#969. Lineage of Song: “This Land Is Your Land”

 

“When the World’s On Fire,” Carter Family

Woody Guthrie 

Bing Crosby

Bruce Springsteen

Obviously still on my A Complete Unknown high, I came up with this post, this is the song Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger pretends to sing innocently (and here I really am just realizing the subversiveness about Bob Dylan Seeger eventually completely forgets is in the spirit of what Seeger himself is doing at the start of the movie and in the spirit of the man who wrote this song, and the song itself, differentiated mostly because Dylan is fighting to be himself).

“This Land Is Your Land” is probably Woody Guthrie’s most successful song. It sounds plainly patriotic in the chorus, but when you get into the meat of it (it’s not as clear cut as Springsteen’s later “Born in the U.S.A.”) you realize Guthrie is protesting private despoiling of the country’s natural bounties (specifically when he reaches a fence). Guthrie became an icon best known by reputation and name rather than his bountiful output, so it certainly needs reminding that he really does have an iconic song to his credit. If there’s a failing to Complete Unknown, it’s that it doesn’t make it explicit that Seeger is using the song in a roundabout ironic fashion. Really, it’s the lynchpin to the whole movie. Once you see it you realize the depth of it. It’s one thing to see Dylan visiting Guthrie at the clinic repeatedly, another to realize that it becomes symbolic of the private lives they’re leading. Anyway, that title has a lot of context.