Showing posts with label folk music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label folk music. Show all posts

February 23 - This Land Is Your Land

    Posted on February 23, 2022


This is an update of my post published on February 23, 2011:




Folk singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie wrote his most famous song on this day in 1940. We know this because, when he died, his daughter went through his files and found the handwritten lyrics on a piece of paper. Some of the words and the title had been crossed out and reworked, and the piece was signed “Woody G.” and dated.

Apparently Guthrie wrote the song in response to Irving Berlin's “God Bless America.” Guthrie was sick of constantly hearing the latter song on the radio, and (according to Wikipedia), he considered the lyrics “unrealistic and complacent.”


Here are the lyrics of "This Land Is Your Land":

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.
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.



And here is a recording of Guthrie singing the song.

Did you know...?

  • Various other countries enjoy different versions of the song. For example, one line in Canada's version says, “From the Arctic Circle to the Great Lakes waters...” Irish people sing, “From the hills of Kerry to the streets of Derry...” And the people of the Bahamas sing, “From Grand Bahama down to Inagua, From the Berry Islands, down to Mayaguana...”

  • This song has been parodied many times. A parody is a version that spoofs something, trying for humor or even trying to ridicule an idea.

  • Guthrie sometimes added different verses to his song. For example, this verse makes a statement about private property:
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.



  • Perhaps the verse above explains why Guthrie was “blacklisted” by Senator Joe McCarthy, who was largely responsible for an anti-Communist “witch hunt” in the 1950s. McCarthy destroyed the lives of many people with his reckless accusations and attacks on public figures, but Guthrie just seemed to shrug off the accusation with a joke: "I ain't a Communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life."
  • Guthrie didn't care about copyright, so as soon as he wrote most of his songs, he released them into the public domain. Here is the copyright notice for “This Land Is Your Land”:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.

Write your own version of the song--or even a full-blown parody. You might want to choose a tune you love and write original lyrics to that song. I have written "good-bye" or birthday songs for friends with personalized lyrics--and it's lots of fun!

Also on this date:































(Last Wednesday of February)








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August 23 – Happy Birthday, Malvina Reynolds

Posted on August 23, 2020

Born on this date in 1900, Malvina Reynolds was a true Turn-of-the-Century child! Her parents were Jewish socialists who immigrated to the U.S. before Malvina was born.

Reynolds was born and raised in San Francisco, California, and she wasn't allowed to get her high school diploma because her parents were opposed to the U.S. involvement in World War I. Not getting the diploma didn't stand in Reynolds's way, though; she went to UC Berkeley and earned a BA and MA in English. She married a carpenter and union organizer, raised a child, and earned a Doctorate in 1939.

But she wasn't able to find a job teaching at the college level, despite her PhD. She was a woman; she was Jewish; she was socialist. And the nation was suffering from the Great Depression! So....

Reynolds got a job as a social worker, wrote a column for a Marxist newspaper, worked in a factory making bombs (!), and eventually took over her father's tailor shop.

That tailor shop was located in Southern California (Long Beach, to be exact). And Reynolds began to meet some famous people like folk singer Pete Seeger. All of a sudden - in her late 40s - she launched a songwriting career!

Reynolds wrote songs recorded by amazing musicians such as Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Marianne Faithful, the Seekers, the Searchers, the Limeliters, and others. She wrote songs for Women for Peace, for the Nestle Boycott, and for a variety of sit-ins and protests.




She even wrote songs for Sesame Street!

Reynolds played a songwriting character
named Kate on Sesame Street!

Reynolds's most famous songs are Little Boxes (about the development of suburbia) and What Have They Done to the Rain? (about nuclear fallout).
When Reynolds drove by Daly City, south of San Francisco,
she turned the wheel over to her husband and wrote the
song "Little Boxes"!


Pretty rad to have such a successful music career so late in life!


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March 19 – Bob Dylan's First!

Posted on March 19, 2018

On this date in 1962, the album Bob Dylan was released by Columbia Records.

Dylan (who was born Robert Allen Zimmerman) had dropped out of college to travel to New York City. He wanted to visit his hero, Woodie Gurthrie, who was seriously ill. He wanted to immerse himself in the folk music scene. He wanted to perform!


Dylan started to get known in the American folk music scene. He explained later that rock'n'roll had appealing, driving beats, but that the lyrics just didn't speak to him. They were catchy instead of deep, fun instead of serious.

Dylan was so serious, he got the record deal with Columbia.

And he was so serious that many of his songs were labeled as protest songs.

As a matter of fact, Dylan came to be labeled as "the voice of a generation."

And...what a voice! Dylan's voice was pretty rough, and that turned some people off. But it was a stand-out for others. Author Joyce Carol Oates wrote: "When we first heard this raw, very young, and seemingly untrained voice, frankly nasal, as if sandpaper could sing, the effect was dramatic and electrifying."

Folk musician Joan Baez was
an early promoter of Dylan.

Dylan's early songs were more popular, at first at least, when other singers sang them. It was easier for most audiences to enjoy melodious, mellifluous voices singing songs like Blowing in the Wind and The Times They Are a-Changin.' 

But some of the people who sang Dylan songs dragged him up on stage with them during shows and promoted him in other ways - and soon audiences knew and loved Dylan songs sung by Dylan.

In all the years since the early 1960s, Dylan didn't stick with just one kind of music, just one kind of song. He's written what some people consider popular music (Like a Rolling Stone), rock, blues, and country. He's explored gospel, rockabilly, even Irish folk music and jazz! He's performed on guitar, harmonica, and keyboards, he's sung, he's recorded - but his greatest contribution, surely, is his songwriting.


Blowing in the Wind is one of Dylan's best. This video was crafted by a Brazilian person, I guess, who writes at the end (in Portuguese), "One day this world, now dominated by some, has to again belong to all."

I grew up listening to The Times, They Are a-Changin' covered by Simon and Garfunkel. Check out Dylan's version and the S&G cover. 

Check out these words of wisdom from Dylan:








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