Woody Guthrie at 100: American struggles and dreams

It’s not widely known that Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” — a song written in 1940 that would later become a grade-school classic — was written as a rejoinder to another American standard, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” a song that gained currency in pre-World War II America.

Guthrie, who would have turned 100 this week, felt Berlin’s song was overly patriotic and didn’t address the struggles and dreams of the ordinary Americans he knew, says Jeff Place, archivist for the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. And so Guthrie penned “This Land” (originally titled “God Blessed America”) as a retort that emphasized the country’s shared resources and egalitarianism, and included verses such as this that would cheer populists (not to mention today’s Occupy movement):

Woody Guthrie at 100

(Courtesy of Shore Fire Media) - Cover art for the Smithsonian Folkways album ‘Woody At 100.’

As I went walking I saw a sign there

And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”

But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,

That side was made for you and me.

Although “This Land is Your Land,” is Guthrie’s most famous song, he is also responsible for thousands of others, an autobiography (“Bound for Glory”) and scads of paintings and drawings. The entire scope of his relatively brief career — Guthrie’s prime period of productivity lasted little more than a decade — is given a loving and thoughtful overview in the just-released, “Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection,” a handsome book produced by Smithsonian Folkways and curated by Place and Robert Santelli.

In addition to many previously unseen photographs of Guthrie and images of his typed and often revised lyrics, the collection contains three CDs with dozens of Guthrie’s recordings, including six original songs that have not been heard before and 21 previously unreleased performances. It’s a sumptuous summation of a career that has affected and shaped American music for generations. And it is one of the highlights of a year-long celebration of Guthrie that will feature tribute concerts all over the world, including one by his granddaughter, Sarah Lee Guthrie, in Washington on Tuesday, and a birthday concert on Saturday by the U-Liners and Magpie at the Takoma Park Civic Auditorium. A high-profile Guthrie tribute will take place at the Kennedy Center on Oct. 14.

“All different genres of music encounter those who are solar flares,” Place says. “People who changed the music entirely — Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Jimi Hendrix. They are there for a brief period of time and change things entirely. Everything is different after them, and Woody Guthrie is like that. Topical songwriting is based on his model.”

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Okla. He died in 1967 at 55, felled by Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative genetic disorder that wore him down physically and mentally in the last third of his life. But in the prime of his career, from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, Guthrie produced songs that would define the era, songs that spoke to the hardships of Depression-era America, Dust Bowl refugees, migrant workers, labor strife, racial inequity, economic justice and war.