I dedicate my song today to Chris Foster from Fareham in Hampshire. Chris is the husband of my niece Janie, and while we don’t see much of each other, it is evident from what my niece Janie says about her soul mate that he is a loving husband and the very best of fathers. Have a smashing day, Chris. Uncle Billy and Sheila xx
My song today is ‘This Land Is Your Land’. This is one of the United States' most famous folk songs. Its lyrics were written by American folk singer Woodie Guthrie in 1940, based on an existing melody, a ‘Carter Family’ tune called ‘When the World's on Fire’, in critical response to Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’. When Guthrie was tired of hearing Kate Smith sing ‘God Bless America’ on the radio in the late 1930s, he sarcastically called his song ‘God Blessed America for Me’ before renaming it ‘This Land Is Your Land’.
In 2002, ‘This Land Is Your Land’ was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the ‘Library of Congress’ to be added to the ‘National Recording Registry’.
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One can knock the American citizens from across the U.S.A., but as far as I’m concerned, ‘The Americans all regular guys’. One can mock them for their vainglorious boasting about having the ‘biggest this’ or the ‘best that’: they can severely criticise them for their vigorous safeguarding of their constitutional rights to ‘carry firearms’ in an ever violent world of oft-repeated random massacre shootings and the senseless deaths caused by mass killers: one half of the American electorate can consider their current President the best thing to have come along since sliced bread, while the other half of the American voters want him impeaching and imprisoning for political gerrymandering with a foreign power, as well as viewing him as being nothing less than a bullying, racist, misogynist. But whatever, whoever or however the Americans are divided in their opinion, there is one thing that they all agree upon; they love their country, and they are proud of singing their National Anthem and the flying of their country’s flag!
From the age that a child goes to elementary school, the whole class swears allegiance to their country and sings their National Anthem before opening their first lesson book of the day. The same goes for every public event that takes place anywhere in the U.S.A. Whatever size of home the U.S.A. citizens live in, their gardens and house porches will proudly display the country’s flag for passers-by to see. Even the maniac gun-toting killers, who randomly shoots down and kills a few dozen innocent people in their local shopping mall in the afternoon for sport, will have the courtesy to wish the man at their corner shop to ‘Have a nice day’ when he picks up his morning milk in his baseball cap with the words ‘I love America’ emblazoned across the peak of it.
Yes, the Americans, have much which can be legitimately said against them, but one thing they cannot be charged with is ever displaying ‘shame’ or a ‘lack of pride’ in their flag and country.
The British on the other hand, are a much more peculiar race. Their historical past is littered by empirical wrongs and injustices and colonisation mistakes by the hundred, but Britain was once a Great country who also had so much more to be proud of than it is prepared today to give itself credit for. I ask you; if Great Britain is such a bad place to live, then why is it still the chosen country of most worldly migrants? The answer lies in its traditional love of freedom and the need for self-governing independence. Whether we are governed either better or worse inside or outside the European Union, it matters less than being able to ‘governing ourselves!’
As an Irish man whose parents and their first three children migrated to England in the mid-1940s, I am often ashamed by a certain masochistic element of the native people to pull this country down at every opportunity, and not to believe in itself as still being a great nation who has much to offer the world.
Despite its years of continuous civil unrest since the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-52, the people of Ireland, whether they live in the North or the South of their politically divided land, remain wholly committed and proud of their respective flags.
I was born an Irish citizen and will die one, but everything that has ever been given to me and my extended family was given to us by this country, England. Recently, the local council made it quite clear to the allotment holders in Haworth that they were forbidden to fly the George Cross, the Union Jack or the White Rose of Yorkshire. Yet, less than ten miles away in the City of Bradford, all manner of foreign flags are flown with impunity, even by those people who publicly declare their wish to see the destruction of the British way of life and all its traditions and state religion!
As an Irish born and bred man, all I can say is that it’s a funny old world I find myself living in. A large part of me thinks that someone with a bit of pride ought to give you Little Englanders a kick up the Khyber Pass to get you back to loving your country as the Irish or the American citizen loves theirs!
When I was a boy growing up in England, be it ever so humble or so great, an English man’s home was his castle, and his allotment and garden shed was his private refuge away from his wife and children. When I was a boy growing up in England, there was no need to wrap all manner of contractual obligations in the archaic words of a legal document; the shake of spitted palms between two men of like mind and the giving of one’s word was quite sufficient to prove lasting. When I was a boy, I still remember the day that Queen Elizabeth went through Liversedge, Heckmondwike in a motorcade, and all the children and their parents lined the road of her travel and waved little English flags at their monarch and cheered their heads off. While we all cheered the Queen, we were also cheering the country; our country!
As a person who was born in Ireland but has lived in England for over 70 years, I only wish that the majority of people born in this great country could come to love and admire it half as much as this old Irish man does! My one piece of advice for all ye Little Englanders is to take a leaf out of America’s book and Ireland’s book, and learn to offer due respect to the land of your birth. Fly your flag fearlessly with pride and know that ‘this land is your land’ (even your small plot of rented allotment which the council only manage on your behalf). Don’t let anyone take away your land!
Remember the lesson of all the losers. First, they came and took away your rights and then they came and took away your land; then they came to take you! Have a bit of pride man. Don’t let them! Stand up for yourself, stand up for your anthem, and stand up for your flag and country! ‘This land is your land’.
Love and peace Bill xxx
My song today is ‘This Land Is Your Land’. This is one of the United States' most famous folk songs. Its lyrics were written by American folk singer Woodie Guthrie in 1940, based on an existing melody, a ‘Carter Family’ tune called ‘When the World's on Fire’, in critical response to Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’. When Guthrie was tired of hearing Kate Smith sing ‘God Bless America’ on the radio in the late 1930s, he sarcastically called his song ‘God Blessed America for Me’ before renaming it ‘This Land Is Your Land’.
In 2002, ‘This Land Is Your Land’ was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the ‘Library of Congress’ to be added to the ‘National Recording Registry’.
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One can knock the American citizens from across the U.S.A., but as far as I’m concerned, ‘The Americans all regular guys’. One can mock them for their vainglorious boasting about having the ‘biggest this’ or the ‘best that’: they can severely criticise them for their vigorous safeguarding of their constitutional rights to ‘carry firearms’ in an ever violent world of oft-repeated random massacre shootings and the senseless deaths caused by mass killers: one half of the American electorate can consider their current President the best thing to have come along since sliced bread, while the other half of the American voters want him impeaching and imprisoning for political gerrymandering with a foreign power, as well as viewing him as being nothing less than a bullying, racist, misogynist. But whatever, whoever or however the Americans are divided in their opinion, there is one thing that they all agree upon; they love their country, and they are proud of singing their National Anthem and the flying of their country’s flag!
From the age that a child goes to elementary school, the whole class swears allegiance to their country and sings their National Anthem before opening their first lesson book of the day. The same goes for every public event that takes place anywhere in the U.S.A. Whatever size of home the U.S.A. citizens live in, their gardens and house porches will proudly display the country’s flag for passers-by to see. Even the maniac gun-toting killers, who randomly shoots down and kills a few dozen innocent people in their local shopping mall in the afternoon for sport, will have the courtesy to wish the man at their corner shop to ‘Have a nice day’ when he picks up his morning milk in his baseball cap with the words ‘I love America’ emblazoned across the peak of it.
Yes, the Americans, have much which can be legitimately said against them, but one thing they cannot be charged with is ever displaying ‘shame’ or a ‘lack of pride’ in their flag and country.
The British on the other hand, are a much more peculiar race. Their historical past is littered by empirical wrongs and injustices and colonisation mistakes by the hundred, but Britain was once a Great country who also had so much more to be proud of than it is prepared today to give itself credit for. I ask you; if Great Britain is such a bad place to live, then why is it still the chosen country of most worldly migrants? The answer lies in its traditional love of freedom and the need for self-governing independence. Whether we are governed either better or worse inside or outside the European Union, it matters less than being able to ‘governing ourselves!’
As an Irish man whose parents and their first three children migrated to England in the mid-1940s, I am often ashamed by a certain masochistic element of the native people to pull this country down at every opportunity, and not to believe in itself as still being a great nation who has much to offer the world.
Despite its years of continuous civil unrest since the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-52, the people of Ireland, whether they live in the North or the South of their politically divided land, remain wholly committed and proud of their respective flags.
I was born an Irish citizen and will die one, but everything that has ever been given to me and my extended family was given to us by this country, England. Recently, the local council made it quite clear to the allotment holders in Haworth that they were forbidden to fly the George Cross, the Union Jack or the White Rose of Yorkshire. Yet, less than ten miles away in the City of Bradford, all manner of foreign flags are flown with impunity, even by those people who publicly declare their wish to see the destruction of the British way of life and all its traditions and state religion!
As an Irish born and bred man, all I can say is that it’s a funny old world I find myself living in. A large part of me thinks that someone with a bit of pride ought to give you Little Englanders a kick up the Khyber Pass to get you back to loving your country as the Irish or the American citizen loves theirs!
When I was a boy growing up in England, be it ever so humble or so great, an English man’s home was his castle, and his allotment and garden shed was his private refuge away from his wife and children. When I was a boy growing up in England, there was no need to wrap all manner of contractual obligations in the archaic words of a legal document; the shake of spitted palms between two men of like mind and the giving of one’s word was quite sufficient to prove lasting. When I was a boy, I still remember the day that Queen Elizabeth went through Liversedge, Heckmondwike in a motorcade, and all the children and their parents lined the road of her travel and waved little English flags at their monarch and cheered their heads off. While we all cheered the Queen, we were also cheering the country; our country!
As a person who was born in Ireland but has lived in England for over 70 years, I only wish that the majority of people born in this great country could come to love and admire it half as much as this old Irish man does! My one piece of advice for all ye Little Englanders is to take a leaf out of America’s book and Ireland’s book, and learn to offer due respect to the land of your birth. Fly your flag fearlessly with pride and know that ‘this land is your land’ (even your small plot of rented allotment which the council only manage on your behalf). Don’t let anyone take away your land!
Remember the lesson of all the losers. First, they came and took away your rights and then they came and took away your land; then they came to take you! Have a bit of pride man. Don’t let them! Stand up for yourself, stand up for your anthem, and stand up for your flag and country! ‘This land is your land’.
Love and peace Bill xxx
