[HCCN] Pete Seeger, This Land

[Peter Robbins]

Here is a link to YouTube of Pete Seeger singing This Land, with the  
three "edited" verses of Woody Guthrie that many people are not  
familiar with.
It's wonderful to see Pete Seeger sing out.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg0wiOHc9tI


here is the article that attracted me to locate the video recording  
above (from Cuba, Juventud Rebelde)   ----   Judy R.

JUVENTUD REBELDE
A New US President: Is this Land Really your Land?

By: Juana Carrasco Martín

Email: digi... at jrebelde.cip.cu
2009-01-21 | 14:08:59 EST

http://www.juventudrebelde.co.cu/columnists/2009-01-21/
a-new-us-president-is-this-land-really-your-land/

SPANISH ORIGINAL:
http://www.juventudrebelde.cu/opinion/
2009-01-21/esta-tierra-es-tu-tierra/

Thanks to my friend Walter, I received an article that was published  
January 18 in the Tuscaloosa News newspaper entitled, “This Land Is  
Your Land, Like Woody Wrote It,” a song which is almost a hymn in the  
United States, learnt by children at school and inspiring pride in  
their country.

Legendary folk singer Pete Seeger, at age 89, teamed up with Bruce  
Springsteen to sing the song at a concert on January 18 at Lincoln  
Memorial in Washington, to celebrate the first African-American  
president in the White House. But the great singer, who in the 1960s  
had the world singing Guantanamera composed by Joseíto Fernández with  
verses by José Martí, sent a new message to his people singing three  
verses of This Land is Your Land, written by Woody Guthrie in the  
1930s and inspired by the Great Depression, the hardships suffered by  
his people and his decision to stand up and fight. The song had been  
edited “to make it less political” and censured for many years, the  
Tuscaloosa newspaper reports and Seeger sang it as it had originally  
been written.

«I wasn’t familiar with those verses,” Walter told me, and I felt  
that he would have liked to have been at that concert to  
wholeheartedly sing these lines along with thousands of his fellow  
citizens.

So old man Pete Seeger had the crowd sing the song as it was actually  
written, as not only a celebration of this great land —which no doubt  
it is—, but as a demand for workers' and people's rights. That is, he  
restored the verses that have been censored from the song over the  
years to make it “less political.”

Journalist Tommy Stevenson published the song as it was known and  
sung by Guthrie, who had been persecuted as part of the infamous  
witch hunts of the McCarthy era, and his original version of this  
song had been black listed ignored by the commercial industry.

These are the original verses:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was  
painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn't say  
nothing; That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I  
seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking Is  
this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway;  
Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you  
and me.

The edited verses substitutes ‘private property’ with “no  
trespassing“and instead of “hungry people” in the second verse,  
writes “someone is whispering and someone is asking/Is this land made  
for you and me.” The cry to fight in the last verse was simply  
eliminated.

George W. Bush and his failed eight years in the White House have  
left an economic mess inherited by Barack Obama so bad that we can  
compare these coming years to those of the Great Depression. In his  
opening speech this Tuesday, he spoke about the current economic  
situation and how he has come to the White House with a promise of  
change.

It seems only appropriate that the singer-songwriter recalls that the  
celebrated land, like it or not, is the land that one day really will  
belong to the people, and that is worth fighting for...The Tuscaloosa  
News journalist writes, “It was wonderful to see the gleam in his  
subversive eye as he did his call and response with the throngs in  
front of the Lincoln Memorial... Somewhere Woody - and Leadbelly, and  
Sonny and Cisco and the rest of the great balladeers of that bygone  
era - are smiling tonight.” 
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