Here’s an interesting article about the same musician: https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-07-21/why-woody-guthries-guitar-was-a-fascist-killer.html
Relevant paragraph:
Woody Guthrie’s guitar didn’t kill fascists because it fired bullets. It killed by neutralizing the fascists. Music, like culture, has the power to defeat right-wing extremists and their antidemocratic ideas rooted in xenophobia, racism, homophobia and sexism. Guthrie fought using ideas, language, music and the shared desire to build a better future together.
People should listen to the entirety of Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land rather than the part that’s excerpted that makes it sound super patriotic rah rah America.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Not to forget the verse about property rights:
So… he climbed the wall, checked the other side, and decided that the inside area was “for you and me” because the inside of the wall didn’t say otherwise?
Yup.
He did not believe in expensive private property rights.
This land is your land.
…is what I would say if I didn’t always twist the lyrics to praise the compact disc 💿
How I sing the song. Warning: Cringe
💿 My pit and your land,
💿 your pit and my land,
💿 from err’r correction
💿 to the sampling theorem
💿 From the Red Book’s premise
💿 to the bitstream coders
💿 CD was made by Sony and Philips.
💿 My laser’s gliding
💿 on the spiral pathway,
💿 my cradle keeps it
💿 pointed the right way.
💿 Plastic is never
💿 made ideally
💿 but wobbles are no problem for CD.
💿 There may be dust bits
💿 that try to fool me,
💿 disks can be tainted,
💿 varying light intensity
💿 But the extra data
💿 carry everything
💿 I need to get the music error-free
💿 Audiophiles
💿 are total dickheads,
💿 claiming they can hear
💿 the “discrete DAC steps”
💿 But Shannon proved that
💿 a low-pass filter
💿 Makes samples match the input perfectly
💿 My pit and your land,
💿 your pit and my land,
💿 from err’r correction
💿 to the sampling theorem
💿 From the Red Book’s promise
💿 to the bitstream coders
💿 This was made by Sony and Philips.
Scotland and Norway have the right to roam, where there are land owners but they do not have the right to keep you off their land. As far as I’m concerned that’s the bare minimum for a decency, even though it’s a long shot from communism.
But Guthrie was a communist. This was before Stalinism and a lot of the bad connotations given to communism since - I doubt he would have embraced much of what have happened in the name of communism. But he was a union man.