
“This Land is Your Land” is Woody Guthrie’s most popular song. It’s so popular I grew up singing a slightly different version in school in Canada, with Canadian locations substituted for the American ones. The different lyrics for different countries (at least 13 of them!) mean it’s popular all around the world. And it’s been covered over 150 times, four times more than his next most covered song. No song is more associated with him.
But whether you grew up knowing the original lyrics or different ones, the lyrics are the thing that make the song enduringly popular. (Minus the more controversial verses.) Slight changes to them make the song adaptable as a patriotic song for any country. So it’s a choice to cover of “This Land is Your Land” as an instrumental.
Self-described “ambient country trio” SUSS is a collaboration between three veterans of the New York new wave/no wave scene of the early 1980s. They’ve been releasing albums that mix Americana and ambient music for the last half decade or so.
Their cover of this Woody Guthrie anthem begins with a drone, which is soon accompanied by soft piano and a very lonesome-sounding harmonica. As other instruments join, the feeling is of wide open space in the West. The melody line is whistled slowly and, at first, incompletely enough to be almost unrecognizable, until the whole thing is whistled a few times before the end. The various instruments hint, here and there, at the melody, but the whole line is only really stated once (in the shortened single version).
It’s pretty as well as pretty radical. It would be easy to not recognize this extremely recognizable song until a few listens in. And then you’d wonder “What is that melody? I know it from somewhere.” Fortunately, they’ve told us.
Check it out: