ABSTRACT
The song This Land Is Your Land (1956, available at: www.arlo.net/lyrics, accessed September 17, 2007) has become a popular standard at public school assembly programs in the United States. It is hard to imagine that it was written by Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie, a formerly unemployed and homeless “Okie” who was involved in left-wing political causes during a career that spanned from the 1920s to the 1950s. Guthrie spent his youth in Oklahoma, absorbing the culture and music of farm workers and rural mountain people before
joining the great dust-bowl migration to the US west coast. In California, he was an active supporter of the labor movement and the Communist Party (Blum 1990: 284-285). Many of Guthrie’s songs celebrate the United States, but in a way that questions the fundamental inequalities he witnessed in our society. A simple statement like “this land is your land, this land is my land,” which says that the nation belongs to everyone, challenges a world where some people have great wealth and limitless opportunity while others are impoverished, discriminated against, and disempowered. In stanzas that rarely appear in
school productions, Woody’s political message is much more explicit. For example, one stanza openly challenges the idea of private property (Seeger 1985: 160-162).
