I’ve been noodling around with a new stanza for This Land is Your Land.

It’s been on my mind lately because I was listening to it this week. I know some of the song’s history but I read up on it a bit more this week, especially the alternative lyrics. I always find alternative lyrics (of any song) to be completely fascinating, and in the folk tradition it’s almost unheard of for a song to have gone untouched in all its incarnations.

This song stays true to that tradition, primarily due to the “censored” lyrics about private property and the relief office. If you haven’t yet seen them, do yourself a favor and check them out. What’s striking to me is that this song has actually seen remarkably few modifications over the years, especially given its towering place in American musical history. Of particular note: it saw something of a revival in the 60s during the civil rights movement, when musicians were scrambling all over themselves to release a rendition of the song. But the text itself doesn’t seem to bear any marks of that history. The political overtones are decidedly about inequality and community - themes of great importance to the civil rights movement to be sure, but also themes that preceded it.

I don’t know why, but over the last few days I’ve been thinking that something needs to be done. The song is long overdue for an addition, particularly one which speaks to our reckoning with the original sin of white supremacy. Particularly now!

It was only natural, for me anyway, to think about this song alongside the I Have a Dream speech - close textual analysis of that speech is something of an obsession of mine. Moreover the two works share a lot in common: not just themes of community and a reckoning with the promise of America; also some rather wonderful images of natural beauty, particularly having to do with water.

Of course I also sought to write something which harmonized with the other stanzas. I wanted it to fit the melody, as well as the story - I wanted it to feel something like part of a wide-ranging ramble across the country, told in the first person, with reference to a whole nation of unnamed fellow country-folk. I think of it fitting just after the “relief office” stanza, in which “my people” make their first appearance. But this new stanza is also meant to allude to that mysterious “voice” in the third and fourth stanzas (“A voice was sounding..”, etc.).

Here is what I have so far:

At the jails and the borders, by the muddy waters,

I heard them praying, I heard them dreaming,

Red valley rivers becoming mighty streams,

Could this land be made for you and me?

If it’s not already clear, this stanza is meant as overt social commentary, particularly with regards to the prison industrial complex and so on. But I didn’t pick those issues out of a hat: jails and borders, in my view, are in some ways just flip sides of the same coin, things that segment people off from one another. I hope to ask the question: how are jails and borders similar? Typically we think of our national borders as keeping people out - but do they really just wind up imprisoning us in a particular mindset? How does that distort the way we think about this land, its people, and who it was “made” for? How does that make us free?

The image of a “mighty stream” is one I lifted directly from King’s speech (which he lifted from the prophet Amos). I like it so much because it is triumphant - whereas Guthrie’s “relief office” stanza is just about despondent. The “red valley rivers” was inspired by King’s “red hills”, and of course prayers and dreams were no small part of his text, either. I really like the idea of juxtaposing a sentiment of joyful triumph in common struggle, alongside that of the earlier stanza.

Alas, “mighty streams” ends on a stressed syllable, which makes this line somewhat of a mismatch with Guthrie’s overall metrical scheme - originally I had hoped for this line to be the second line of the stanza rather than the third. I couldn’t think of a way to make that work metrically, which is why the lines appear as they do. It’s actually rather lucky. As the stanza stands, it creates a kind of metaphor, of prayers and dreams of many downtrodden people joining together like the tributaries of a mighty stream. It unites the idea of community, justice, and land, into a nice image. I certainly hadn’t intended it to come out that way, but I’m glad it did!

I hope that on the whole the effect was respectful and additive. No one will ever accuse me of being any kind of singer-songwriter, or a great orator. I’m a software developer, which means I never think of any text as finished: everything is a work in progress. Hence my fascination with alternate lyrics. I’ve certainly enjoyed exploring these great works in this way.