>
> 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