This Land Is Your Land: A Song History

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Woody Guthrie wrote the song in New York in February 1940.[1] His handwritten lyric sheet carries the date February 23, 1940.[2] The Library of Congress gives his first title as "God Blessed America for Me" (an NPR feature has the shorter "God Blessed America") and says the song was supposedly a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," which Kate Smith had introduced in 1938 and which Guthrie considered complacent.[3][1] The tune appears to derive from the Carter Family's "When the World's on Fire," which NPR dates to a 1930 gospel recording, though neither source treats the borrowing as documented fact.[3][4]

Black-and-white photograph of an old loaded car driving along an empty straight highway

Dorothea Lange, Migrant family on U.S. Highway 99 between Bakersfield and Famoso, California, photograph, 1936. Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. Shown for its time and subject; it has no direct connection to the song.

Guthrie recorded the song in New York during a long session for Moses Asch in April 1944, but Folkways, the label Asch founded, did not issue it until 1951.[4] The Library of Congress adds that he made the recording while briefly home on leave from the merchant marine.[3] One of the more pointed verses was recorded at that session but left off the release, and that take went largely unheard until 1997, when Smithsonian archivist Jeff Place came across the acetate master while digitizing it.[4] Nora Guthrie told NPR that the Weavers originally recorded only the first three verses.[4] The Library of Congress notes that the original fifth and sixth verses are often omitted in later performances.[3] Guthrie's 1944 recording was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2002.[3]

Pete Seeger told NPR that the song was never on the hit parade or played on the radio.[1] It has nonetheless been widely learned in schools and is sung at parades and political campaigns.[1] In 2022 the Morgan Library & Museum, a few blocks from where the song was composed, displayed the original handwritten lyrics in an exhibition curated in collaboration with the Woody Guthrie Center and drawn largely from the Woody Guthrie Archive.[5] The Center, which opened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2013, maintains archives and special collections.[6]

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Sources

  1. NPR: "How 'This Land Is Your Land' Roamed And Rambled Into American Life".
  2. The Morgan Library & Museum: "This Land".
  3. Library of Congress, National Recording Registry: "'This Land Is Your Land'—Woody Guthrie (1944)" (essay by Cary O'Dell).
  4. NPR / WUNC (Nick Spitzer): "The Story of Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land'".
  5. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Woody Guthrie: People Are the Song".
  6. Woody Guthrie Center: "About".