Human Expression

I’m going to keep this real simple, ’cause Woody was a simple man – at least that’s what he lead people to believe. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was actually a very well educated individual who’s soul desire was to engender essential support and honor for his fellow human beings – no matter what color, or how small or how tall. He blended with the “common folk” to liven their spirits and for them to know that someone was willing to give voice to the struggling working class. Besides that he was an amazing musician that was a pioneer of vocal improvisation – or wrap.

Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) is best known as an American singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children’s songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar. His best-known song is “This Land Is Your Land”, which an altered form is regularly sung in American schools.



Guthrie was tired of the radio overplaying Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”. He thought the lyrics were unrealistic and complacent. Partly inspired by his experiences during a cross-country trip and his distaste for God Bless America, he penned “This Land Is Your Land”, in February 1940; it was subtitled “God Blessed America.” The melody is based on the gospel song “Oh My Loving Brother”, best-known as “Little Darling, Pal of Mine”, sung by the country group The Carter Family. Guthrie signed the manuscript with the comment “All you can write is what you see, Woody G., N.Y., N.Y., N.Y.”. He protested against class inequality in the final verses:



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

As I went walking, I saw a sign there,
And on the sign there, It said “no trespassing.” [In another version, the sign reads "Private Property"]
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing!
That side was made for you and me.



These verses were often omitted in subsequent recordings, sometimes by Guthrie himself. Although the song was written in 1940, it was four years before he recorded it for Moses Asch in April 1944, and even longer until sheet music was produced and given to schools by Howie Richmond.



Woody wrote over a thousand songs, including such classics as So Long It’s Been Good to Know You, Deportee, and I Ain’t Got No Home. Songs of all kinds — about kids, cowboys, workers, and hobos — taken from real life. But the singer did not like all songs equally. Perhaps because he grew up in the Dust Bowl landscape of Central Oklahoma, during a time of great depression for both his family and his country, Woody hated “a song that makes you think that you’re not any good.”



“I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.”

“I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.”




“I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.”























Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California and learned traditional folk and blues songs. Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, earning him the nickname the “Dust Bowl Troubadour”. Throughout his life Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, though he was never an actual member of any.




His many trips cross-country opened his eyes to a land where people went hungry, and the lives and health of immigrants and union workers were threatened by moneyed interests. When he sang about such things, some called him a populist; others, a Socialist or Communist. “Left wing, right wing, chicken wing — it’s the same thing to me,” Woody replied. “I sing my songs wherever I can sing ‘em.” He also joked, “I ain’t a Communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life.”




For the last 15 years of that life, while folk music became more and more popular in America, Guthrie was hospitalized with Huntington’s disease, the same genetic nerve disorder that had sent his mother into a state mental hospital when he was a boy. “Woody spent his life, like a lot of us, searching for things to love,” a friend once said, calling him “a little guy sloping down a dusty road, looking for something he couldn’t name.” Guthrie himself felt his best songs came to him when he was walking down a road. Seemingly afraid of money, or fame, and continually on the move, he left behind three wives, eight children (including the folksinger Arlo Guthrie, born in 1947), and a 1943 autobiography, Bound For Glory.



Woody Guthrie was “the original folk hero,” said the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when he became one of its first 50 inductees in 1988 (same year as The Beatles). The restless, drifting troubadour changed American music forever, the citation said, when he “transformed the folk ballad into a vehicle for social protest and observation,” and became an inspiration for many who followed including Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.




“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don’t give a darn. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it.