realthog: (Default)
realthog ([personal profile] realthog) wrote2009-01-19 10:34 pm

if you watch only one music video all year . . .


. . . make sure it's this one. At yesterday's inaugural bash in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Pete Seeger (for whom it must feel like he's reaching a destination at the end of a tortuously twisting road it's taken him a lifetime to walk), Bruce Springsteen and Seeger's grandson Tao Rodriguez-Seeger sing Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" complete with three of Guthrie's verses that're almost always censored out because "too politically controversial".

Hard to watch with a dry eye. We've all got there at last, folks.

[identity profile] kylecassidy.livejournal.com 2009-01-20 03:51 am (UTC)(link)
about ... 15 years ago i saw pete seeger play at the lincoln memorial. well, to be exact, i was SO FAR BACK that i couldn't see people who were SO FAR from pete that THEY COULDN'T SEE HIM.

big audience. go pete. i have a Weavers cassette around here that I haven't listened to in 20 years. I probably should. thanks for the reminder.

[identity profile] sarcobatus.livejournal.com 2009-01-20 04:55 am (UTC)(link)
Eighty-nine years old! He looks spry.

Thanks for the link, P. I haven't read or heard those verses in a very long time (almost makes me feel as though I need a walker).

[identity profile] tomaq.livejournal.com 2009-01-21 02:03 am (UTC)(link)
I sent it to a friend who said he'd never heard those verses before, even though he'd been singing the better-known ones for 25 years.

Now I understand how Woody Guthrie meant for the song to be a rebuttal to the self-satisfied "God Bless America."