This Land Is Your Land

Nel disco compare una versione corale con Graziano Romani, Michele Anelli, Alice Fabretti, Francesco Grillenzoni (dei Tupamaros), Stefano "Cisco" Bellotti (ex Modena City Ramblers), Andrea Parodi, Maurizio Zannato (dei Marmaja), Marco Mezzetti (dei Ratoblanco), Paolo Enrico Archetti Maestri (degli Yo Yo Mundi), Gianluca Spirito (dei Ned Ludd), Lorenzo Semprini, Luca Mirti (dei Del Sangre)

Sono accompagnate da una traduzione italiana.

E’ la canzone che apre l’album TRATTURO ZERO, adattata qui con il chiaro intento di collocarla fuori da confini territoriali prima attraverso una fratellanza tra eroi erranti romantici di mondi ed epoche diverse come gli Hobos e il Guerin Meschino di Andrea Da Barberino e poi dichiarando apertamente che “…nostra patria è il mondo intero…”.

“This Land is your Land” è una celebre canzone tradizionale del patrimonio folk statunitense scritta da Woody Guthrie nel 1940 per esprimere rabbia e dissenso verso i sentimenti patriottardi della contemporanea canzone “God Bless America” di Irving Berlin.
La melodia di “This Land is your Land” è stata composta sulla base di quella
del gospel “When the world's on fire” (Quando il mondo andrà a fuoco), più
conosciuto nella versione del gruppo The Carter Family, registrato 1930
prima che Guthrie realizzasse la sua canzone che in breve divenne
una specie di inno della bellezza di un’America ideale.
“This Land is your Land”, però non è tutta qui perché Woody Guthrie popola
quest’America ideale con la presenza sofferta degli Stati Uniti reali cantando
strofe che evocavano la crisi degli anni ’30:


Oggi:
“This Land is your Land” oltre che dal suo compositore, è stata eseguita nel tempo in differenti versioni da molti cantanti tra cui Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Johnny Cash e Bruce Springsteen ed altri ancora… fino a l’ultima, per ora, di Massimo Liberatori con la Società dei Musici.

La versione è adattata alla Svezia.
This version is modified to fit Swedish reality.

Dafydd Iwan was born in 1943 in Brynaman, a village on the western edge of the South Wales Coalfield, in an area where Welsh was still the predominant community language. By a strange coincidence, the previous year had seen the birth of another icon of the pop world, John Cale (of Velvet Underground fame), in the nearby village of Garnant, although their musical, cultural and ideological paths would be strikingly different in many ways. Both John Cale’s and Dafydd Iwan’s mothers were teachers by profession, but while John Cale’s father was a coal miner, Dafydd Iwan’s was a Nonconformist minister. When Dafydd was twelve years of age, his father accepted a call to pastor a church in the village of Llanuwchllyn in the Bala area of central north Wales, a rural area very different from Brynaman, but similar to the extent that Welsh was the everyday language of the community. The family’s move to Llanuwchllyn in the mid 1950s also meant that Dafydd Iwan’s teenage years were spent in fairly close proximity to the Tryweryn valley at the very time the Liverpool Corporation was seeking to drown it. The move also brought him into close proximity with the senior camp of the influential youth movement, Urdd Gobaith Cymru (The Welsh League of Youth, lit. ‘The League of the Hope of Wales’), situated in a converted mansion on the shores of Bala Lake. Working at the camp during school holidays brought Dafydd Iwan into contact with young Welsh-speakers from all parts of Wales, and it was there that he first began to perform informally on the guitar.

There are three matters relating to Dafydd Iwan’s early upbringing which ought, perhaps, to be highlighted. Firstly, it was thoroughly Welsh — apart from his secondary-school education, which was for the most part through the medium of English. Such a practice was normal at the time, even in those areas where Welsh was the predominant community language, and was satirized by Dafydd Iwan in a humorous protest song he wrote in 1967, ‘Cân yr Ysgol’ (‘The School Song’), in which he contrasts the Welshness of the community in which he was raised with the Englishness of his schooling in that community, except for ‘an occasional lesson in Welsh, fair play!/Because I was a little Welshman!’ By ‘a thoroughly Welsh upbringing’, one does not only mean that he was reared in a community in which Welsh was the normal everyday language, but also that he was steeped in traditional Welsh culture. Both of his parents were university graduates, who were well-versed in the culture of Welsh-speaking Wales and committed to promoting that culture, a commitment which included giving their children a good grounding in it.

One aspect of that grounding is the next matter which needs to be emphasised, namely that Dafydd Iwan's upbringing gave him ample opportunity to perform inpublic from a very early age. Dafydd was not a shy child, and during his childhood and youth he was to perform regulary in public at various religious and cultural activities organized by his father's chapel and on an inter-chapel level, not to mention the plethora of eisteddfodau (competitive cultural festivals) which exist in Welsh-speaking Wales in all shapes and sizes and at all levels, local, regional and national. Dafydd Iwan's upbringing, then, not only gave him a good grounding in traditional Welsh culture, but also made him an experienced public performer.

His upbringing also led naturally to his becoming a Welsh nationalist in political terms. His parents were both ardent nationalists, and (as has already been noted) his paternal grandfather, Fred Jones - another Nonconformist minister - was one of the founding members of Plaid Cymru in 1925. Indeed, being a member of Plaid Cymru was such a family affair that Dafydd Iwan could claim in 1966 that around 120 members of his family were party members.

But there is another sense in which his upbringing led naturally to his becoming a Welsh nationalist. For historical and geographical reasons, loyalty to the nation and national identity has often played second fiddle in Wales to more local or regional allegiances. Part of the reason for this is the divisive nature of Wales’s mountainous terrain; another is that Wales has never experienced a strong central national government and has had until very recently few national institutions. Furthermore, from the late Middle Ages, the ruling classes in Wales became increasingly anglicized in language and culture, and more and more London-centric in their concerns and abode, with no middle class of any significance developing until the rapid growth of urbanization and industrialization during the nineteenth century. In recent centuries, then, the nearest Welsh cultural life has often come to an ‘aristocracy’ in terms of national leadership, has been the social grouping one might describe as ‘ministers of religion and teachers’, a grouping whose members, as a result of educational opportunities and the often peripatetic nature of their calling, are not normally as deep-rooted in one particular community and have horizons which are frequently broader than most. It is no surprise, then, to see one author note that ‘schoolmasters and ministers...have formed the backbone of so many aspects of the nationalist movement in Wales’. Neither is such a grouping unfamiliar to ballad students, since throughout Europe ‘ministers of religion and teachers’ have often in the past been the first port of call in a given community for collectors of folk traditions seeking informants.

We see this heightened sense of national rather than local identity not only in Dafydd Iwan’s immediate family background, but also in his own personal experience. For example, he begins the autobiography he published in 1981 by stating that his upbringing and dispersed family roots mean that he does not feel a strong sense of belonging to any one particular locality; rather, he says, his commitment is to Wales as a unit.[24] This is stated very clearly in one of Dafydd Iwan’s earliest songs, ‘Mae’n Wlad i Mi’, based on ‘This Land is Your Land’ by the influential American singer-songwriter, Woody Guthrie. The song’s theme is that every part of Wales is the heritage of every Welsh person.

Painting the World Green: Dafydd Iwan and the Welsh Protest Ballad by Dr E. Wyn James, School of Welsh, Cardiff University.)