This Land Is Your Land: the lost verses

Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine/The Nightwatchman) and friends sang This Land Is Your Land at a rally in Wisconsin last week for the protesters, public and private employees, who want to kill the union-busting bill.  The whole video is worth it, but if you're in a rush start at 4:20.

Mahlon Mitchell, President of the Wisconsin Professional Firefighters Association on Democracy Now Friday morning, talked about himself and 60 firefighters sleeping in the capital rotunda alongside 600 protesters, even though their union is exempt from the bill: 

"Well, it just shows how important union work is and how important the union is to the middle class. There is not one employee, public employee, state, municipal, local employee, firefighter, police officer teacher, that does their job to get rich. We don’t do our job to get rich. We do our job to have a decent life, to have a decent middle-class family and not have to struggle like a lot of our other people do. Well, what this bill will in essence do is bring the middle class back down lower. And that’s really where the Governor wants and the corporate backers want us, so that we’d have less power and we have less influence on elections. So this is not about just unionism. This is about an attack on the middle class. This is about Wisconsinites, and this is a hard-working Midwest state, and we need unions to help take care of our middle class."

 Video Interview, which I highly recommend.  I think we'd all be better off if we reminded ourselves that we must share this country, it belongs to us all, "us" being a very general term; and we need to make room for everyone to retain their individual potential.  It's not a race to first place, it's a society.  The bottom-line is that you (meaning everyone) should be worried about the middle-class shrinking. How are we doing with that?  Glad you asked.

More about the song, after the jump (because originally this was a music post).

The song, usually heard sung by children singing the first few verses, is by folk-great Woody Guthrie.

I must admit I first heard of Guthrie as a college kid listening to the Anti-Flag song This Machine Kills Fascists, whose title is a reference to the slogan Guthrie often displayed on his acoustic guitar. (It also happens to be one of my favorite pictures of all time.)  And much to my chagrin, I don't know much more about him than that. In fact, I have almost total ignorance of folk music as a tool of political dissent, although it's been a powerful one in both the U.S. and the UK since the 1930s -- this is embarrassing to me. Maybe I'll start here. 

I should note that whether the seldom sung verses were in the original song or not is up for debate. However, the debate may be pointless since Guthrie sang different lyrics at different times, which apparently is a thing folk singers did.