My fellow liberals hate Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA. I love it (barf alert)

Washington Post ^ | June 30, 2017 | Arvin Temkar

[piasa]

Bush 1988

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7A_I7832t0

[Arthur McGowan]

People keep playing the song at ear-splitting volume. I’m not allowed to find it annoying?

[Vendome]

Winning...

[ifinnegan]

This Land is Your Land is not an anti-American song, no matter what the Compost pile writer thinks.

It’s about the beauty of America.

Woody Guthrie did take his stuff from the Carter Family. He acknowledged it and talked about “church house licks” he used from Maybelle Carter.

You’re right, it’s based on When the World’s On Fire, a Pentecostal song, and Guthrie used the Carter Family version of it.

http://youtu.be/qxo-zayI6tE

[piasa]

Guthrie said it was to counter “America the Beautiful.”

[ealgeone]

You must not have interacted with him before.

[Fiji Hill]

The Fire Song (When the World's On Fire) was apparently written and first performed by Blind Willie Davis in 1928, but the Carter Family made it popular. My favorite version is by the Old Fashioned Revival Hour Chorus Choir, available at various sites around the Internet, although I may be prejudiced because my mother was a member of the choir.

This Land is Your Land (Woody Guthrie, 1944) seems to be a relic of the period when Stalin sought cooperation from the Western allies to defeat the Axis. Communist groups like the Almanac Singers, which had previously recorded anti-war songs like Plow Under (1941) when Stalin was aligned with Hitler, were now waxing pro-war, patriotic songs like Reuben James (1942). Another product of this period was Frank Sinatra's The House I Live In (1945), a patriotic song co-written by Earl Robinson, a hard-core Stalinist who was as red as a tail light to the end of his life.

Comrade Woody did manage to sneak some Bolshevism into the song with the verse about the sign that "didn't say nothing."

[Artemis Webb]

"I’m pretty conservative and don’ t like the song. A matter of taste I guess."

I find it gets played ad nauseum at 4th of July events. I went to one huge event some years ago and no less than six different groups sang it. When it first came out (during the Reagan administration) I loved it. Since then, not so much.

[trisham]

Agreed.

[Fiji Hill]

Guthrie said it was to counter “America the Beautiful.”

I heard that the song he wanted to counter was "God Bless America" (1939), a huge bestseller during hte WWII years that must have driven him crazy. But I'm sure Comrade Woody had absolutely no use for a song with a refrain containing the line, "God shed his grace on thee."

[oldtech]

Here’s another that’s on Youtube......Hank,Jr. has an album called, “America...the way I see it”