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woody guthrie

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brick street café

from woody guthrie posted in music by pete_nice

The Brick Street Café is the main restaurant in Okemah, OK, and features live music as well as a substantial amount of Woody Guthrie paraphernalia and ephemera: newspaper clippings, photographs, and painted Guthrie slogans.

Outside the restaurant is a preserved concrete slab, ceremoniously framed in red brick, that has Guthrie’s embedded signature.

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woody guthrie statue

from woody guthrie posted in music by pete_nice

Dedicated during the 1998 Wood Guthrie Free Folk Festival, this statue stands in the town of Guthrie's birth.

Surrounding the statue are bricks engraved with Guthrie's song titles. The Woody Guthrie Coalition sold engraved sponsorship bricks that form a walkway around the statue and park. Part of the proceeds allowed the organization to form a scholarship for graduating seniors interested in the arts.

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“this land is your land”

from woody guthrie posted in music by pete_nice

In the early months of 1940, Woody Guthrie arrived in New York City. Dubbed "the Oklahoma cowboy" by his contemporaries, he was embraced by the leftist folk scene at the time.

On constant radio rotation at the time was Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." Guthrie found the song distasteful- unrealistic and complacent. On February 23, 1940, in a small boarding house at the corner of 43rd st and 6th Ave in NYC, he went about writing an answer to Berlin. Guthrie's response was the song "This Land is Your Land."

Adapting the melody from "When The World's On Fire" by the Carter family, "This Land is Your Land" has become a powerful national song, still open for interpretation today.

One of the original versions of the song had a final verse that goes like this:

"As I went walking, I saw a sign there,
And on the sign there, It said 'Private Property'
But on the other side, it didn't say nothing!
That side was made for you and me."

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