‘This Land is Your Land’: The Woody Guthrie folk anthem that fails America’s indigenous people
‘This Land Is Your Land’ was famously written out of desperation. Woody Guthrie was sick to the back teeth of Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’, so he decided to sit down and pen something less saccharine and blindly patriotic. This was the era of the Great Depression, after all, and America was a far cry from the land of milk and honey depicted in Berlin’s lyrics.
Having spent his teens train-hopping, hitchhiking and generally immersing himself in the American landscape, Guthrie had come to view his nation as a patchwork of cultures. The land beneath their feet, he realised, was the one thing binding them together. Woody’s emphasis on the common ground shared by migrants and indigenous peoples has made ‘This Land Is Your Land’ one of America’s most beloved folk anthems. And while the song is today regarded as the ultimate socialist anthem, it continues to leave Native Americans with a bitter taste in their mouths.
In 1919, Woody Guthrie was left to fend for himself after his sister died in a fire and his dad’s business collapsed. When his mother suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to the state mental hospital, he packed his bags and spent his adolescence roaming the country, playing songs for tips. When the war came along, he joined the US Army as a merchant marine and spent many an hour entertaining the troops with anti-fascist songs criticising the nationalistic governments of Hitler and Mussolini. “I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what colour, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work,” he later said of his music. “And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.”
Though Guthrie framed ‘This Land Is Your Land’ as a socialist anthem, many have argued that it fails to recognise the Native population in the US. Today, the song is celebrated for encapsulating the tolerance America likes to imagine it stands for. But for many Native Americans, it reflects the ongoing erasure of indigenous people. When Jennifer Lopez performed the iconic folk tune at President Biden’s inauguration, many described it as an example of white America being “tone deaf” to the legacy of colonialism in the country – one famously built on stolen land. Is it any surprise that Cree musician Buffy Sainte-Marie refused to perform the song with Pete Seeger in 1966? “I just cried through it,” she told The Village Voice in 2017. “I thought, ‘This used to be my land, and you guys aren’t even smart enough to be sensitive to this?'”
Guthrie’s song, like so many classic American protest anthems, appears to speak for all Americans but, in reality, emphasises voices already dominant within the culture. In a 2019 article for Smithsonian Folklife, Mali Obomsawin argues that Woody’s song highlights the “particular blind spot that Americans have in regard to Natives”. Obomsawin points out that American patriotism “erases us, even if it comes in the form of a leftist protest song. Why? Because this land ‘was’ our land”.
Though Guthrie probably didn’t intend any of this (his song ‘Oklahoma Hills’ refers to the people of Osage Nation), his music has, over the years, been drained of its inclusivity. That’s why it now seems to encapsulate only the struggles of white blue-collar Americans, despite Guthrie consistently railing against such a monolithic perception of his nation. “My blood beats Spanish, and my breath burns Indian, and my soul boils negro,” he wrote in an unpublished poem (via BBC).
Woody’s political anthem was undoubtedly radical for the time. But in a country still committed to erasing its indigenous population, whether through industrial expansion or cultural whitewashing, it doesn’t evoke the sense of pride it once did. “It just doesn’t really seem that precious to me, as a Native person,” Obomsawin writes. “It’s really more of a matter of: is America willing to address the problems that are represented by the blind spot of this song?” That said, ‘This Land is Your Land’ continues to ignite essential debates surrounding America’s fragile identity. For that, it should be commended.
You can revisit the song below.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.