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This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie

ISBN: 0670035351

Title: This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie

Author: Elizabeth Partridge

KDL Description:

Offers an in-depth look at the life and music of this celebrated song writer and singer who performed songs from the late 1920s to the 1950s about daily life, racial equality, and the working man’s world in America.
Lexile Level: 1020
Guided Reading Level: Z

Amazon Description:

In his short lifetime (1912–1967), Woody Guthrie wrote over three thousand songs. Accompanying himself on the guitar, he sang about what he saw happening around him: the breadlines of the Depression, migrant workers pouring out of the Dust Bowl, unions fighting for decent work conditions, and fascism of all kinds. Hundreds of his songs came from personal experiences: melancholy songs about his difficult childhood in Oklahoma and Texas, tender songs written for the women he loved, playful children’s tunes written for his kids.

It was Woody’s career as a troubadour musician that popularized the term folk-singer. He crossed and recrossed America, picking up cowboy songs, mountain ballads, religious music, sea chanteys, blues, and work songs. But by the time a folk music revival blossomed in the late 1950s, Woody was permanently hospitalized with Huntington’s Disease, the same debilitating illness that claimed his mother.

In Elizabeth Partridge’s honest and gripping biography, This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie, meet and travel the country with the man who created such a rich musical legacy for America.