It's very comforting to know that Woody Guthrie wrote This Land Is Your Land as an antidote to the treacle of Kate Smith's God Bless America.
Guthrie couldn't stand the sentimentality of the Irving Berlin song he kept hearing on the radio and so, contrarian that he was, he set out to write a song that would capture a truer picture of his land, one that celebrated its bounty without the bombast.
The Oklahoma folk singer would have been happy to know that a major poll commissioned in 2002 ranked "This Land" the second most historically important song of the 20th century, behind "Over The Rainbow." "God Bless America" was 19th.
Thanks to Bruce Springsteen, who's just released a new CD called The Seeger Sessions, both Pete Seeger and by association, his very good friend Woody Guthrie, are enjoying revivals.
By coincidence, I've just finished reading a marvellous book called Ramblin' Man, The Life And Times Of Woody Guthrie.
Like most people I only knew the legend of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, the nomadic folk singer who documented the Dust Bowl migration from the southern states to California in such great tunes as Do Re Mi and So Long, It's Been Good To Know You.
One of the first singers to introduce social protest into his lyrics after seeing the dark side of the American dream, Guthrie had a poet's knack of taking the ordinary and transforming it into the mythic.
Because my father was a folk music fan who had some of the old American Folkways albums, I knew Guthrie's music through the singing of his buddy Cisco Houston (Reuben James, East Texas Red, Hard Travellin'.) That was before Bob Dylan's "Song For Woody" on his first album that put Guthrie on the cultural map for my generation.
For those who knew the real drinkin', swearin', womanizin' Guthrie, his subsequent sainthood came as a big shock. As his friend and fellow member of The Almanac Singers, Millard Lampell put it, "the problem is to keep the mass media from turning Woody into a precious folk hero."
Cray's book certainly demonstrates the hobo saint had feet of clay.
In the portrait Cray artfully sketches, Guthrie emerges as a little unkempt kid who never grew up. Chronically unemployed, he thought nothing of leaving his first wife and small children to fend for themselves while he indulged his insatiable yen for the road.
He was averse to baths of any description, would hit on every skirt in sight especially when drunk, and would simply move in unannounced on friends and relatives for a period, then be off on his next adventure.
He lived his whole life on the run from his debtors and his demons, including the Huntington's disease that eventually confined his mother to the mad house and put him in the New Jersey hospital where he gradually disintegrated over the last decade of his life.
All of which makes fascinating reading but is totally irrelevant to the man's musical legacy, which has stood the test of time.
After finishing the book, I dug out an old single I have of Joan Baez singing one of Guthrie's best songs, "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)." It was another song he crafted after hearing a radio report that upset him. A group of Mexican migrant workers being flown back across the Mexican border who were killed in a plane crash were dismissed as deportees in the report. His song gives them names and faces and souls.
In a time of the renewed hostilities on immigrants on both sides of the border, Guthrie's words still cut to the quick. "Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?/ Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?/To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil/And be called by no name except 'deportees?'"
When the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in 1998 to honour the man who was branded a Communist and thrown in jail so many times he lost track, his son Arlo remembered the man behind the myth.
He said, "For a man who fought all his life against being respectable, this comes as a stunning defeat."