Woody Guthrie

“This land was made for you and me.” Way back in 1940, there was a man named Woody Guthrie. He trekked across the USA singing hundreds of songs. His most prominent song, though, is “This Land is Your Land”, a song that explained that the USA is for everyone. He is often quoted because of his inspiring messages. The famous song is very similar to one of his quotes, but is different too. Both the song and the quote are proportionate in some ways. First, let’s knock off the obvious one: they are both by Woody Guthrie. Another similarity is they both state the fact that Woody Guthrie will not quit. In the song he says “Nobody living can ever stop me”, and in the quote he announces “I’m out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and…

rock and roll. He had grown up listening to everyone from Roy Orbison and Chuck Berry to Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie, who would later become a great influence in his life and his mentor. Woody Guthrie was an American singer-songwriter…

This Land is Your Land This Land is Your Land is an American Folk song that was written in 1940 by songwriter Woody Guthrie. This Land is Your Land was written in response to the song God Bless America which songwriter Woody Guthrie disagreed. He wanted is own representation of a patriotic song that he felt would more accurately relate to American citizens at the time. In an article by Mark Allen Jackson, Jackson sates that “it is a musical response to God Bless America” (Jackson 251). In…

Is this land our land? In Woody Guthrie’s poem, “This Land Is Your Land,” the tone is set to be a joyful song, but the tone twists towards the end. As I read, I interpreted the poem in the tone of joy which transforms into disillusion when the speaker questions, “Is this land made for you and me?” (Guthrie line 24). Reading Guthrie’s poem, I came to the conclusion that because of all the hardships America went through in the 1930s, the American dream is not for everyone regardless of one’s…

dragged into debt, and people were made to migrate from their homes as storms of the Dust Bowl ruined agricultural opportunities. The population could be found in a world of barren earth and broken dreams, an era many believed to be “the final destruction of the old Jeffersonian idea of agrarian harmony with nature” (“Dust Bowl” 2). Indeed, the troubles facing the nation served as primary reasons for the spark in entertainment during this decade. Movies, music, radio, and fiction were only…

Land Is Your Land is a poem written by Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie in February of 1940; in April of 1944 it was eventually set to music and turned into a song. On the first reading of this poem, especially when one takes into account the song that was learned in childhood, it has a very patriotic feel to it, “This land is your land this land is my land / this land was made for you and me” (Guthrie 1:1, 1:4). Upon closer inspection, when the last three stanzas of the poem are taken into…

“This Land Is Your Land” is about the person’s connection to American land and the negative effects of taking the land away from them, as The Tampa Bay Times associates with red sympathies. Guthrie would be opposed to banks claiming land that they had no use or emotional connection to, other than to profitize the land. Steinbeck had a similar opinion and calls the bank a “monster”. Since annexing the land was a step toward industrialization, Steinbeck and Guthrie opposed industrialization of…

scale of migrants is unknown, but it’s estimated that up to 400,000 Southwesterners moved west during the 1930s and up to 300,000 moved into California a decade earlier.” (Sander) Even young children and teenagers were forced to leave their homes in search for jobs to earn money to support their families back home. Woody Guthrie lived in Pampa, Texas at the time of the Dust Bowl. In the year 1933 he married Mary Jennings, and together they had three children named Gwen, Sue, and Bill. Woody and…

Bob Dylan is a American musician. He is a singer and a songwriter who sings mostly about folk music. He has been an extremely influential person in the music industry for years. Bob Dylan also had a lot of influence during the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He sang at the March on Washington in August of 1963 with a fellow folk musician, Joan Baez.…

They suffered from famine, sickness, and extreme poverty. However, they kept a beautiful spirit about them. A spirit which artists like Woody Guthrie picked up on, and wrote songs which truly embodied the sense of hopefulness the “Okies” exuded on their trek to find the American Dream which was taken out from under them. Songs like, Dust Bowl Refugee and Dust Bowl Blues highlight the struggle of the migrant workers who Guthrie was traveling with. In these Lyrics from Dust Bowl Refugee a picture…