When Jennifer Lopez sang Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” at the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden in January of this year, it marked the latest use of a much-contested song. Written by Guthrie in 1940, “This Land” has traveled that ribbon of highway far and wide through American culture. As his daughter Nora wrote in the Foreword to a book about Guthrie’s composition, “It’s a song that seems to be open to all kinds of interpretations and manipulations.” In that same book, museum curator and historian Robert Santelli describes “This Land Is Your Land” as a “musical mixed message.” Often (mis)understood as an easy-going, inclusive singalong celebrating the United States as a land of opportunity, Guthrie’s song is in fact a far more complex, strange, even troubling entity.
From its inception to its latest iterations, “This Land” raises as many questions as it provides easy affirmations. If this song has become a kind of alternative national anthem, it’s a funny sort of one. Which nation, exactly, does it represent? Whose land? What state is sovereign here, if any? Who is the “you and me” in the song? And as “This Land” becomes anthemic, this has only made visible more issues: can an alternative national anthem truly exist? Can such a song slip the knot of patriotic jingoism? Can it fly a musical flag of more flickering potential? Or does it just get folded into official use, appropriated by the very forces it seeks to oppose? “This Land Is Your Land” seems like an intriguingly destabilizing anthem, one that might undercut assertions of uncritical nationalism. This is its great promise. Yet the dangers of “This Land” settling into static and conservative signification persist.
Examining the song’s origins reveals its differences from a typical national anthem. “This Land” began as a satire of Irving Berlin’s maudlin, exceptionalist ballad “God Bless America.” It was an “answer song” that challenged the straightforward, even smug assumptions of Berlin’s tune, which Guthrie loathed. Written in 1918 during US involvement in World War I, “God Bless America” did not gain mass popularity until Berlin resuscitated it during the growing tensions leading up to World War II. In 1938, Kate Smith, a young singer known as the “First Lady of the Radio” and “Songbird of the South,” recorded it. “God Bless America” blared out of jukeboxes and radios (and even on cinema newsreels) in the late 1930s and early 1940s. For Guthrie, hearing the song constantly as he headed to New York City from Pampa, Texas, in search of the next phase of his musical career, it was ultimately “just another of those songs that told people not to worry, that God was in the driver’s seat.”
Guthrie’s answer was originally titled, sardonically, “God Blessed America for Me.” It lampoons the easy patriotism of Berlin’s song. The original closing line of each verse mocked the idea that God had done any such thing. In this sense “This Land” began its life most of all as a song of doubt: about the politics of the United States, about a divine power, and particularly about whether a divine power was guiding the fate of the United States. In the context of the Great Depression, Berlin’s “God Bless America” seemed to shoot the opiate of the masses—religion—right into the veins of the body politic. Guthrie even penned a verse, later dropped by adopters of the song but never entirely forgotten, about the flaws of private property and economic inequality in 1930s America. He expressed a profound skepticism about the United States. Was this land really made for you and me?