[lbo-talk] This Land vs God Bless

knowknot at mindspring.com knowknot at mindspring.com
Mon Aug 29 12:50:59 PDT 2005


On 8/29/05, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> said:

>

> knowknot at mindspring.com wondered

>

>> [ Wasn't it Pete Seeger, not Woody Guthrie,

>> who wrote the lyrics to the "This Land, etc."

>> verse quoted below ? ]

>

>> "Was a big high wall there - that tried to

>> stop me

>> A sign atop it - said 'Private Property'

>> But on the other side - it didn't say nothing

>> That side was made for you and me."

>

> No. Absolutely not. They are 10% Woody. Guthrie

> insisted that baby Arlo learn them when he (WG)

> was dying of Hodgkin's, wanted to make sure they

> were not washed out of the song. Read Joe Klein'a

> biography -- writen, I guess, before Klein went

> neocon. ARlo tells the story too. I also heard Pete

> tell it this way as well. * * * Woody wrote

> those lines.

As I indicated earlier, this is no Big Deal. Guthrie, Seeger, et all, and many others before and since (cf., Dylan) have "borrowed" more than a little - only, please, to call it "Folk Tradition" - but even so:

Your response has prompted what I experience as a kind of "lost recollection refreshed" kind of Thing (although I also readily grant that it is at least possible that this is a "false" and not actually "lost" memory) that I (now think I) remember being at a gathering with Seeger (now more than forty years ago!) at which he said he wrote the quoted lyrics and that some years later in a Carnegie Hall performance (at which Seeger awas present) Arlo Gutrie said the same before singing the "complete" song.

Anyway, for musicologist/bibliophiles, note that the above lyrics don't appear in Woody Gutrie's self-published "Ten Songs for Two Bits" pamphlet in which it has long been said he first published his lyrics to "This Land, etc." *

---------------

* That broadside is reproduced (for other reasons) at:

http://www.eff.org/IP/20040823_Jibjab_Copyright_Scans.pdf



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