This Land is still Your Land
FEBRUARY 21, 2025
Mark Perryman celebrates the 85th anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s anthem.
On Sunday, 23rd February 2025, it will be the 85th anniversary of Woody Guthrie writing his anthemic This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land. Ever since, it has been sung out loud and proud as an American, global, song of resistance quite like almost none other.
February 1940: the United States hadn’t yet entered World War Two; that wouldn’t come for almost another two years following Imperial Japan’s deadly air attack on the US naval base, Pearl Harbor. Nazi Germany was in the process of taking all of Europe by Blitzkrieg. The Soviet Union was quelled by the shameful, and to prove treacherous, Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.
While US President Roosevelt’s sympathies were with Churchill and the British armed forces leading the resistance both in Europe and South-East Asia, American support was purely economic, transactional lend-lease and of entirely financial benefit to US business. American public opinion was for non-intervention, appeasement. But for a section of the American right it went further. Just like the Daily Mail’s notorious front page “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”, this is a moment where there are many in America who resent being reminded that a year before Woody penned his song, 20,000 American Nazis filled the famous Madison Square Garden, sieg-heiling their American support for Hitler to a huge backdrop of George Washington squeezed between two equally large Swastika flags.
Such was the context of This Land Is Your Land. In Mike Marqusee’s brilliant book Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art (updated and expanded as Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and The 1960s) Mike provides the details of Woody’s authorship including the missing lines ‘purged’ from the more sanitised version that has become popular ever after.
A big high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property”
And
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
This land was made for you and me.
One can scarcely imagine Vance, adding such lines to his Hillbilly Elegy soundtrack. And there lies, in Woody’s and our time, the falsehoods, but dangerously successful populist right appeal of Trumpian and Faragist versions.
Mike Marqusee is much missed by many, including myself. He was that very rare kind, a public intellectual, a hugely creative political organiser – at the height of opposition to the Iraq War, only Mike would have the idea and the ability to organise an Iraq v USA football match; Philosophy Football (of course) provided the kits. He was a gloriously gifted writer who was as at ease writing about Dylan, his Jewish identity, Muhammad Ali and most of all his quixotically American love of cricket, as about Labour Party politics.
It is his take on the latter that helps explains Mike’s disavowal of one particular accolade This Land is often accorded: “The song combines a sense of longing and belonging, and has been cursed with the soubriquet of the ‘alternative national anthem’.”
By political inclination I’m a pluralist. I have simply no interest in a political culture founded on the pressing need for all of us hankering after a label, ‘left’ or Labour, for want of any other, to entirely agree with one another and exclude those with whom we don’t. In my experience, I learn just as much engaging with those I don’t share wholehearted agreement with as those with whom I do. I would often debate with Mike his rejection of the national popular, in particular Englishness, a position he waggishly entitled “Anyone but England”. His position was far more illuminating and instructive than Sir Keir’s entirely performative ‘progressive patriotism’, never to be articulated without a Union Jack draped somewhere or other in the camera shot.
However, this rejection of the national popular, if you like, This Land as an ‘alternative national anthem’, reflects a broader rebuttal of a Gramscian (yes, yes, Philosophy Football do a Gramsci T-shirt too) politics that focuses on popular culture as an absolutely central site where ideas are contested and changed. It’s a focus that recognises and doesn’t downgrade the meaning given to our nation for many which is key to this. In this sense the very special power of This Land is that it is both, and at the same time, universal and very distinctly American.
And it is this mix, the national, the popular and the radical that framed future generations who sang in the different ways of who their land belonged to: Simone, Dylan and Baez via Patti Smith, the Clash, the Specials. Billy Bragg, to new-generation minstrels of change, Grace Petrie, Joe Solo and Calum Baird, with plenty more where that rebel-rousing lot came from. Now that’s what I call a soundtrack of however many revolutions per minute takes your fancy.
Mark Perryman is the co-founder of Philosophy Football.
The 85th anniversary This Land T-shirt is available exclusively from the self-styled ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ aka Philosophy Football here

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