No Safe Harbor. Essays About Pirate Politics.

This world is not my home
I’m just a-passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
The angels beckon me
From heaven’s open door
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

The hymn could be understood to be telling workers to accept hunger and pain and not fight back. This angered Guthrie, so he mocked and parodied the original — keeping the melody and reworking the words to comment on the harsh material conditions many suffered through. “I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-ramblin’ round,” he sang, talking about being a homeless, wandering worker who gets hassled by the police, rather than a subservient, spiritual traveler waiting for an afterlife door prize. Instead of looking to heaven — because “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore” — Guthrie wryly arrived at his song’s punch line: “I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.”[3]

In 1940 Guthrie was bombarded by Irving Berlin’s jingoistic “God Bless America,” which goes, in part, “From the mountains to the prairies / to the oceans white with foam / God bless America, my home sweet home.” The irritated folk singer wrote a response that originally went, “From California to the New York Island / From the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters / God blessed America for me.” (Guthrie later changed the last line to “This land was made for you and me.”) Continuing with his anti-privatization theme, in another version of this famous song Guthrie wrote:

As I was walkin’ — I saw a sign there
And that sign said — no trespassin’
But on the other side... it didn’t say nothin’!
Now that side was made for you and me!

He set the lyrics to a beautiful melody he learned from the Carter Family, giving birth to one of the most enduring (and endearing) folk songs of all time. Guthrie’s approach is a great example of how appropriation — stealing, borrowing, whatever you want to call it — is a creative act that can have a powerful impact. Before Guthrie, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, borrowed from popular melodies for their radical tunes, which were published and popularized in the Little Red Songbook. These songs also parodied religious hymns, such as “In the Sweet By-and-By,” which was changed to, “You will eat, by and by.” [4]

For Guthrie and many other folk musicians, music was politics. Guthrie was affiliated closely with the labor movement, which inspired many of his greatest songs; these songs, in turn, motivated members of the movement during trying times. That’s why Guthrie famously scrawled on his guitar, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Appropriation is an important method that creative people have used to comment on the world for years, from the radical Dada art of the early twentieth century to the beats and rhymes of hip-hop artists today. Guthrie drew from the culture that surrounded him and transformed, reworked, and remixed it in order to write moving songs that inspired the working class to fight for a dignified life. Instead of passively consuming and regurgitating the Tin Pan Alley songs that were popular during the day, Guthrie and other folk singers created culture in an attempt to change the world around them. They were truly part of a counterculture, not an over-the-counter culture.

Curious about the copyright status of Guthrie’s decades-old music, I called up Woody Guthrie Publishing and spoke to a very nice gentleman named Michael Smith, the general manager of the organization. He was clearly familiar with the folk-song tradition and obviously knowledgeable about Guthrie, but he nevertheless had a lot of trouble accepting the idea that copyright extension was a bad thing for art and culture. I was surprised when Smith told me that the song-publishing company that owns Guthrie’s music denies recording artists permission to adapt his lyrics. And I was shocked when Smith defended the actions of the company, called The Richmond Organization (TRO), even after I pointed out that Guthrie often altered other songwriters’ lyrics. “Well,” Smith explained, “he admitted to stealing, but at the time that Woody was writing...”He paused. “I mean, things have changed from Woody’s time.”

They certainly have. During the 2004 election season, a year after I spoke to Michael Smith, a small-time team of cartoonists posted a Guthrie-invoking political parody on their Web site. Not surprisingly, TRO threatened to sue. The animated short portrayed G.W. Bush and John Kerry singing a goofy ditty to the tune of “This Land Is Your Land,” where Bush said, “You’re a liberal sissy,” Kerry replied, “You’re a right wing nut job,” and they sang together, “This land will surely vote for me.” Guthrie’s copyright managers didn’t think it was funny at all. “This puts a completely different spin on the song,” TRO’s Kathryn Ostien told CNN. “The damage to the song is huge.” Perhaps more damage is done to Guthrie’s legacy by practicing such an aggressive form of copyright zealotry.

“If someone changed a lyric in Woody’s time,” said Michael Smith, “chances are it wasn’t going to be recorded and it was just spread through campfire singing, you know, family-time singing and stuff like that. You know, now you can create your own CD at home and distribute it any way you want to, and so the dissemination is a lot broader, a lot faster, and can be a lot more detrimental to the integrity of the song.”Detrimental to the integrity of the song? I pressed him further on Guthrie’s own alterations of others’ songs and asked what Woody would think of TRO locking up his folksong catalog. “The answer to that is, you know, ‘Hey, you’re going to have to ask him, because we have a duty,’ ” Smith said. “We don’t know what Woody would have wanted — we can’t tell.”

Soon Michael Smith began to make a little more sense to me — at least economic sense. “If you allow multiple rewrites to occur, then people will think it’s in the public domain, and then you have a hard time pressing people to prove to them that it’s not in the public domain.” Then the publishers can no longer generate revenue from it. That a company can still make money off “This Land Is Your Land” is exactly the type of thing I believe Woody Guthrie would not have wanted. Even worse, that TRO prevents musicians from releasing altered, updated versions of his music probably makes Guthrie roll in his grave. But don’t trust me; listen to the man himself. When Guthrie was still alive, for instance, Bess Lomax Hawes told him that his song “Union Maid” had gone into the oral tradition, as folklorists call it.

“It was part of the cultural landscape, no longer even associated with him,” said Hawes, the daughter of the famous song collector and archivist Alan Lomax.“He answered, ‘If that were true, it would be the greatest honor of my life.’ ”[5] In a written statement attached to a published copy of his lyrics for “This Land Is Your Land,” Guthrie made clear his belief that it should be understood as communal property. “This song is Copyrighted in US,” he wrote, “under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” Notice that he mentioned the song’s copyright lasted twenty-eight years, though the term was later lengthened.

Also note that Guthrie said, “We wrote it” not “ I wrote it,” something that indicates Guthrie didn’t see himself as the song’s sole author. Since much of the song’s power comes from that lovely melody passed down to him, how could he? In light of Guthrie’s view, how sad it is that others continue to taint this socialist musician’s ideals by keeping his songs private property, turning them into a lucrative revenue stream rather than a shareable part of our common cultural heritage. If Woody Guthrie had to make his art under the overly restrictive policies his song-publishing company imposes on today’s musicians, it would have been very hard for him to make his music at all. In some cases it would have been impossible, for “things have changed.”

In a dramatic turn of events, Ludlow Music, the subsidiary of TRO that controls Guthrie’s most famous copyrights, backed off from its legal threats against JibJab.com’s parody. This was after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) -a nonprofit organization that defends civil liberties online — came to the Web site’s rescue, providing legal counsel. What made the aftermath of the JibJab.com flap remarkable wasn’t merely that the copyright bullying ended. More interesting was the discovery by EFF senior intellectual property attorney Fred von Lohmann that, according to his research, “This Land Is Your Land” has been in the public domain since 1973! He