988 - Woody Guthrie Pastures of Plenty 1940

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie is best known as an American singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children's songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists" displayed on his guitar. His best-known song is "This Land Is Your Land", which is regularly sung in American and Canadian schools.
Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California and learned traditional folk and blues songs. Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, earning him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Troubadour". Throughout his life Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, though he was never an actual member of any.
Guthrie wrote this "Pastures of Plenty" after the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) hired him for a 30-day period to write songs about their projects, including the "Grand Coulee Dam." Guthrie was rarely paid to write songs, so this was very unusual, but resulted in some of his best work.
Anna Canoni, who is Guthrie's granddaughter and a director at the Woody Guthrie Foundation, says of this song: "It was written about the Columbia River. And it's about migrants - it's all about the country. It's a very big song. It's very general in certain respects, and very specific in other respects. But it's all about traveling across the country, and it's about working the land and owning the land based on your work and your labor, not on money and paper. And it's a feeling, a sense of the wonderful feeling that you work this land and that you take pride in it, and therefore you will fight for it. It's not about, I own this property so I want to keep it. It's much deeper than that. It's a beautiful song".