When Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land' went to school

In “This Land Is Your Land: Woody Guthrie and the Journey of an American Folksong” (Running Press, $24), author and Grammy Museum Executive Director Robert Santelli traces the extraordinary life of what is arguably America’s best-known and best-loved folk song, written by America’s greatest folk troubadour.

It’s long been known that Woody Guthrie wrote the song in 1940 as his reaction to -- and dissatisfaction with -- Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America, which became ubiquitous throughout the Depression, primarily from Kate Smith’s signature recording and her countless performances on live radio broadcasts.

Among the many examples of cultural detective work in Santelli's book -- published in conjunction with this year's Woody Guthrie centennial -- Santelli traces a journey that culminates in the song being sung by Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen at a 2009 inauguration concert for President Obama. Along the way, he also answers the question: How exactly how did “This Land Is Your Land” become part of the elementary school standard repertoire, where virtually every kid in the United States can sing it -- or at least, the best-known parts of it -- by the time they’re 7?

It partly can be traced to the inclusion of “This Land Is Your Land” on a 1951 album of children’s songs called “Songs  to Grow On,” the third volume in a series of children’s music released by producer Moses Asch on his new Folkways record label.

Asch, who had made records with Seeger and Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter  and other folk and blues artists in New York City in the '40s, first met and recorded with Guthrie in 1944. He was so bowled over by the quality of Guthrie’s songs, which had not been captured extensively in recordings before that, that he got Guthrie to lay down dozens of tracks, including “God Blessed America,” the song that eventually would come to be known as “This Land Is Your Land.”

But it wasn’t an immediate breakout hit, just one among the slew of songs Guthrie recorded for Asch. Seeger also loved the song’s sing-along and routinely included it when he performed in schools and at summer camps in New York and elsewhere around the Northeast.

The genius stroke, however, came with Guthrie’s introduction to music publisher Howie Richmond. Even into the '50s, Guthrie may have established a body of work as impressive as that of any songwriter in history, but he had no publisher to represent and promote his songs. “Either because of his unconventional ways or his political stance, he was turned down wherever he went,” Santelli writes.

Folklorist Alan Lomax, who with his father, John, made field  recordings for the Library of Congress documenting the nation’s folk and blues traditions, met with Richmond to float the idea of extending the reach of such songs beyond the walls of the Library of Congress. Perhaps, Lomax suggested, there was a way to educate the country’s youth to their musical heritage by including some of them in elementary school textbooks.

Richmond took the idea and ran with it, lobbying textbook publishers to include words and music  to some of the songs from the Lomax collection; as an incentive, he reduced the normal licensing fees and threw in “This Land Is Your Land” as an added bonus -- he would charge only $1 to include it.

“I really believed that ‘This Land’ -- a truly great song about America, its natural wealth and beauty -- was something that kids sitting in classrooms ought to know and learn to sing,” Richmond told Santelli. “Plus, it was a great song for entire classes to sing. It had a great melody, great chorus, and those lyrics, well, they were so beautiful. I didn’t mind practically giving it away.”

The gambit worked and “This Land” quickly began landing on the desks of American schoolchildren with their next round of new books and incorporated into classroom music time.

The published version, however, omitted two verses that made “This Land” more than a celebration of America’s natural resources, but also a pointed political protest song in which Guthrie spoke on behalf of the millions he’d seen left by the wayside of the American dream during the Great Depression.

In addition to his poetic imagery about the nation’s endless skyway, golden valley, redwood forests, gulf stream waters, sparkling sands and diamond deserts, Guthrie also made a point to note:

As I was walkin’, I saw a sign there
And that sign said ‘No trespassin’
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’
Now that side was made for you and me

Another often-overlooked verse says:

In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office, I saw my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
'If this land’s still made for you and me?’

(To head the folk purists off at the pass: Numerous variations on these lyrics have been chronicled over the decades, even as written down by Guthrie himself. The verses here are taken from Santelli's book, where they are rendered as "Original Lyrics.")

Half a century later, when Springsteen called Seeger to invite him to sing “This Land Is Your Land” with him at a concert celebrating Obama’s inauguration, “I told him I would, but only if he agreed to sing the song with its original lyrics,” Seeger told Santelli, himself a longtime Guthrie aficionado who had organized a tribute to him in 1996 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland to launch the hall’s “American Masters” series of tribute performances.
 

“All these years I sang ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ but never with so many people watching and listening,” Seeger said. “Washington, D.C., filled with people. Television cameras were everywhere. I wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass by. I wanted to make absolutely certain that the world knew the lyrics that Woody originally wrote.”

Springsteen needed no coaching -- he’d been singing the song, including the usually missing verses, since the 1980s.

“We’d like you to join us in perhaps the greatest song ever written about our home,” Springsteen said to the massive audience by way of introduction.

No Teleprompters were needed that day. Nearly everyone there in Washington, D.C., and watching at home on television had long ago learned it in grade school.

RELATED:

This year, this land will be Woody Guthrie's

Woody Guthrie is celebrated with a concert in Tulsa, Okla.

Following Woody Guthrie's footsteps from Oklahoma to Texas to California

-- Randy Lewis

 Photo of Woody Guthrie. Credit: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images.

John Fullbright: Folk-rock straight outta Okemah

This post has been updated. See details at bottom.

NORMAN, Okla. -- It’s hard to think of any city on the face of the planet that casts a larger shadow over the career of an aspiring folk-rooted singer-songwriter than Okemah, Okla., the town where 24-year-old musician John Fullbright was born and raised, and which -- 100 years ago come July 14 -- was the birthplace of one Woody Guthrie.

“When I get asked what it’s like to grow up in Woody’s hometown, I say it’s kind of like living next door to a neighbor you don’t know anything about,” Fullbright said in his folksy eastern Oklahoma drawl. “I’m just now starting to figure him out. I’m a bigger fan of his writing than his music. I like his books and the stuff he wrote for the paper. But it’s kinda hard to listen to him sing.”

On a recent spring day, he’d accepted the invitation of University of Oklahoma English professor Susan Kates to talk about how his Oklahoma roots figure into his songwriting. Kates said she loved the literary quality of his music. Between questions from students, Fullbright served up a handful of his songs, many of them from his preternaturally self-assured debut studio album, “From the Ground Up,” due May 8.

He’s supporting the album with a tour of about two dozen shows, including a May 10 stop at the Hotel Café in Hollywood, where he shares the bill with Gurf Morlix, and a mid-July appearance back home for the annual Woodyfest salute to Okemah’s favorite son, which runs July 11-14 this year. In March, he also played several showcases at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.

Fullbright doesn’t share much stylistically with Guthrie outside of their deep interest in telling stories that shed light on the human condition. Musically, he incorporates folk blues, gospel and Americana rock elements.

One of the songs he shared in Kates’ class was “Satan and St. Paul,” a stylish and witty, almost essay-like exploration of romantic regret:

Don’t tell me that you love me

I got nothing left in turn

Except this empty bag of promises

And second degree burns

On the tips of my fingers

From touching certain fruit

That I never should have touched in the first place

The official video can be seen here:

It’s among several on the album with evocative scriptural references, creating the impression that this native of the Bible Belt is deeply steeped in religion.

Not so much, as it turns out.

“My mom was pretty biblical, that’s kinda how I was raised, but for me it’s more of a tool in writing. It’s a very strong way to get a point across.” His mother also strongly encouraged, to put it mildly, his piano studies, which surface on the album perhaps most impressively on “Fat Man,” a Randy Newman-esque song about a surrealistic dream.

“When I was about 9, my mom asked me if I wanted to take piano lessons and I said, ‘Sure.’ I didn’t realize I was signing a 12-year-contract I couldn’t get out of,” he said. “I played the piano a lot, but didn’t play what they wanted me to play. I just wanted to play boogie-woogie. It turned into therapy: boogie-woogie therapy. I’d play the same chord progression for two hours, just trying to figure out how to play the blues.”

The forces that shaped him tend to include great '60s and '70s singer-songwriters such as Newman, Townes Van Zandt, Mickey Newbury and fellow Oklahoman Jimmy Webb, who said recently, “I have no doubt that in a very short time John Fullbright will be a household name in American music.” His voice at times creates the impression of a younger sibling of another Oklahoma musician, Leon Russell.

“I’m a huge Leon fan,” he said, “The bottom line is we have the same goofy voice. It’s uncanny even to me. I’ll hear myself on tape and say, ‘Jesus, I sound just like Leon.’ I don’t mean for it to sound that way. My grandpa was his stepdad’s cousin. I say it, and I can’t actually do the math.”

Fullbright’s bold enough to open his album with “Gawd Above,” a song in which he takes the perspective of the Supreme Being. He has referred to it as “Sympathy for the Creator”:

Six long days, Seventh day He rested

Said, “Here’s one sure way humans can be bested

Give 'em wine and song, fire and lust

When it all goes wrong, I’m the man to trust.”

Such songs have also earned Fullbright the backing of Greg Johnson, owner of Oklahoma City’s venerable folk club the Blue Door. Johnson not only has booked Fullbright on countless shows to help build a following, but he’s also acting as his manager, the first act he’s ever been so inspired to take on.

“I love good songwriting,” Johnson said on a night that Arlo Guthrie played the Blue Door. “I get kind of tired of so many of the Americana acts that are getting into the jam-band thing. That’s fun for a while, but where are the songs? John’s songs remind me of people like Kris Kristofferson and John Prine -- just really great songwriters.”

Fullbright says the Blue Door has become “my home away from home. … It’s kind of like a little church of songs.”

Early on, he said, his approach to songwriting “was all inspiration. If you didn’t get it the first time, then it’s lost. Any more, it’s flipping around: It’s inspiration, when it comes, and then really trying to work it out. I don’t give up on songs anymore, really. Even if no one will ever hear them, they have to be at least almost done. I figure that if you can see it through to the end, even if you don’t like it, there’ll be a big chunk you’ll be able to use in something else down the line.”

That’s another thing Fullbright’s just beginning to have in common with Woody Guthrie.

“Woody was a fountain of creativity -- all the output of songs and articles and books," he said. "And he cared about people. Those are two important things about him. I kind of strive to be more like him in those areas.”

And the third would be getting his music known beyond the borders of Okemah.

“It’s comforting to know that somebody else did it -- came from Okemah and went out and became successful being a songwriter,” he said. “If times get tough and the house gets dark, that’s something I can remember.”

Update at 8:43 p.m.: An earlier version of this post said Fullbright is 23. He turned 24 on Monday.

RELATED:

At SXSW music festival, money talk abounds

SXSW 2012: Bruce Springsteen joins Joe Ely, Alejandro Escovedo

Following Woody Guthrie's footsteps from Oklahoma to Texas to California

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: John Fullbright on the porch of his house outside of Okemah, Okla. Credit: Vicki Farmer.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse reunite for 'Americana' due June 5

Neil Young has reunited with Crazy Horse for their first album together in nearly nine years, “Americana,” in which the band offers its take on 11 songs drawn from the American folk music tradition.

The new collection, slated for release June 5, includes Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” Stephen Foster’s “Oh Susannah,” the British national anthem “God Save the Queen,” and folk songs from the 19^th century and earlier including “Tom Dooley,” “Clementine,” “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” (under the title "Jesus Chariot") and “Wayfarin’ Stranger.”

In his notes with the album, Young says he and longtime collaborators Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot and Poncho Sampedro have tapped the notion of “the folk process” in which traditional songs were sometimes modified to make them more digestible by rock music fans in the early days of what came to be known as folk-rock.

The Young-Crazy Horse version of “This Land Is Your Land,” for instance, omits the widely known verses popularized through grade-school renditions of the song and opts instead for the lyrics omitted from Guthrie’s own recording.

“This folk song was written by Woody Guthrie in the 1940s,” Young writes, “to a preexisting melody as a response to ‘God Bless America,’ which Guthrie was tired of hearing. The lyrics Guthrie sang varied over time, but the lyrics sung in Americana version were in the original manuscript of the song."

Young’s definition of folk music is broad enough to encompass the Silhouettes’ 1958 doo-wop hit “Get A Job”—“It is a genuine folk song with all the true characteristics,” Young states—and a couple of the arrangements, “High Flyin’ Bird” and “Tom Dooley” (under the title of its older incarnation, "Tom Dula"), are credited to the Squires, the rock band Young played in while he was still in high school in Winnipeg.

Update on March 27 at 8:45 a.m.: For the Record: An earlier version of this posted identified the Squires as Neil Young's high school rock band in Toronto. The band was in Winnipeg.

RELATED:

Neil Young, Jonathan Demme chat on 'Journeys' doc at Slamdance

Neil Young 'Trunk Show'

Woody Guthrie is celebrated with a concert in Tulsa, Okla.

--Randy Lewis

Top photo of Neil Young. Credit: Pegi Young.

Cover image from Neil Young and Crazy Horse's 'Americana.' Credit: Warner Bros. Records.

Pete Seeger sings 'Forever Young' for 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan's debut

Monday is the 50th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan’s debut album, and in commemoration the organizers of the recent four-CD Dylan tribute album “Chimes of Freedom” benefiting Amnesty International are releasing a new video of Dylan mentor Pete Seeger singing the Minnesotan's 1974 song “Forever Young.”

At age 92, Seeger is joined on the track, and in the video, by the Rivertown Kids children’s choir, a New York group consisting of 20 children age 9 to 13. The video can be seen here:

Along with the new video, a grassroots campaign has begun to spur download sales of the track in hopes of getting Seeger back into the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which would make him the oldest person ever to appear on the Billboard chart. The effort, dubbed “Forever Pete,” has generated a website, www.foreverpete.com, a Twitter feed, http://twitter.com/ForeverPete and a Facebook page. Proceeds from sales of the track will go to Amnesty International.

As a performer, songwriter, activist, member of the Almanac Singers and the Weavers folk groups and an associate of Woody Guthrie, Seeger played an important role in Dylan’s early career. He mentored the young musician during his watershed performances at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1963, 1964 and 1965.

From 1950 to 1955, the Weavers charted 11 singles, most of them traditional folk songs the band helped to revive, and as a solo act Seeger appeared on the chart in 1964 with the song “Little Boxes.” His impact was even greater as a songwriter and arranger, contributing “If I Had a Hammer,” which was a charting song for Peter, Paul & Mary and Trini Lopez; the Byrds' hit “Turn! Turn! Turn!”; and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” which charted for several performers.

Arlo Guthrie, at a tour stop in Oklahoma City, Okla., last week on his way to a centennial concert salute to his father, said he had recently invited Seeger, with whom he toured on and off for three decades, to join him for a show, but Seeger declined.

“Pete said, ‘Arlo, I can’t play as well as I used to play, and I can’t sing as well as I used to sing,’ ” Guthrie told the audience. “I said, ‘Pete, have you taken a look at your audience lately? They can’t hear as well as they used to hear!’”

To date, the oldest artists to make the charts with new material (as opposed to reissues) are Tony Bennett in the U.S. at 85, and in the U.K., Doris Day recently scored at hit at 87.

RELATED:

Bob Dylan tribute album honors Amnesty International too

Bob Dylan 'Freedom' tribute album debuts at No. 11--and No. 39

Woody Guthrie is celebrated with a concert in Tulsa, Okla.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Pete Seeger, left, and Bob Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Credit: (c) Jim Marshall Photography LLC.

In rotation: Woody Guthrie's 'Live Wire'

 A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...

The mere existence of this release of Woody Guthrie in concert, recorded at a little auditorium in Newark, N.J., in 1949, is something of a miracle. It also reveals a little-seen side of one of the most important American folk musicians of the 20th century. Recorded by college student Paul Braverman using a wire recorder — an early device that captured sound waves and imprinted that information onto copper wire — the audio document that spawned “The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance, 1949” was tucked away amid random possessions for 50 years and ended up in a Florida closet.

Braverman found it among his possessions and donated it to the Woody Guthrie Archives in 2001. Not only did the thread of metallic data survive intact, but after an intricate restoration process to fix the wobbly wow-and-flutter distortion due to bends in the copper, Guthrie’s guitar and voice also came out crisp and clear. In 2008, the release won a Grammy for best historical album, but it had gone out of print. Now, thankfully, Rounder has reissued it.

On this recording, Guthrie’s approach is casual and conversational, revealing the so-called Dust Bowl balladeer to be both strong in voice and the consummate entertainer: smart and amiable, offering funny between-song banter and a long, autobiographical greeting to the audience. And that voice: You can hear in it not only the whole of the folk revival of the late ’50s through the ’60s — musicians such as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Phil Ochs — but hints of the outlaw country movement of Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle. History never sounded so engaging.

RELATED:

In rotation: Nicolas Jaar's 'Space is Only Noise'

In rotation: The Feelies' 'Here Before'

In Rotation: Los Amigos Invisibles' 'Not So Commercial'

— Randall Roberts

Woody Guthrie
“The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance, 1949”
(Rounder Records)