"This Land is Your Land"

" This Land is Your Land"

originally titled

"God Blessed America"

John Steinbeck wrote:

"Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of the people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit."

(But has the American Spirit risen above petty bickering such as THIS?)

In the fall of 1952, doctors at Brooklyn State Hospital diagnosed Woody with Huntington's Chorea, a fatal hereditary degenerative disease affecting the nervous system. At the time, he did not fully accept this diagnosis and would check himself in and out of the hospital to wander New York as he had for over a decade.

Then in May 1956, he was involuntarily committed to Greystone Park, a mental institution where he remained for the next five years as he worsened. In the late 1950s, an admirer named Bob Gleason would pick Woody up on the weekends and take him to East Orange, New Jersey. It was there that Bob Dylan came to meet Woody in early 1961.

Woody's songs achieved a wider audience than ever before, inspiring Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Pete Seeger, Mary Travers, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Arlo Guthrie, Donovan, The Grateful Dead, and Bruce Springsteen

As well known is Woody,

there are few that recognize his children's songs.

Have all the parents of toddlers recognized "Ride in the Car"

from whence "Riding on the Bus" came?

Woody Guthrie!