Pete Seeger - "This Land Is Your Land" (Unreleased) [Official Audio]

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Hear a previously unreleased live version of Woody Guthrie's folk anthem "This Land Is Your Land," performed by Pete Seeger during a show at the University of Tulsa in 1976. His rendition is part of a six-disc anthology project 'The Smithsonian Folkways Collection,' and it's one of 19 previously unreleased songs in the collection.

'Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection' released by Smithsonian Folkways on May 3, 2019.

Stream/download/purchase:
Smithsonian Folkways: https://folkways.si.edu/pete-seeger/the-smithsonian-folkways-collection
Bandcamp: https://peteseeger.bandcamp.com/album/the-smithsonian-folkways-collection

During his travels in early 1940, Woody Guthrie kept hearing Kate Smith’s patriotic “God Bless America” played on the jukebox everywhere he went. Listening to the imagery in Irving Berlin’s lyrics, Woody felt the song did not speak to the Americans he knew and the things that he had seen in his travels all over the land. He sat down and wrote his own song, originally called “God Blessed America,” which described his picture of America from “California to the New York Island.” Now known as “This Land Is Your Land,” the song has almost become a secondary national anthem sung by school children all over the country. If you ask someone who Woody Guthrie was and get a blank stare, ask again and say, “This Land Is Your Land.” Then you will hear, “Oh, yeah I know that. He’s the guy who wrote it?” Two of the original verses—which are political commentary about the Great Depression—are often left out when sung today. One verse mentions people waiting in “bread lines”; another refers to a “sign that said private property, on the back side it didn’t say nothing, that side was made for you and me.” What Pete sings here includes those two verses.

Pete Seeger
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