One of the top Google searches for This Land Is Your Land is a complicated question: “Is This Land is Your Land a communist song?” Woody had a quip for that: “I ain’t a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life.” While it’s true that he never joined the American Communist Party (CPUSA), during 1938 and 1939 he played many fundraisers and wrote a column for the People’s World newspaper.
For the party, this charismatic, authentic voice from the working-class heartlands was a godsend, because US communists were in a phase of reclaiming patriotism rather than rejecting it. The CPUSA threw its support behind President Roosevelt’s New Deal, claiming: “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.” Guthrie, a quasi-communist who went on to write patriotic songs for Roosevelt’s Bonneville Power Administration, embodied that bridge-building spirit, as did This Land Is Your Land. The song represents something that the left often struggles to achieve: radical patriotism for the masses.
Getty ImagesAlready popularised by school textbooks, This Land Is Your Land regained its political bite in the 1960s through the folk revival and the civil rights movement. While recordings by Bing Crosby and Peter, Paul and Mary were abbreviated, Pete Seeger and Guthrie’s son Arlo always performed the radical verses, lest they be forgotten. It helped that Guthrie, no nightingale himself, had written a song that anyone could sing. The robustly cheerful melody (taken from the gospel hymn When the World’s on Fire) was perfect for a protest march, picket line, festival or classroom.
This Land Is Your Land has since become immeasurably famous, woven deep into the fabric of US culture. Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger sang it, radical verses and all, at the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009. Lady Gaga pointedly combined it with God Bless America in her 2017 Super Bowl performance, while Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine sang it at the Occupy Wall Street protest camp in 2011. It was sung during the presidential campaigns of Democrats George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984, as well as that of Mondale’s opponent Ronald Reagan. Bernie Sanders, who recorded his own bewildering reggae version in 1987, made it a mainstay of both his runs for president. It has been parodied in The Simpsons and Tim Robbins’ 1992 satire Bob Roberts, and used to advertise cars and airlines.