Recognizing a tune that many of us think ought to be the national anthem, The Flood is celebrating America’s 250th birthday with Woody Guthrie’s most beloved song, as seen in Pamela Bowen’s video below: Just nine years after President Herbert Hoover signed a 1931 congressional resolution to make “The Star Spangled Banner” the country’s official anthem, Woody wrote “This Land Is Your Land.” About the Song Guthrie — having only recently landed in a fleabag boarding house in New York City after rambling and roaming, hitchhiking and hoboing across the country from California — wasn’t thinking about targeting the anthem as he wrote “This Land.” However, he did have another song in his sights. Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” recorded by Kate Smith in 1939, famously irked him — Woody thought it just didn’t tell America’s full story — and his 1940 composition was inspired as a protest against that tune. The reason for his ire? Well, everywhere that Woody had wandered in his long trek across the country, he heard “God Bless America” roaring from jukeboxes and radios. For him Berlin’s song was too sappy, too blindly patriotic, too cut off from the hard-knock life that many Americans were facing as the Great Depression dragged into its 10th year. Guthrie wrote his song as almost a parody. “And I don’t mean that in a humorous sense,” his daughter Nora Guthrie has said. “I mean that strictly in the literal sense of parody as a response to something.” Woody’s original title was “God Blessed America for Me.” Nora notes, “He crossed it out later and called it ‘This Land Was Made for You and Me.’ See, the parody turned into a more mature comment.” The Melody Woody borrowed the melody, as he did for most of his songs. “He tended to write words first, and later on picked out a tune,” said Pete Seeger, Guthrie’s long-time friend and rambling partner. “Woody once said, ‘When I’m writing a song and I get the words, I look around for some tune that has proved its popularity with the people.’” In this case, the melody of “This Land” is very similar to “Oh, My Loving Brother,” a Baptist hymn that The Carter Family had recorded a decade earlier as “When the World’s On Fire.” That same melody also had inspired the Carters’ own “Little Darlin’, Pal of Mine” a couple of years before that. “Missing” Verses In penning the lyrics to “This Land is You Land,” Guthrie, true to his original mission of protest, included several verses critical of the American economic system. Then, according to biographer Joe Klein, “he completely forgot about the song, and didn’t do anything with it for another five years.” By the time Woody debuted the song on his weekly radio show in 1944 at the height of World War II, he had revised it, softening the criticism and nixing the more controversial verses about businessmen’s greed and disregard for the needy. Of this and later self-editing, Woody’s daughter said, “This is the early ‘50s, and [U.S. Sen. Joseph] McCarthy’s out there, and it was considered dangerous in many ways to record this kind of material.” “Like most of the things, if we’re talking about my dad,” Nora added, “it gets very complex here.” Noting that when The Weavers recorded the song in the mid-1950s, they also sang only the first three verses, “which, in one way, was very, very helpful to my dad, because we had no money. So thank God that they recorded something, and our family was able to get some royalties from that.” More recently, a growing number of singers have dusted off one or two of Guthrie’s “lost” lyrics, as The Flood does in this rendition from a recent rehearsal, ending with: 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. Legacy Forty years ago a 1947 release of “This Land is Your Land” on the Asch record label was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2002, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. In 2009, Pete Seeger joined rocker Bruce Springsteen to sing it from start to finish as part of President Barack Obama’s inaugural celebration. In 2021, it was listed by Rolling Stone magazine among its “Top 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” and just last year it was put at No. 11 on its list of “The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time.” Cap’n John Guests on This Podcast Meanwhile, back to this week’s podcast, we have a guest artist. As reported earlier, fiddler John Ace from Alexandria, Va., accompanied Floodster Emeritus Dave Ball to the latest Flood rehearsals to sit in. With Dave, John was on the way from Florida for gigs in Lewisburg, WV. Of Fourths Past Finally, over the years Independence Day has played an important part on many a page in The Flood’s scrapbook. For instance, playing for a Huntington community party during the nation’s bicentennial 50 years ago this weekend was a sweet memory in the band’s first decade. Read all about it and other Fourths by clicking below: Happy Birthday, America! This is a public episode. 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