Cover Me: This Land Is Your Land

Four years ago, I found myself in an unusual situation. It was a cold winter day, and I was standing alongside of Pete Seeger… He’s ninety years old, a living embodiment of Woody’s legacy. And there were several hundred thousand of our fellow citizens in front of us. We had the Lincoln Memorial behind us and a newly-elected president to our right. We were going to sing, “This Land is Your Land” in front of all these Americans. And Pete insisted, “We have to sing all the verses! We have to sing all the verses, man, you can’t leave any of them out.” I said, I don’t know, Pete… He says, “No. We’re all gonna sing all the verses. All the verses.” So we got to it.
–Bruce Springsteen, March 15, 2012

Pete Seeger was right: they had to sing all the verses. Because that day–January 18, 2009–was one of those rare moments in America when all assembled understood that something of momentous importance was happening.

On the day that America’s first Black president assumed his office, Woody Guthrie’s biting response to “God Bless America” was stripped of its bitter irony and gleamed under the grey winter skies like a jewel in the sun.

As was his habit, Seeger spoon-fed the crowd each line a half-second before they sang it back to him. For the first several verses, it was unnecessary. Anyone who went to primary school in America knows the words by heart.

But towards the end of the song, viewers on the mall and at home appreciated the assist, because the most important lyrics of the song are ones most of us never knew existed.

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.

In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land 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.

Without those verses, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” is just a poetic travelogue, a paean to the beauty and birthright of the American Land.

With them, the song is also a reminder that all too often, America fails to live up to its promise of inclusion. On paper, its bounty of natural resources and political freedoms belong to all citizens. In reality, there have always been underclasses of downtrodden and disenfranchised to whom that bounty was more tease than promise.

(Note: like much American folk music, Guthrie’s lyrics are fluid, changing slightly from one recording and performance to the next. There’s no definitive version to which we can point, so the lyrics you read here may somewhat differ from the ones you next hear.)

That’s the message of Guthrie’s song, but to this day it goes largely unrecognized. Blame Guthrie himself for that.

He wrote the song in 1939 with the best of intentions. Ironically, he was inspired by another saccharinely patriotic song that was wildly popular that year: Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”

Berlin’s song, like Guthrie’s more well-known verses, is merely a catalog of American natural treasures. However, Berlin also wrote an introduction that didn’t make Kate Smith’s recording but which she performed in concert whenever she sang the song:

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer. 

Yes, it was wartime. (Berlin actually wrote “God Bless America” during World War I.) And there’s nothing wrong with a little patriotic pride even in peacetime. But it irked Guthrie to hear Berlin’s blindly syrupy song coming out of every radio a full decade into the Great Depression while all around him were migrants and homeless struggling to find work and survive. These were his people, and they weren’t feeling particularly blessed.

Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land” as an answer to “God Bless America,” copying and polishing its catalog of wonders and even titling it originally as “God Blessed America For Me.” He borrowed the melody from two popular songs by The Carter Family, “Little Darling, Pal of Mine” and “When the World’s On Fire.”

Lyrically, Guthrie balanced his song by pointing out where America was falling short and failing its citizens. When he first recorded it in 1944, “This Land Is Your Land” included one of his additional verses:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted that said Private Property
But on the back side it didn’t say nothin’
This land was made for you and me

No one heard that version, though. It stayed in the vault for a half-century before it was finally released. The version most of us are familiar with is the sanitized one he released in 1951. By then, an anti-communist fervor was sweeping the country, and it’s possible that the sympathetic Guthrie was nevertheless wary of being blacklisted.

“This Land Is You Land” was never a hit. You wouldn’t have found it on the radio or in jukeboxes, and yet somehow it became ingrained in American schoolchildren from the redwood forests to the New York island.

Credit ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who made it his mission to preserve American folk songs. Lomax collaborated with publisher Howie Richmond to document songs like Guthrie’s in classroom textbooks, minus its more progressive lyrics.

That’s how “This Land Is Your Land” came to be sung in classrooms across America, rivaling and perhaps surpassing “God Bless America” in its ubiquity. And while most Americans weren’t aware of the political leanings of its author, enough were to keep its message alive.

Even though the versions in print and on record excluded Guthrie’s sharpest lyrics, the folk music tradition kept them alive, with Seeger in particular insisting on performing every single verse when he sang it.

Bruce Springsteen, for all his professed hesitancy in the pull-quote at the top of this essay, always insisted on performing all the verses, starting with his first performance in 1980, a performance he included in his Live 1975-85 box set six years later, to the puzzlement of many fans.

Springsteen was captivated with the beauty and poetry of Guthrie’s words, along with Guthrie’s ability to simultaneously hold his country accountable. He continued performing “This Land Is Your Land” throughout the remainder of the River Tour (even in Europe), and he reprised it in the summer of 1985 on the Born in the USA Tour. The version below (from Bruce’s tour-closing stand in Los Angeles) remains his definitive performance.

When Bruce next toured in 1988, “This Land Is Your Land” didn’t fit his relationship-themed setlist, so he retired it from rotation. Other than a brief ensemble encore at a 1996 Woody Guthrie tribute concert, it would be decades before Bruce performed Guthrie’s signature song again in public.

Which brings us almost full circle.

In the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator Barack Obama tapped Springsteen to join him for a last-minute mini-tour of get-out-the-vote rallies. Bruce had already endorsed Obama early in the campaign, and he was keen to do all he could to deliver a better outcome than when he last took to the road in support of a candidate.

In Philadelphia, Columbus, Cleveland, and Ypsilanti, Michigan, Bruce took to the stage with his guitar in support of Senator Obama. His setlist included motivational originals like “No Surrender,” “The Rising,” and “The Promised Land,” but he closed each set with the one song that distilled both the promise and the duty that lay before his audience.

Springsteen’s arrangement of “This Land Is Your Land” that year was far removed from his 1980s performances. Feeling victory in the air, his performances were optimistic, energizing and galvanizing. This video from his Michigan rally–with endearing behind-the-scenes footage of the Obama family singing and dancing along–is a rarely seen treasure.

Bruce went on to perform “This Land Is Your Land” a handful of times since, including in the 2009 film The People Speak, and a star-studded closing encore at South by Southwest.

But no performance of “This Land Is Your Land” by anyone was seen by or touched as many people as Bruce’s duet with Pete Seeger on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Inauguration Day, 2009.

Looking back on that day years later, Bruce marveled:

So on that day, Pete and myself and generations of young and old Americans – all colors, religious beliefs – I realized that sometimes things that come from the outside, they make their way in, to become a part of the beating heart of the nation. And on that day, when we sung that song, Americans – young and old, black and white, of all religious and political beliefs – were united, for a brief moment, by Woody’s poetry.

This Land Is Your Land
Recorded: December 28, 1980 (live)
Released: Live 1975-85 (1986)
First performed: December 28, 1980 (Uniondale, NY)
Last performed: June 3, 2013 (Milan, Italy)

Looking for your favorite Bruce song? Check our full index. New entries every month!