Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (14 July 1912 – 3 October 1967) was a prolific American folk musician, most famous for his song "This Land Is Your Land" (1940).

Quotes

My eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been my messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls...

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don't give a darn. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.
- Message on mimeographed copies of lyrics distributed to fans in the 1930s, as quoted by Pete Seeger in an NPR interview "Pete Seeger remembers Woody" (1996)

Ever'body might be just one big soul,
Well it looks that a-way to me.
Everywhere that you look, in the day or night,
That's where I'm a-gonna be, Ma,
That's where I'm a-gonna be.
Wherever little children are hungry and cry,
Wherever people ain't free.
Wherever men are fightin' for their rights,
That's where I'm a-gonna be, Ma.
That's where I'm a-gonna be.
- "Tom Joad" (1940), a ballad based on the character Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

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
God blessed America for me.
- Final stanza of manuscript notes for "God Blessed America" which later became "This Land Is Your Land" (23 February 1940)

All you can write is what you see.
- Comment written on his first manuscript notes for "God Blessed America" (23 February 1940); quoted in Woody Guthrie: A Life (1981) by Joe Klein, p. 136

THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.
- A message he would variously write or post on his guitar, beginning in 1941.

I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind
- "Pastures of Plenty" (1941)

I'm blowing, and just as wild and whirling as you are, and lots of times I've been picked up, throwed down, and picked up; but my eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been my messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls...
- Bound For Glory (1943). QUoted in Kinney, David (2014). The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob. Simon and Schuster. p. 40. ISBN 978-1-4516-2693-3.

I'm gonna tell all you fascists, you may be surprised
People all over this world are getting organized
You're bound to lose
You fascists are bound to lose

Race hatred cannot stop us, this one thing I know
Poll tax and Jim Crow and greed have got to go
You're bound to lose
You fascists are bound to lose

...

People of every color marching side by side
Marching across these fields where a million fascists died
You're bound to lose
You fascists are bound to lose

...

I'm going into this battle, take my union gun
Gonna end this world of slavery before this war is won
You're bound to lose
You fascists are bound to lose
- All You Fascists (1944)

I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that — I use to wonder if it wouldn't be better just to haul off and quit hoping. Just protect my own inner brain, my own mind and heart, by drawing it up into a hard knot, and not having any more hopes or dreams at all. Pull in my feelings, and call back all of my sentiments — and not let any earthly event move me in either direction, either cause me to hate, to fear, to love, to care, to take sides, to argue the matter at all — and, yet … there are certain good times, and pleasures that I never can forget, no matter how much I want to, because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me.
And these pleasures that you cannot ever forget are the yeast that always starts working in your mind again, and it gets in your thoughts again, and in your eyes again, and then, all at once, no matter what has happened to you, you are building a brand new world again, based and built on the mistakes, the wreck, the hard luck and trouble of the old one.
- "Notes about Music" (29 March 1946) also quoted in A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (2000) by Bryan K. Garman, p. 244

No matter how bad the wicked world has hurt you, in the long run, there is something gained, and it is all for the best … The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine, a working machine, and any song that says, the pleasures I have seen in all of my trouble, are the things I never can get — don't worry — the human race will sing this way as long as there is a human to race.
The human race is a pretty old place.
- "Notes about Music" (29 March 1946) also quoted in Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (2004) by Ed Cray

Let me be known as just the man that told you something you already knew.
- "Notes about Music" (29 March 1946), quoted in "Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie : American Proghet-singers and their People" in: Journal of American Studies (April 1990), p. 55

Okemah was one of the singiest, square dancingest, drinkingest, yellingest, preachingest, walkingest, talkingest, laughingest, cryingest, shootingest, fist fightingest, bleedingest, gamblingest, gun, club and razor carryingest of our ranch towns and farm towns, because it blossomed out into one of our first Oil Boom Towns.
- Pastures Of Plenty: A Self Portrait (1990), p. 3

I ain't a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life.
- As quoted in "Woody Guthrie" by Steve Earle in The Nation (21 July 2003)

I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. … I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.
I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.
And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you've not any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.
- Statement quoted in Prophet Singer: The Voice And Vision of Woody Guthrie (2007) by Mark Allan Jackson. There are a few slight variants of this statement, which seems to have originated in a performance monologue.

This Land Is Your Land (1940; 1944)

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land is made for you and me.

"This Land Is Your Land" was written primarily on 23 February 1940 as "God Blessed America", but was not recorded until 1944, after the title and a few of the lyrics were altered. Significant variations exist among various published and recorded versions of the song. - Full lyrics at Wikisource

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land is made for you and me.

As I go walking this ribbon of highway
I see above me the endless skyway
And all around me the wind keeps saying:
This land is made for you and me.

When the sun came shining as I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice come chanting:
This land was made for you and me.
- This is one of the more variable of the stanzas; other renditions include:
  - Where the wind is blowing I go a strolling
    The wheat field waving and the dust clouds rolling
    The fog is lifting and the wind is saying:
    This land is made for you and me.
  - The sun comes shining as I was strolling,
    The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
    The fog was lifting as a voice come chanting:
    This land was made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me
As I go walking my freedom highway
Nobody living can make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
- The last line of this last stanza is also sometimes rendered "This land is made for you and me."

Quotes about This Land is Your Land

This Land is My Land (1993), a picture book written and illustrated by the Canadian Cree artist George Littlechild, ... refers to Woody Guthrie's Depression-era song, "This Land Is Your Land," which is far from an unproblematic expression of patriotic love for country but (especially in its seldom-sung fourth and sixth verses) ironizes the line "This land was made for you and me" by pointing to distinctions between those who have access to the bounty of the land and those who do not. Through his intertextual reference to Woody Guthrie's song, Littlechild acknowledges traditions of resistance in white culture, even as he draws attention to the effects of colonization upon Native Americans.
- Clare Bradford, Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature, p. 20

The Columbia River Collection (1941)

Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done

Also known as "The Great Historical Bum" · Full text online

I'm just a lonesome traveler, The Great Historical Bum.
Highly educated from history I have come.
I built the Rock of Ages, 'twas in the Year of One
And that was about the biggest thing that man had ever done.
I worked in the Garden of Eden, that was the year of two,
Joined the apple pickers union, I always paid my due;
I'm the man that signed the contract to raise the rising sun,
And that was about the biggest thing that man had ever done

I'd better quit my talking, 'cause I told you all I know,
But please remember, pardner, wherever you may go,
The people are building a peaceful world, and when the job is done
That'll be the biggest thing that man has ever done.
- Variant: The world is digging, slavery's grave and when the job is done
  This'll be the biggest thing that man has ever done.

I better quit my talking now; I told you all I know,
But please remember, pardner, wherever you may go,
I'm older than your old folks, and I'm younger than the young,
And I'm about the biggest thing that man has ever done.

Quotes about Guthrie

Sorted alphabetically by author or source

As I drove across the New Mexico Painted Desert, I found myself singing softly, "This land is your land, this land is my land...," the Woody Guthrie alternative anthem that was enjoying a revived popularity. It made me think, no, this is not your land. I was driving through the Navajo Nation as a guest, not an owner. I wondered how the Navajos or other Indians would feel about that song.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Outlaw Woman (2001)

[Guthrie's songs] made my head spin[,] made me want to gasp. ... He was so poetic and tough and rhythmic. ... The songs themselves, his repertoire, were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them. ... For me it was an epiphany... I could sing all these songs, every single one of them and they were all that I wanted to sing. It was like I had been in the dark and someone had turned on the main switch of a lightning conductor.
- Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (2004), pp. 243–245

Guthrie, he had a particular sound. And besides that, he said something to go along with his sound. That was highly unusual to my ears. He was a radical, his songs had a radical slant. I thought, "Ooh", you know, like... "That's what I want to sing. I want to sing that." I couldn't believe that I'd never heard of this man. You could listen to his songs, and actually learn how to live.
- Bob Dylan, in No Direction Home (2005)

Woody Guthrie was what folks who don't believe in anything would call an anomaly. Admittedly, the intersection of space and time at the corner of July 14, 1912, and Okemah, Oklahoma, was a long shot to produce anything like a national treasure.
Woody was born in one of the most desolate places in America, just in time to come of age in the worst period in our history. … He became the living embodiment of everything a people's revolution is supposed to be about: that working people have dignity, intelligence and value above and beyond the market's demand for their labor. … For me personally, Woody is my hero of heroes and the only person on earth that I will go to my grave regretting that I never met.
- Steve Earle, in "Woody Guthrie" in The Nation (21 July 2003)

Of course I remember when I was a little kid, I started writing my songs, my dad took me aside one time, and said "Arlo, you know if you can't be great, it's better to belong." I'm still thinking about that.
- Arlo Guthrie, during the recording of the 40th Anniversary performance of Alice's Restaurant; partly a pun on how Alice's Restaurant is nearly 20 minutes or longer each time he performs it.

Now they sing out his praises on every distant shore,
But so few remember what he was fightin' for.
Oh why sing the songs and forget about the aim,
He wrote them for a reason, why not sing them for the same?
And now he's bound for a glory all his own,
And now he's bound for glory.
- Phil Ochs, in "Bound For Glory (The Story of Woody Guthrie)" (1963)

I remember the night he wrote the song "Tom Joad." He said, "Pete, do you know where I can get a typewriter?"
I said, "I'm staying with someone who has one."
"Well, I got to write a ballad," he said. "I don't usually write ballads to order, but Victor wants me to do a whole album of Dust Bowl songs, and they say they want one about Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath." … Woody had a half-gallon jug of wine with him, sat down and started typing away. He would stand up every few seconds and test out a verse on his guitar and sit down and type some more. About one o'clock my friend and I got so sleepy we couldn't stay awake. In the morning we found Woody curled up on the floor under the table; the half gallon of wine was almost empty and the completed ballad was sitting near the typewriter.
And it is one of his masterpieces.
- Pete Seeger, in The Incompleat Folksinger (1972), p. 44

We must look beyond the songs to find the full importance of Woody Guthrie. As a song-maker, he has earned the stature he deserves. But his reputation as a writer, poet and philosopher is still underground and must he brought into the light. When his songs, poems, and essays are studied in our American literature classes, this omission may be righted.
- Robert Shelton, in his introduction to Born To Win (1967) by Woody Guthrie

Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of the people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.
- John Steinbeck, as quoted in Woody Guthrie: A Life (1981) by Joe Klein, p. 160

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