This Land is Your Land

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Woody Guthrie wrote America’s alternate national anthem out of pure irritation. In the winter of 1940, hitchhiking to New York, he heard Kate Smith’s “God Bless America” playing seemingly everywhere — and, finding it smug, scrawled his rebuttal in a cheap Times Square hotel. His original title? “God Blessed America for Me,” each verse ending with that sarcastic refrain before he later swapped in “This land was made for you and me.” The tune wasn’t new: Guthrie borrowed it from the Carter Family’s “When the World’s on Fire,” which itself came from an old Baptist hymn. And here’s the part most people never learned in school: Guthrie’s original included pointed verses — one about a “Private Property” sign whose blank back side “was made for you and me,” another about hungry people lined up at the relief office. Those verses were quietly dropped from songbooks and most recordings, and generations of schoolchildren sang a tamer song than the one Woody wrote. The folk revival brought it roaring back — Peter, Paul and Mary made it a staple of their concerts, harmonizing Woody’s plainspoken anthem into something soaring. One last twist worthy of this song about who owns what: in 2016, lawyers challenged the song’s copyright, arguing it belongs to the public domain. The case settled without a clear ruling — so the ownership of “This Land Is Your Land” remains, fittingly, contested ground.