Posted on 06/26/2020 4:30:48 AM PDT by Kaslin
A semi-professional soccer team in Oklahoma will no longer play the national anthem before matches. Instead – the Tulsa Athletic will play Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”
The Athletics are part of the National Premier Soccer League. The team says they dropped The Star Spangled Banner to create a more inclusive environment.
“From our beginning, we have developed a culture of inclusion and acceptance at Tulsa Athletic,” team owner Sonny Dalesandro said in the press release. “We live in a country that allows us to freely speak our voice. We utilize this right as a club to continually try and improve our team and community. We believe ‘This Land Is Your Land’ not only captures a powerful patriotic sentiment, but that it does so in a far more inclusive way. The song speaks to this country being built and shared by every person of every race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. It represents a future Tulsa Athletic is committed to striving for.”
It’s an interesting decision – because Woody Guthrie was reportedly a vocal supporter of Communism and was sympathetic to their causes. NPR claims that "This Land is Your Land" was written as a Marxist response to "God Bless America."
"He was irritated by Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," sung by Kate Smith, which seemed to be endlessly playing on the radio in the late 1930s," NPR reported in 2012. So irritated, in fact, that he wrote this song as a retort, at first sarcastically calling it "God Blessed America for Me" before renaming it "This Land Is Your Land."
History.com noted that while Guthrie was in California he "came into contact with the Communist Party and became increasingly sympathetic to its causes. Many of his songs reflected a strong commitment to the common working people, and he became something of a musical spokesman for populist sentiments."
It sounds like the soccer team is making more than just a political statement.
“After carefully reviewing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' lyrics and meaning, including the third verse which mentions ‘No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave…,’ Tulsa Athletic came to the decision that the song does not align with the club’s core values. While this verse is rarely sung, Tulsa Athletic does not believe ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ represents or unites their diverse players, fans and community,” the team said in a press release.
Yet another irony because Guthrie's father was reportedly a member of the Ku Klux Klan and there had been rumblings the musician himself was a racist.
LA Weekly published a screed in 2012 titled, "Little-Known Fact: Woody Guthrie Was a Big Ol' Racist."
It seems to me the only way to deal with racially insensitive, Commie-loving soccer teams is to give them the boot.
National Premier Soccer League
Really popular in the US...
I’m taking my Hobbie Cat ‘16 up to Torch Lake next weekend and sailing for three days straight weather permitting.
Oh yeah. And a racist.
“But the most damning buried Guthrie biographical fact? That he was, just like his old man, a racist.
Having blacked up as a teenager in Okemah to perform a half-baked minstrel show, Guthrie while living in Echo Park took time out from championing oppressed white Okies to doodle his innumerable cartoons of what he described as “jungle blacks,” a group he also referred to as “niggers,” “darkies,” “chocolate drops” and, yes, “monkeys.”*
After encountering a group of African-Americans on Santa Monica Beach one day in 1937, Guthrie immortalized the meeting in a lengthy poem that included stanzas like, “What is that Ethiopian smell / upon the Zephyrs, what a fright!” and “We could dimly hear their chants / and we thought the blacks by chance / were doing a cannibal dance.”*
Broadcasting on Pasadena’s KFVD, Guthrie often indulged in on-air employ of ebonics and was stunned when a black listener characterized the singer as “unintelligent” after hearing Guthrie perform songs with titles like “Run, Nigger, Run” and “Nigger Blues.” Fortunately for Guthrie, recordings of these tunes do not survive.”
https://www.laweekly.com/little-known-fact-woody-guthrie-was-a-big-ol-racist/
Woody Gutherie has a racist past...
https://www.laweekly.com/little-known-fact-woody-guthrie-was-a-big-ol-racist/
JONNY WHITESIDEJULY 13, 2012
...But the most damning buried Guthrie biographical fact? That he was, just like his old man, a racist.
Having blacked up as a teenager in Okemah to perform a half-baked minstrel show, Guthrie while living in Echo Park took time out from championing oppressed white Okies to doodle his innumerable cartoons of what he described as [omitted, see article]...
Broadcasting on Pasadena’s KFVD, Guthrie often indulged in on-air employ of ebonics and was stunned when a black listener characterized the singer as “unintelligent” after hearing Guthrie perform songs with titles like... [again see the article for offending titles]... Fortunately for Guthrie, recordings of these tunes do not survive.
(Guthrie apologists are quick to point out that “———” was then in common usage. But its intended meaning was pejorative then — and, yes, racist — just as it is now.)
also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Guthrie#Early_life:_1912%E2%80%9331
Charles Guthrie was reportedly involved in the 1911 lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson.[12] (Woody Guthrie wrote three songs about the event in the 1960s. He said that his father, Charles, became a member of the Ku Klux Klan during its revived beginning in 1915.[12][13])
In Oklahoma.
What they are saying is they have no loyalty to the United States, but still see the United States’ land as theirs for the taking.
Beat me to it. His dad was also a klansman with a lot of land.
That song that the press was saying was about Donald Trump’s dad could’ve been more directed at Woody’s own father.
Goodbye soccer (whatever that is).
This list looks like the equivalent of the NAIA . . . teams that have no rhyme or reason except they couldn’t hang with the cool kids
Ribbon of highway, diamond deserts, blah, blah.
There’s a team where I live, and I had no clue they even existed. :)
“We live in a country that allows us to freely speak our voice.”
Oh, really? Say something like “all lives matter” and see what happens, you dumba$$.
Me too! When you click on the team logo there’s an assistant coach listed but nothing else. Obviously the league isn’t playing but you’d think last year’s info would be up, unless this is a historical list of all franchises that played at some point.
Never heard of it.
Mine had a roster.
He wasn’t a ‘Communist sympathizer’ he was an outright COMMUNIST!............
Being a good 'ol godless socialist (and a white supremacist to boot), Woody wrote this as an angry rejoinder. Guthrie, Burl Ives, Will Geer, and a few others were Communist sympathizers in the 1930's, back when the Depression was causing many to positively look at Communism (remember all those glowing reports of Stalin's Russia by Walter Duranty?).
Down in OK I would imagine that, “Jose can you see?” would be considered right neighborly.
Woody Guthrie was a communist and a massive black-hating racist.
Typical white hypocritical Democrat.
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