Mark Knows It All

My Seraphim Chorus is doing a Summer of Love, Music of the 60’s concert in June. One of the concert selections is Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie’s folk song standard This Land Is Your Land. It is a boffo arrangement that elevates it more than a tad beyond some of the hokey versions many of us sang in our high school choir days. Sometimes a song has been performed badly for so long, to hear it done well is almost like a re-introduction. This is one of those songs. I was curious as to the song’s back story, so I did a little research. It was written by Woody Guthrie in 1940 as a backlash of sorts to Kate Smith’s version of God Bless America . He felt the Irving Berlin standard did not ring true to his vision of the spirit of America, and I suspect neither did Kate Smith. He put his lyrics to the tune of an old Baptist Gospel Hymn entitled Oh My Loving Brother and made famous by the 1930 Carter Family recording re-named When the World’s on Fire . You can follow the sequence from Kate