This Land Was Made For You and Me: What Woody Guthrie Can Teach Us Right Now
Woody was a true man of the people, and his enduring legacy lives on
When I was in college, I served as the editor-in-chief of my college paper for a time. While in that capacity, I had the honor of being connected to Marjorie Guthrie, widow of Woody Guthrie and mother of Arlo Guthrie.
I asked Marjorie if I could interview her for the paper, to which she agreed. I conducted the interview in her office in New York City, and at one point during the interview she opened a file cabinet and pulled out some papers.
She handed them to me and I immediately recognized the significance of what I was looking at. They were the original handwritten lyrics to This Land is Your Land, written by Woody Guthrie.
I stood in awe; it was as if I had in my possession the original handwritten Declaration of Independence or Bible.
This Land is Your Land was written in 1940, after Woody had moved to New York City from Oklahoma. He wrote it as a critical response to Irving Berlin’s song God Bless America, originally calling it, as a sarcastic rebuttal to Berlin’s song, “God Blessed America For Me,” before changing the title to This Land Is Your Land.
The pages I held at Marjorie Guthrie’s office had this first verse:
“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,
God blessed America for me.”
The last verse on those pages went:
“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.”
Woody didn’t do anything with the song for four years, letting it lay fallow. In 1944, he was asked to make a recording of the song by the folk archivist Moses Asch, which began the song’s journey from handwritten lyrics to recording, and from a sarcastic rebuttal to Irving Berlin to the iconic This Land Is Your Land that today has a special place in the Americana pantheon.
There are at least seven known verses to the song, but only the first few are commonly sung today. The ones that are more critical have been left by the wayside, sung only by musicians known for their willingness to sing protest songs.
One of those verses is this:
“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.”
Not only This Land Is Your Land, but Woody’s entire legacy has been an inspiration for generations of musicians—from his friend Pete Seeger, to the next generation musicians Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Peter, Paul & Mary, Odetta, Nina Simone, and Joan Baez, to subsequent generations of musicians, such as Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Arlo Guthrie, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, John Lennon, Tracy Chapman, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and bands such as U2, Green Day, Rage Against the Machine, Pink Floyd, The Clash, Dropkick Murphys, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Midnight Oil, Pearl Jam, Pussy Riot, Sex Pistols, and numerous others.
But Woody’s legacy doesn’t just continue through the songs of musicians. His ideas and themes continue to be vital to the continued existence of democracy and to the aspiration for a more equitable society.
And it is in this regard that Woody Guthrie, who was born in 1912 and died in 1967, has a lot to teach us.
Woody was born in a time known as the Progressive Era, which spanned from 1900 to 1920, a period in which the excesses of the Gilded Age, an epoch in which great wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy industrialists while the rest of the country lived in poverty, were being reversed.
Worker’s rights and unions were established, antitrust laws that broke up the big corporations were enacted, the selection of U.S. senators was changed from appointment through backroom deals to election by the people, a progressive national income tax was instituted, women were given the right to vote, along with many other progressive changes.
Woody was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, about an hour away from Tulsa, Oklahoma’s second largest city. When Woody was eight, a horrific event in the Greenwood section of Tulsa took place, one that is now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre.
A very prosperous African-American section of Tulsa, known as Black Wall Street, was set upon by a mob of white supremacists, with the complicity of city officials. At least three hundred African-American residents of Greenwood were killed, many more were hospitalized, and the entire area was destroyed, with thousands losing their businesses and life savings, because the mob burned down the entire neighborhood.
Woody most probably knew about the race massacre, as his father was a member of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
When he was very young, his father was a successful businessman, but by the time he turned 14, his mother was committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane, and his father, having been severely burned in a fire at the home, saw his business dealings go sour and went broke.
From there, Woody and his siblings were on their own, and Woody lived a hardscrabble existence, working odd jobs and begging for money and meals.
Young Woody was bright, but education wasn’t for him and he dropped out of high school. Where he found his greatest affinity was in music, playing old folk songs on his guitar in the streets, for money and food.
By the 1930s, not only was the U.S. in the throes of the Great Depression, but in Oklahoma and other prairie states, the Dust Bowl, a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture, had led to a mass migration of Okies to California.
Woody Guthrie, now with wife and children, was one of those Okies who took off for California. He left his wife and children behind, as he went searching for a better life, and once settled in California, he sent for them.
It was at this point, as one of tens of thousands of transplanted Okies in California, and working itinerant jobs, that Guthrie began to start writing and singing songs about injustice and the plight of the downtrodden and working class.
During this time, Guthrie became friends with the writer John Steinbeck, who went on to write the 1939 classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, about the Joad family and other poor families driven from their Oklahoma homes by the Dust Bowl and bank foreclosures on their houses.
As the Grapes of Wrath told the story, due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they were trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads, along with thousands of other Okies, set out for California, seeking jobs, security, and a better future.
In California, the Okies were treated as the dregs of society, toiling long hours in agricultural fields for low pay and living in migrant camps, where they were continually hounded by the police.
Woody Guthrie knew the entire story of The Grapes of Wrath, because he lived that life himself.
By the late 1930s, while still in California, Woody was starting to make a name for himself as a singer of folk and hillbilly music, performing in public and on the radio. And then, once Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath came out, Woody moved to New York City, and started writing and singing even more pointed music.
He was writing and singing songs about both his own life and the others he had encountered, the working class and farmers—white, black, brown—who had been screwed over and left behind by the banks, and the system in general.
Once in New York City, not only did he write This Land Is Your Land in 1940; in that very same year he put out an album called Dust Bowl Ballads. All the songs on the album dealt with the Dust Bowl and its effects on the country and its people.
One song on the album was The Ballad of Tom Joad, directly influenced by Steinbeck’s novel. In the song, Guthrie writes of the need to always be vigilant in the name of injustice; at the end of the song, Tom Joad tells his mother, in some of the most haunting lyrics ever written:
“Ever'body might be just one big soul
Well it looks that a way to me.
Everywhere that you look in the day or night
That's where I'm gonna be, Ma,
That's where I'm gonna be.
“Wherever little children are hungry and cry
Wherever people ain't free.
Wherever men are fightin' for their rights
That's where I'm gonna be, Ma.
That's where I'm a gonna be.”
Another song on the album was about the famous outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd, who Guthrie described as a misunderstood Robin Hood adored by the people.
The song contains the classic lines:
“Yes, as through this world I've wandered / I've seen lots of funny men / Some will rob you with a six-gun / And some with a fountain pen. And as through your life you travel / Yes, as through your life you roam / You won't never see an outlaw/ Drive a family from their home.”
Another song, not on the album, that Woody wrote in 1940, They Laid Jesus Christ in His Grave, was simple, direct, and radical in its depiction of Jesus. Woody wrote that it was the wealthy who killed Jesus, because Jesus told them to sell their goods and give the money to the poor.
As one verse states,
“When Jesus come to town, all the working folks around
Believed what he did say
The bankers and the preachers, they nailed Him on the cross
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave”
By the early 1940s, as World War II waged on, Woody became an outspoken anti-fascist, singing songs against fascism and having the words inscribed on his guitar, “This machine kills fascists.”
Of fascism, Woody said that it was, “a form of economic exploitation similar to slavery,” and denounced fascists—particularly their leaders—as a group of gangsters who set out to “rob the world.”
By this point, Woody was a true man of the people, and his enduring legacy was deeply cemented for all eternity.
And it is to this legacy what Woody can teach us now.
Woody showed us that this land was truly made for you and me—not for the wealthy property owners—and that we are all brothers and sisters in unity.
When we tear each other apart because of our differences, it causes us to lose sight of the fact that we have more in common than not.
As Woody wrote, everybody is just one big soul. Yet we can’t see that when we fight over the crumbs, while the wealthy laugh all the way to the bank.
Woody knew that this world is run by kleptocrats, oligarchs, and plutocrats who run Wall Street, hedge funds, private equity, major corporations, and are also involved in politics.
These are the liars, thieves, scoundrels, fascists, criminals, and dregs of society that Woody Guthrie warned us about.
And sadly, these wealthy and criminal elites deliberately make a sizable segment of the country think they are on their side, while all the wealthy care about is fattening their wallets by taking the money from the wallets of the working class.
As Woody sang in They Laid Jesus Christ in His Grave, Jesus was killed by the rich, who were angered by Jesus’ advocacy for the poor and working class.
In modern times, the evangelical churches wrap themselves in piety and portray their work as a moral crusade, all at the same time enriching themselves at the hands of their flock.
Most of the people who have fallen sway to the far right’s misguided ideas are members of the working class, all who would benefit from listening to the words of Woody Guthrie: Woody could set them straight and help them understand that the working class nowadays is being screwed just the same as the Okies who left Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl.
The Okies were screwed over by the rich and the banks, and the same holds true today for the working class.
And it’s these elites who are the people impeding the ability for this land to be made for you and me.
Once enough people understand this reality—and it’s all right there in the songs of Woody Guthrie—we can stop fighting each other and begin working together.
Ultimately, what Woody Guthrie can teach us boils down to these two things he said:
“The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine.”
And,
“Love is the only medicine I believe in.”