Mark Perryman celebrates the 85th anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s anthem
On Sunday, 23rd February 2025, it will be the 85th anniversary of Woody Guthrie writing his anthemic This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land. Ever since, it has been sung out loud and proud as an American – and global – song of resistance.
In February 1940, the United States hadn’t yet entered World War Two – that wouldn’t come for almost another two years following Imperial Japan’s deadly air attack on the US naval base, Pearl Harbour. Nazi Germany was in the process of taking all of Europe by blitzkrieg. The Soviet Union had been quelled by the shameful and treacherous Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.
Whilst US President Roosevelt’s sympathies were with Churchill and with the British armed forces leading the resistance both in Europe and South-East Asia, American support was purely economic, consisting of transactional lend-lease arrangements which were entirely of benefit to US business.
American public opinion was for non-intervention, appeasement – but for a section of the American right it went further. Just like the Daily Mail’s notorious front page ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’, there are many in America who resent being reminded that a year previously to Woody penning his song 20,000 America Nazis had filled the famous Madison Square Garden. They sieg heil’d their American support for Hitler to a huge backdrop of George Washington, squeezed between two equally large swastika flags.
Such was the context of This Land Is Your Land. In Mike Marqusee’s brilliant book Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art (updated and expanded as Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s). Mike provides the details of Woody’s authorship including the missing lines ‘purged’ from the more sanitised version that has become popular ever after:
A big high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property
and
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief office I saw my people –
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
This land was made for you and me.
One can scarcely imagine JD Vance, adding such lines to his Hillbilly Elegy soundtrack. And therein lies, despite their tuneful exposure by Woody and in our time by others too, the dangerously successful falsehoods, of the populist right’s appeal, Trumpian and Faragist versions.
Mike Marqusee is much missed by many including myself. He was that very rare kind, a public intellectual, a hugely creative political organiser – at the height of opposition to the Iraq War only Mike would have the idea and the ability to organise an Iraq v USA football match, with Philosophy Football (of course) providing the kits. And he was a gloriously gifted writer who was as much at ease writing about Dylan, his Jewish identity, Muhammad Ali and most of all his quixotically American love of cricket, as about Labour Party politics.
It is his take on the latter that helps explains Mike’s disavowal of one particular accolade This Land is often accorded:
The song combines a sense of longing and belonging, and has been cursed with the sobriquet of the ‘alternative national anthem’.
By political inclination I’m a pluralist. I simply have no interest in a political culture founded on the pressing need for all of us sharing the same label, ‘left’ or Labour or any other, to entirely agree with one another and exclude those whom we don’t. In my experience I learn just as much engaging with those I don’t share wholehearted agreement with as those whom I do. I would often debate with Mike his rejection of the ‘national-popular’, in particular Englishness, his position he waggishly entitled ‘Anyone but England.’ Yet despite our disagreement his position was always far more illuminating and instructive than Sir Keir’s entirely performative ‘progressive patriotism,’ never to be articulated without a Union Jack draped somewhere or other in the camera shot.
However, this rejection of the national-popular, if you like This Land as an ‘alternative national anthem’ can often lead to a broader rebuttal of a Gramscian (yes, yes Philosophy Football do a Gramsci T-shirt too) politics that focuses on popular culture rather than the kind of spaces varying parts of the left are considerably more comfortable in, from the electoral arena via the picket line to the rarefied world of planet placard, as an absolutely central site where ideas are contested and changed. A focus that recognises and doesn’t downgrade the meaning given by many to their nation is key to this. In this sense the very special power of This Land is that it is both nationalist and popular, and at the same time universal and distinctly American.
And it is this mix, the national, the popular and the radical, that framed future generations who sang in the different ways of who their land belonged to. Simone, Dylan and Baez via Patti Smith, Clash, The Specials. Billy Bragg to new generation minstrels of change – Grace Petrie, Joe Solo and Calum Baird — with plenty more where that rebel-rousing lot came from.
Now that’s what I call a soundtrack of however revolutions per minute takes your fancy!
The 85th anniversary This Land T-shirt is available exclusively from the self-styled ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ aka Philosophy Football here
