Is This Still Our Land ?

 

          "Woody" Guthrie was born in 1912 in Oklahoma, seven years after it was admitted as a state. He was one of eight children,  one whom, a sister, died in a coal fire. His father, who was active  in the Democratic Party, named him after the future President. Guthrie's father was a businessman and property owner who later fell upon hard times. Guthrie's mother, Nora, suffered from Huntington's disease - the same debilitating illness that would afflict Woody Guthrie during the last decades of his life.  Nora Guthrie was institutionalized when Guthrie was only 14 years old. Since Guthrie's father by then living and working in Texas in order pay off debts from failed real estate deals, Guthrie and his six remaining siblings were on their own in Oklahoma.


     , half-length portrait, facing slightly left, ...


     At that very early age, Woody Guthrie worked odd jobs around his home town, where he came to depend upon the compassion of family friends for meals and shelter. He soon taught himself to play the harmonica and displayed an aptitude for music that he learned to "play by ear." As a gifted listener, Guthrie also learned a number of ballads and traditional English and Scottish songs from the parents of his friends. To ward off hunger, Guthrie would often play a song in exchange for a sandwich or quarter. 
         
     When he was eighteen years of age, Guthrie began to travel with the migrant workers from Oklahoma to California. From them, he learned the traditional folk and blues songs. Many of the songs he later wrote described the wrenching suffering and injustices that he witnessed during in the Dust Bowl era and in the throes of  the Great Depression. His experiences instilled within him a life-long commitment to social justice that he expressed in his folk songs. His most famous ballad "This land is your land" has been a inspiration to generations of folk artists:

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 went 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 roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
While 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
A voice was chanting, As the fog was lifting,
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.
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.
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?
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.

    The lyrics of Woody Guthrie's ballad capture the passion and love of country that is expressed by Walt Whitman in his poem, "I hear America singing," in which Whitman celebrated the lives of the mechanics, the carpenter, the mason, the boatman, the shoemaker and the woodcutter. Much like Whitman, Guthrie believed that it was the ordinary person -  the Everyman - who personified the quest for equality and whose lives expressed the essential democratic values. Guthrie also understood, as did Whitman, that great concentrations of wealth in the few, if not curbed, would subvert democracy and render meaningless the phrase "equality of opportunity."

     In 1968, Guthrie's ballad became the unofficial song of Robert Kennedy's tragic presidential campaign. Kennedy's murder that year, coupled with the assassination of Martin Luther King and the tragic death of Thomas Merton, caused this country to fall into a deep, numbing slumber from which it has yet to awaken. Since that fateful year, the democracy that the Progressive Movement, the New Deal and the Great Society endeavored to create has been chipped away, brick by brick, by the purveyors of money and influence.

    The right-wing noise machine, fueled by an array of wedge issues such as guns, religious liberty, hostility to unions and public employees and budget deficits, are working feverishly to distract the attention of all of us who are vulnerable from noticing the root causes of our misery: a dysfunctional federal system and a poorly performing economy that are largely the fault of the political elite, at all levels of government, who continue to pander to the agenda of the wealthy and their corporations, rather than to address the needs of ordinary citizens.                  

        If a song has the power to summon a nation to reclaim its destiny, Woody Guthrie's ballad should become the anthem for all progressive voters in the 2012 election at all levels. The lyrics challenge each of us to take our country back from those who seek to privatize the American Dream and to close off the access of ordinary citizens to the public square with signs that say  "no trespassing."    

 



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