“This Land is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie with Pete Seeger

Woody Guthrie wrote "This Land Is Your Land" in 1940 as a pointed reply to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America", a song he had grown tired of hearing Kate Smith sing over the radio. His first title for it, "God Blessed America for Me", dripped with sarcasm, and he borrowed the melody from a Carter Family tune, "When the World's on Fire". The take counted here comes from the 1999 set America! A Celebration of Freedom From Our Nation's Finest.

The sly part is how plain it sounds, a tune simple enough for any schoolroom carrying an argument with a patriotic anthem. Songbooks spread it from the mid-1940s on, and the familiar short version first reached wax on a Folkways 10-inch in 1951. A 1947 Asch recording entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1989, the Library of Congress added the song to the National Recording Registry in 2002, and Rolling Stone later placed it at 11 among the best protest songs.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.