl and not in print.

This Land was finally recorded in 1944 when Guthrie was on break from the Merchant Marine. In New York at Moe Asch’s recording studio, Guthrie lays down some 160 tracks, 75 in a single day.

Importantly, Guthrie profoundly changed the song for these recordings by dropping the two most incendiary verses, the ones that firmly root the original meaning of the song in the hard-scrabble soil of protest.

With those verses gone, and we’ll return to this shortly, the song is reset on a patriotic trajectory, propelled first by an unobjectionable version by the Canadian group, The Travelers (with geographic changes to the lyrics). Later, Pete Seeger records his own version, still without the protest stanzas, and the rest is sort of history.

The great irony of all this is that we, the children of the 60s, hammered through This Land without a clue about its roots and original meaning. Without the first notion that, among the holy pentangle of patriotic songs, this one was about something completely different.

We just didn’t know the verses.

As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

How did I miss this?

Well, one reason is that until relatively recently, people didn’t record the full version. Even today, the folks you would expect sometimes include them, sometimes don’t. For example, Springsteen almost always adds one or both of the sacramental stanzas. Dylan sometimes did, sometimes doesn’t. Mellencamp, and we’ll return to him, usually does in studio recordings (there are a few), but not always live.

In a fine bit of symmetry, there was a follow-up Johnnie Walker commercial that featured only the forgotten stanzas. Produced by a man named Dan Bell, it is delivered as spoken verse, and it just slays.

Farm Aid

The narrative thread that began in the Dust Bowl reappears 50 years later, when Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s interest-rate shock triggered a bow wave of farm foreclosures. If you weren’t there for it, a 20% federal funds rate and bank prime rates as high as 21% were well and truly devastating.

Riding the moment that started with the Live Aid concert for Ethiopia (Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia), Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Cougar Mellencamp pulled together the first Farm Aid concert that featured, well, basically everyone. That sounds like hyperbole, but the list of performers is simply staggering, including, weirdly given the theme, the first public appearance of Sammy Hagar fronting Van Halen.

80,000 people showed up to listen. $7 million was raised. A good time was had by all, and the rails were set for a cause and an organization that operates still today.

Finally, in the fading light of the day, the entire cast and crew (and audience, too) sing This Land as both protest and prayer. I’m sure it would have given you the shivers if you were there (I tagged the 1987 version below).

The circle had come complete.

Coda to the Times

It is almost too strange to note that, towards the end of his life, Woody Guthrie rented an apartment from Donald Trump’s father. It’s true.

It should come as no surprise that he came to hate the man.

We know this because Will Kaufman, Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Lancashire, uncovered a trove of Guthrie’s writings while living in a Trump apartment development called Beach Haven.

From Guthrie’s notebooks at the time . . .

I suppose

Old Man Trump knows

Just how much

Racial Hate

he stirred up

In the bloodpot of human hearts

When he drawed

That color line

Here at his

Eighteen hundred family project ….

Beach Haven ain’t my home!

I just cain’t pay this rent!

My money’s down the drain!

And my soul is badly bent!

Beach Haven looks like heaven

Where no black ones come to roam!

No, no, no! Old Man Trump!

Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!

Trump had built Beach Haven in the 1950s, when affordable housing was scarce (history does indeed rhyme), with cheap money from the Federal Housing Authority. In 1954, Trump is investigated by a US Senate committee for lying about the cost of building the complex. Though he was not criminally charged, he was blacklisted from further federal loan guarantees and then later by the state. He is also forced to return about $1.2 million on another subsidized project.

Guthrie is unaware of the financial shenanigans when he signs a lease, but soon becomes aware of the bald-faced racial exclusion practices promulgated by the elder Trump. Thus, his rant.

Twenty years later, the Trumps, now including Donald, are sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for violations of the Fair Housing Act.

The questions of land, citizenship, worth, and equal treatment before the law that were at the forefront of Woody Guthrie’s mind in the 30s never really went away. They’re still with us.

Not even the song changes.

The Full Version

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island,
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
This land was made for you and me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway;
I saw below me that golden valley;
This land was made for you and me.

I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding;
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

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.