This Land is Your Land
This machine kills fascists. If wishing made it so.
I’ve been working on a new book, a follow up to I Will Not Hurt Myself/I Will Not Hurt Others. It’s the last time I’ll be diving in to my past in the large scale for a while. But it deals with scenes from the road filtered through the lens of the music that has been important on road trips, songs that we sang, found music, and the music that fills the walkman of my travels. I’ll be testing out sections of the book over the next few weeks and months and given our political climate, I can’t think of a better place to start than at the beginning…
Dad was a farm kid from Depression-era Vinita, Oklahoma. I can only guess, but I think he came back from the war changed. He wanted to see a world not at war. And he had a visceral affection for the American ideal and wanted to see the country up close. So on a regular basis, we loaded up the car and drove. By the time I was 13, I had seen every state (but Alaska, which came much later) many of the Canadian Provinces, and had dipped into Mexico. When you strip away the political and religious arguments around the dinner table, the disagreements about clothing styles and rock concerts, and the mundane child v. parent detritus of growing up, what remains for me is the time we spent on the road together. This was real family time – not Mom’s anger-fueled cleaning while Dad watched the football game, not middle-class small talk around the dinner table. When you’re trapped in a car for long periods of time punctuated by Motel 6’s in the pursuit of crossing a continent and returning back, you get to know your family in a completely different way. In these trips, my Dad used those Motel 6 pools to teach me to swim; I learned about the importance of car maintenance, how to read maps and navigate and scan the horizon for trouble ahead. It left me with a love of the American landscape and our uniquely nutty tourist industry. It taught me how to pack really well. It left we with not just a love of travel, but resfeber, the restless race of the traveler’s heart before the journey; the clear knowledge that the road, the going and being someplace not home was an irresistible pursuit.
The common denominator to every trip, be it day-tripping to go fishing or a weeks-long road trip, was singing. We had our standards. You can’t go on a road trip without Down in the Valley, Yellow Rose of Texas, Oklahoma Hills, Red River Valley, or Bye Bye Blackbird. My sister and I teamed up for Side by Side. Dad liked The Old Rugged Crossed, which I found creepy. At some point Mom was bound to start up the soapy, maudlin Cowboy Jack, at which point we would groan, roll our eyes, and join in. This Land is Your Land was actually an odd favorite of both my parents, looking back now. Guthrie was unambiguous about his socialism and my parents were conservative Midwest Baptists, more so after moving to California from Oklahoma after the war. But they were from Vinita, just up the road from Guthrie’s birthplace of Okemah and maybe that made the difference. American folk music made a bridge. My parents were old school country fans, while my sisters liked the newer wave of folk music, the Beatles, and later, disco. I came along much later and found punk and new wave along with socialist politics. Singing gave us a place where we all could meet. Singing kept Dad awake on the long slogs across featureless prairie and endless asphalt. It made the time pass and kept my sisters’ minds off throwing up. It calmed us when driving through dicey road conditions. It colored how my brain looks at America. When I think of America in the most general terms, the semantic “America”, my brain automatically snaps to 1970’s filtered vistas; a child’s view- something larger, wider, and taller than it really is; and something that belongs to all of us in responsibility and delight.
