A Quote by Steve Earle

Like most kids, I grew up singing 'This Land Is Your Land' in grammar school, but with the most radical verses neatly removed. This was before I knew it was a Woody Guthrie song.

Steve Earle

Quote Topics

Before Grammar Grammar School Grew Grew Up Kids Knew Land Like Most Radical School Singing Song Up Verses Woody Your

Quote Author

Steve Earle
American - Musician
Born: January 17, 1955

I've always been a big fan of how Woody Guthrie wrote political songs like 'This Land is Your Land.'

Ryan Bingham

We don't need another Woody. Even Bob Dylan knew he couldn't be Woody Guthrie... I like Woody Guthrie fine, but I don't need the 50th generation version of it.

Buzz Osborne

A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.

John Mellencamp

Little kids sing a song called "America the Beautiful." They sing a song called "This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land." To me, those songs are not just nice little ditties. They are marching orders. They are commandments that we must protect America's beauty from the clear-cutters, the strip-miners, the oil spillers. They are pledges we have made. They are promises to keep.

Van Jones

The meter is ticking [particularly in the face of climate change], so you've got to get to as much as you can as fast as you can. I grew up with 'This Land Is Our Land,' and public land doesn't belong to that administration or this one. We want our kids to grow up with real natural places, not just photos of them.

Robert Redford

This land is your land, this land is my land, From California to the New York Island. From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me.

Woody Guthrie

I grew up in the country, which is probably why I'm so attached to the land. I love it. I love the lay of the land. I love walking the land. And I love knowing that it's my land.

Oprah Winfrey

My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.

Alan Arkin

I always knew that sooner or later there would come somebody like Woody Guthrie who could make a great song every week. Dylan certainly had a social agenda, but he was such a good poet that most of his attempts were head and shoulders above things that I and others were trying to do. ... If I had an address, I'd send him a birthday card saying, 'keep on going.'

Pete Seeger

Musically, though, you're a character and you're singing a song. If you're not your own character, you're the character in the song, most of the time. Even blues musicians, a lot of them who were the most realistic, at times, they were singing a song and portraying a character in the song. There's something to be said for getting involved in the emotion of a song, too, with the characters.

Jack White

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

Bob Dylan

Young man the simple answer is: land, land and land. No-one gives up land. Ever.

Munir Butt

It sounds like something from a Woody Guthrie song, but it's true; I was raised in a freight car.

Merle Haggard

God said this is our land, land in which we flourish as people... we want our cattle to get fat on our land so that our children grow up in prosperity; and we do not want the fat removed to feed others.

Jomo Kenyatta

For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.