This 4th of July, this land is everybody's land

Woke up this morning to several dozen emails from YouTube, containing comments on a single video I uploaded forever ago. That’s several dozen more comments than all my videos combined usually generate on a good week. Something was up.

It seems Billy Ray Cyrus has placed an upload of mine on his Fourth of July Playlist, Johnny Cash sings “This Land Is Your Land.”

Obviously, I was flattered, despite not being a Billy Ray Cyrus fan, per se. “Achy-Breaky Heart” was the first song they taught us on the first day of Guitar 101 a few years ago, but I think that was more for its familiarity and very simple two-chord structure. Still, if you asked me to, I could whip it for you on demand, it’s just that easy.

Anyhow, a lot of the new commenters have beefs to pick with Cash for two reasons: One, ‘our’ land was originally somebody else’s, a race we casually herded into camps and slaughtered on the plains, and b) In the clip, Cash ultimately melds Woody Guthrie’s protest song about taking responsibility for our own actions with Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” tear-jerking, patriotic swill of the first order.

[Sidebar: Ordinarily I don’t moderate comments much. I’m open to people who disagree with me, but I’m not about to let my little online Johnny Cash shrine become just another nasty place on the web where people say hateful shit. If you can’t disagree without being disagreeable, I will delete you.]

Anyhow, there’s too many comments for me to answer them all individually, so I’ll answer them here and maybe provide a link.

First, the clip in question:



I’ll start with the second complaint, because it’s the more interesting one.

I don’t know what was on Cash and co-writer Merle Kilgore’s minds when they wrote the piece above, and they’re not around to ask anymore. Well, Cash isn’t.

And I’m willing to bet that Cash and Kilgore didn’t have any idea that Guthrie is alleged to have written “This Land Is Your Land” as a response to “God Bless America,” which Guthrie considered patriotic claptrap.

Guthrie’s point was no matter the provenance of this land, its upkeep, protection and maintenance was the ongoing responsibility of every American. “Thank you, God, we’ll take it from here.”

One would think the two songs would be irreconcilable, yes?

Not Cash. By this point in his career, Cash had put himself through the wringer in almost every conceivable way. He was newly sober, and taking a look around at the mess the country was in, in the wake of the Kennedy/King assassinations and America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam, ironically enough it was The Man In Black who saw the shades of grey that still acted as mortar, holding this great country together.

He saw that both arguments had merit; moreover, that both arguments benefited from the presence of the other. So in what may now seem like a clumsy effort, he attempted to marry the two opposing sides, and illustrate that what unites us is indeed stronger than that which divides us.

The Missus keeps telling me that one definition of genius is the ability to hold two opposing viewpoints equally at the same time. If so, Cash was a certifiable genius.

The other big beef, that this clip fails to mention the genocide of the Native Americans at the hand of the White Man, is a fair one, but beside the point. Cash had one agenda for this clip, which he executed to his satisfaction. But it was not about the plight of the American Indian.

He saved that topic for any number of other special segments—where he did not mention the glory that is America even once—as well as entire albums’-worth of songs on the subject.

The clip below is just one of the many pieces he did on the sad state of Native Americans during his show’s two-season run.



So please, haters, if you’re going to hate on Johnny Cash, do it from an informed perspective. And do it courteously, or I will indeed delete your comment. I’ll even delete your ass if you agree with me discourteously!

I’d like to thank Billy Ray Cyrus and the people at YouTube for making me part of the national conversation this Independence Day, even in this tiniest of ways.