The success of Guthrie's political message depends upon his ability to blend his protest with folk traditions, but his message's resonance is due to his insights into the inequality of American society. By examining the lyrics of "This Land is Your Land," one is able to see how Guthrie uses folk standards to contrast the idealized America with the bleakness of reality. Guthrie's influence on music and the culture at large stems from precisely this kind of insight and skill, because he is able to use the accessibility of folk to convey an important political message to people it might not otherwise reach.
Woody Guthrie
The most compelling thing about the protest music that arose during the middle of the twentieth century is the degree to which its criticisms and observations remain relevant to this day. This is nowhere more true than in the music of Woody Guthrie, whose radical, anti-capitalist views informed some of his best and most well-loved songs, and made him "one of America's greatest proletarian spokesmen" (Kaufman 456). In particular, his 1940 song "This Land is Your Land" includes a powerful criticism of American capitalism and its ill effects that feels eerily prescient of the kind of inequality seen today. Examining in detail the lyrics of "This Land is Your Land" alongside more recent iterations of the song will not only reveal Guthrie's anti-capitalist message, but also the continued relevance of that message to contemporary America.
Guthrie's role as a political agitator and critic was well-established prior to his writing of "This Land is Your Land." In fact, during the 1930s he contributed columns to a Communist newspaper based in San Francisco, and his writing of "This Land in Your Land" only continued this trend, because he actually wrote it as a response to Burl Ives' "God Bless America" (Blake 184). Like Ives' song, "This Land is Your Land" takes a hopeful view of the United States, but unlike "God Bless America," Guthrie's lyrics do not sugarcoat the country, or ignore the very real inequality and hardship it contains. Instead, Guthrie uses the contrast between a mythical, idealized America made up of the country's best aspects and the real United States post-Depression in order to criticize the reigning economic (and ultimately political) order.
"This Land is Your Land" begins by participating in a common trope of folk music, wherein a narrator describes an imaginary land where all the hardships of everyday life are replaced by ease and comfort; in fact, Burl Ives himself popularized another instance of this trope in the form of the song "Big Rock Candy Mountains." The narrator of "This Land is Your Land" begins by describing America "from the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters," and the lyrics only get more and more mythic from there. The narrator travels under "an endless skyway" and above "a golden valley," through "diamond deserts," wheat fields, and dust clouds. The America he describes is open and inviting, with a voice that tells the narrator he is welcome, and it embodies all of the greatest and best possibilities of America.
At this point, "This Land is Your Land" does not differ from other pro-America folk songs, but in the last three verses, Guthrie makes an increasingly radical statement regarding America's economic system and its ill effects. In the fifth verse of the song, the narrator describes seeing a sign, "And on the sign it said 'No Trespassing.' / but on the other side it didn't say nothing," and concludes by stating "That side was made for you and me." In this verse the entire song changes, because the direct second-person address the narrator uses goes from being a folksy trope to an act of political interpolation. The narrator is identifying both himself and the audience as people who would be better served by a world that disregards the notion of trespassing, and thus the ownership of land. The folk tradition allows Guthrie to insert this political identification and implicit critique smoothly, without breaking the rhetorical flow of the song.
Guthrie's critique only become more pointed, as the narrator describes seeing "his people" "by the relief office […] / as they stood hungry," which makes him ask "is this land made for you and me?" Guthrie contrasts the idealized world of the first few verses with the bleak reality of hunger and poverty in America after the Great Depression, and he uses the image of hungry people to vividly demonstrate the fact that American capitalism is not a system made for the majority of people living within it. Instead, it is based on a system of exploitation that necessarily creates a lower class of citizen, and Guthrie contrasts this harsh system with the promise supposedly offered by the best notions of America.
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