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  • Here’s another story about that fine patriot Woody Guthrie. But, of course, given the source, most of your readers would have already seen it.

    “Songs made for you and me”
    http://socialistworker.org/2012/07/12/songs-made-for-you-and-me

    … Riding freight trains north through California, he was confronted with the viciousness of police and railroad security–and grotesque scenes of poverty contrasting with the natural beauty of the landscape. “I can’t tell you how pretty this country did look to me,” he wrote. “I can’t tell you how ugly the cops looked, nor how ugly the jails looked, the hobo jungles, the shacktowns up and down the rivers, how dirty the Hoovervilles looked on the rim of the city garbage dump.” ….

    In one of his songbooks, he’d famously write: “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.” ….

    BACK IN Los Angeles, Woody met Ed Robbin, a commentator for KFVD and reporter for the Communist Party (CP) newspaper on the West Coast, the People’s Daily World.

    Through Robbin, Woody met a number of CP members, including actor Will Geer (today mostly remembered for his role as “Grandpa Walton” on The Waltons). Geer and Guthrie became lifelong friends–Geer also introduced Woody to important figures on the left, including author John Steinbeck, who later summed up Woody by saying, “He is just a voice and a guitar…there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs that he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression.”

    WOODY BRISTLED against the patriotism and jingoism exploding in the U.S. as America’s entrance into the Second World War approached. This anger set the stage for his most famous composition in February 1940: “This Land Is Your Land.”

    While today the song is largely considered a patriotic, if populist, vision of an ideal America, Guthrie actually composed the song as a direct response to Irving Berlin’s hyper-sentimental “God Bless America.” ….

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