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The best songwriters of all time (28): Woody Guthrie
The most influential folk singer in America described his way of working as follows. “If I want to write a song and have the words on paper, I look around and look for a melody that has already demonstrated its attractiveness among the audience.”
Woody Guthrie, the son of a comparatively well-heighted family in Oklahoma, but radicalized by the Great Depression, rattled the entire US music tradition for usable melodies. Whether country, gospel, blues or Novelty song. All sources were right for him to give his socially critical songs the necessary smile.
“This is Your Land”:
“This Land is Your Land”, which he took out from the merchant in 1940 on a home leave, was melodic in an old gospel song called “Oh My Loving Brother”. The spectrum of his music soon knew no limits. Guthrie wrote children’s songs, songs for the Jewish Chanukka festival and songs for the unions. He celebrated the “Outlaw” Jesus and the US troops in World War II.
And he denounced Charles Lindbergh as a Nazi sympathizer. He could not help even a song about flying saucers. Guthries music, Dylan wrote in his Chronicles, “had the long breath of humanity”.
Woody Guthrie described Trump as racists 65 years ago
In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed the lease for a new apartment in the New York district of Brooklyn. Now, more than half a century later, this contract causes a stir.
How will Kaufman, professor in American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire, In the event of research The man who wrote “This Land is Your Land” put his name next to that of Donald Trump’s father. At the time, Fred Trump had the residential building in which the folk musician lived for two years. That alone may not be worth mentioning, but that the relationship between Guthrie and his landlord was anything but rosy. At that time, Woody Guthrie described him as racists-even today, 65 years later, Fred’s son Donald Trump is also accused of stir up racism within the American society. Particularly strange: he even proudly emphasizes to continue the values conveyed by his father.
Guthrie noticed how people were marginalized in his apartment block due to their skin color – Trump did not accept black tenants. In Woody Guthrie’s diaries, writings were recently discovered on how he tried to stop the exclusion in order to create a heterogeneous community.
In a poem it says:
I Suppose
Old Man Trump Knows
Just how much
Racial hate
He Stirred Up
In the Bloodpot of Human Hearts
When hey drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen Hundred Family Project….
Another poem is:
Beach haven ain’t my home!
I just Cain’t Pay This Rent!
My Money’s Down the Drain!
And my soul is Badly Bent!
Beach Haven Looks Like Heaven
Where No Black Ones Come to Roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t My Home!
Donald Trump did not rest in his father’s medium-sized company, but began to build luxury buildings, hotels and golf courses. In 2015, however, he said in an interview with the “Washington Post“:” My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy. ” Guthrie would therefore probably have despised the presidential candidate Trump for his aggressive attitude.