American Icons: This Land is Your Land

“This Land is Your Land” is the national anthem we actually know the words to. Americans sing it at school and summer camp; Bruce Springsteen and the late Pete Seeger sang it at President Obama’s first inauguration. Yet Woody Guthrie’s song was once branded anti-American, even Communist.

Pete Seeger tells Kurt Andersen how Guthrie wrote it as a satiric response to “God Bless America,” and soul singer Sharon Jones explains what the song means to her as a descendant of slaves. Leftist, environmentalist, nationalist, or patriotic — “This Land” allows everyone to sing it their way. We find out why some controversial lines about private property disappeared, and hear the song in Swedish, Hebrew, and Ojibwa.

(Originally aired October 1, 2010)

The original, handwritten lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land,” dated February 23, 1940

(Courtesy of The Woody Guthrie Archives. Used by permission.)

Woody Guthrie’s daughter, Nora, says Woody originally wrote the line “God blessed America for me” as a parody of the Irving Berlin song, “God Bless America.” That lyric became the now-familiar “thisland is made for you and me”

(Courtesy of The Woody Guthrie Archives. Used by permission.)

Video: Kurt Andersen visits Pete Seeger at his upstate New York home

Sharon Jones

(John Carrico)

Bonus Track:Sharon Jones on “This Land Is Your Land”
Soul singer Sharon Jones describes the special meaning the lyrics of “This Land Is Your Land” hold for her.

Bonus Track:”This Land Is Your Land,” performed by Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings
The group performs its own interpretation of Guthrie’s song.

Mikael Wiehe

(Miro Anter)

Bonus Track: A Powerful Translation
Swedish folk singer Mikael Wiehe explains how translating and singing “This Land Is Your Land” inspired courage after he had received death threats from neo-Nazi groups.

Woody Guthrie’s birthplace in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma in October 1979.

(Walter Smalling)

Woody Guthrie with his wife, Mary Guthrie, and children at the piano, in 1940

(Courtesy of The Woody Guthrie Archives. Used by permission.)

Woody Guthrie in 1943

(Lester Balog/Courtesy of The Woody Guthrie Archives. Used by permission.)

Left to right: Woody Guthrie with guitar and Pete Seeger with banjo. Guthrie and Seeger met at a midnight benefit concert in New York when Guthrie was 29 and Seeger was 22

(Credit: Courtesy of The Woody Guthrie Archives. Used by permission.)

Pete Seeger leads the crowd in singing “This Land Is Your Land” at the celebration for the inauguration of President Barack Obama

(Donna Lou Morgan, U.S. Navy)