This Land is Your Land

Guthrie first recorded it in the spring of 1944 for Moe Asch. That recording included the “private property” verse but not the verse about a relief office, and it was not released at the time; Smithsonian archivist Jeff Place heard the acetate master again in 1997, and the recording was added to the National Recording Registry in 2002. The first release came in 1951, on the Folkways LP This Land Is My Land: American Work Songs (FP 27), in a shorter version without the two more pointed verses, which are the ones most often left out when the song is sung. It was never a radio hit: it spread by being sung in camps, classrooms and small gatherings, and in the 1960s the folk revival took it up, with recordings by Peter, Paul and Mary (1962), the Kingston Trio and others.

Flatt and Scruggs recorded it on 18 October 1967 at Columbia Studio A in Nashville for Changin’ Times (Columbia CL 2796, released 6 January 1968). Lester Flatt sang lead, with Earl Scruggs on banjo, Randy Scruggs on guitar, Josh Graves on dobro, Jake Tullock on bass and Charlie McCoy on harmonica. The album was part of Scruggs’s move to add songs by Bob Dylan and others to the group’s repertoire; Flatt, a traditionalist, did not care for the change, and the duo broke up in 1969.