San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
An anthem in tune with the truth
He was short and spindly, and his voice carried a weight belied by his frame.
Ah, the voice. It was warm but rough, as raggedy as the clothes of his subjects — farmworkers, coal miners, Mexican immigrants. The vocals could turn a two-minute song into a Shakespearean tragedy.
Woody Guthrie sang about the poor and dispossessed, his empathy so profound that his voice seemed to crack from the strain of describing their heartache. The songs are Steinbeck novels set to music, filled with hope and sorrow. He even sang about Tom Joad, the tragic hero of “The Grapes of Wrath.”
The songs were simple, but as his folk compatriot, Pete Seeger, once said, “Any damned fool can be complicated. It takes a wise man to be simple.” The songs are no less grand for their simplicity, and like all great compositions, they reverberate long after the last notes have been played. They will last forever.
“His music had the infinite sweep of humanity,” Bob Dylan wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, “Chronicles.”
Just recently, from one end of America to the other, we heard his masterpiece — “This Land is Your Land.” It was during Earth Day, an appropriate occasion to hear a song that expresses boundless love and respect for this land we call home. It is, as the song says,
our land — yours and mine.
“Woody wrote some of the greatest songs about America’s struggle to live up its ideals in convincing fashion,” Bruce Springsteen once said. “He is one of my most important influences and inspirations.”
Plaintive in its call for justice and equality, “This Land is Your Land” is neither angry nor dogmatic. It is also not polemical; its tone, deep and mournful, transcends politics, reflecting none of the socialism that critics have condemned.
He is not saying that the poor and dispossessed should appropriate the property or wealth of others; he is saying that they deserve an equal chance to fulfill the American Dream.
Covered by artists as diverse as Springsteen and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the song is more patriotic than “America the Beautiful” or “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It may be the most radical song in the America canon, for it expresses a deep love for this
country without trying to minimize — or, worse, ignore — its flaws. Guthrie expressed this sentiment with sensitivity, not anger; empathy, not dogma; poetry, not rhetoric.
We are stronger when we overcome our flaws, but we cannot overcome them if we do not acknowledge them. There is no acknowledgment, no penitence, in songs such as “America the Beautiful” and the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” neither of which references the Manifest Destiny that guided the young nation toward its grotesque abuse of Blacks, Native Americans and other minorities. We continue to see, centuries later, the horrors of that “destiny.”
Guthrie took a different approach with “This Land is Your Land,” which is more nuanced and mature and, most of all, honest. It was said to be his response to “America the Beautiful.” He recorded it for Folkway Records in 1941, but it was not released until a decade later; it was worth the wait.
As modest and unadorned as a country road, the song should have been the national anthem. Whatever pride we felt in our country would have been stronger if we felt it without hiding from our past. “This Land is Your Land” confronts our history; the other songs, as iconic as they are, do not.
“I think all the best songs just come out of pure, raw feeling that you can’t quite explain,” Dan Penn, who composed classics such as “Dark End of the Street,” once said of his own compositions. “Everything we get is just a gift we can borrow for awhile.”
Penn could have been talking about Guthrie. If the “troubadour” received the songs as gifts, we will be borrowing them for a long while, especially “This Land is Your Land.” It may never become our national anthem, but it remains anthemic, and that is the next best thing.