This Land Is Your Land

 On another of my Wild Google Chases,  I ended up in Dickinson, North Dakota.   I had heard the the school population there was exploding due to the incoming pipeline worker families.

What I hadn't anticipated is how beautiful the area was.

 Immediately, the song "This Land Is Your Land" started playing in my head.

 The rolling Great Plains are truly gorgeous.

 And the hay rolls.

 They seem almost artistically placed in the field.

 It is such a peaceful setting, as opposed to the hustle-bustle of Southern California where I live.

 I spent four years of my childhood in Grand Forks, North Dakota.   While I love where I live now, I should take the time to make it back to the center of this country once in awhile. 

 This lead me to look into Woody Guthrie.  I've always been aware that he wrote "This Land Is Your Land",  but I knew very little about Woody himself.

It appears he was a bit of an activist.   When he originally wrote This Land on February 23, 1940 in his room in the Hanover House Hotel at 101 West 43rd Street while he was staying in New York City,   he included a number of verses with political leanings.

He set the song aside and didn't think about it for a few years.

In March 1944, he cleaned up the lyrics a bit, removed the political verses, added the classic line 'This land was made for you and me", and recorded the song.

This original recording is in the hands of the Smithsonian now, as it should be.

Woody was born and raised in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma to working class parents.   His mother Nora was committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane when he was 14.

What they didn't know at the time was that her deteriorating mental condition was due to Huntington's Disease.  This is an inherited disease, and offspring have a 50% chance of having it.

Years later in the 1950s,  Woody was afflicted with the disease himself.  By the time it became evident he had the disease, he had eight children.  His first two daughters went on to have the disease also,  his first son died early in an auto accident, and I haven't tracked down most of his other children.  Another son, Arlo Guthrie, also became a famous songwriter.

By 1956 at the age of 44,  Woody was hospitalized due to the disease and eventually had to point at cards to communicate with his family and hospital staff.  He died in 1967 at the age of 55.