"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.
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."