FREEDOM HIGHWAY

freedom highway

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

Woody Guthrie got the idea for "This Land is your land" in the winter of 1940, while hitchhiking from Oklahoma to New York City. Irving Berlin's song "God Bless America" from twenty years before had been enjoying new popularity that year, as storm clouds once again gathered "far across the sea". Guthrie reportedly despised the song and seemingly couldn't get away from it the whole trip - car radios, diners, jukeboxes, everybody was playing it. He wrote "This Land is your land" as a counter to "God Bless America" - indeed, his draft title was "God blessed America for me."

There is a tone of defiance which runs through the song, which one can readily hear once familiar with its history as well as the history of Guthrie's life. That America did in fact belong to all Americans was by no means a given in Guthrie's day: he himself was among the "Okies" - migrant workers from the dust bowl - barred from entering Los Angeles to seek work in the 1930s.