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In my deep research into his private papers, I found a brilliant, complicated and flawed human being whose struggle to understand both his personal world and his place in history made me admire him more deeply than before I began the project.
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I spent the past seven years researching and writing Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life, a biography focusing on how the singer lived as a son, lover, father, psychiatric patient, and disabled person while maintaining his staunch leftist principles in the increasingly reactionary atmosphere of the post-war US.
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Jennifer Lopez performs Woody Guthrie’s song This Land Is Your Land during the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden in Washington, DC, on Janu That Guthrie is an icon of the US left, a man famous for songs calling for justice for the disempowered and exploited, carried no currency “The inauguration began by JLO singing a song celebrating stolen land and Indigenous genocide,” wrote Lower Brule Sioux historian Nick Estes on Twitter, where the song was also called a “settler anthem” and “the epitome of Indigenous erasure”. Several minutes into US President Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, on the heels of an impassioned rendition of The Star Spangled Banner by her fellow pop superstar Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez stepped up to the podium and began singing lyrics many Americans learn in schools and churches:įrom the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waterįew songs besides Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, it would seem, could better embody the theme of “unity” with which President-elect Biden had been attempting to dissipate the climate of bullying and cruelty cultivated by the Trump administration.īut throughout Wednesday afternoon and the days that followed, a steady stream of social media posts criticised the use of the song, with its apparent disregard for the fact that it only became possible to call this land yours and mine because of acts of violence against its earlier occupants, the Indigenous people of what we now call North America.