Author/Lyricist: Woody Guthrie
Illustrator: Kathy Jakobsen
Publisher and Year: Little, Brown and Company, 1998
Number of pages: 32
Genre: Poetry
This picture book is about the song “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie. In the story, the narrator travels across the United States of America, seeing the diversity and celebration of culture and community everywhere he goes. He also sees the division evident in society, and the classist and racist divides between people; yet it is his stalwart hope that brotherhood will win out over separation and prejudice.
The pictures at the beginning of the book fill the entire page; this draws the audience immediately into the story (and song). As the stanza progresses, however, the images become restricted by borders and walled in, becoming windows to different locations across America. Then the second stanza begins and the borders are gone again. Now the borders become more a part of the picture itself, having small images within them, and quotes around the edges (most are Woody Guthrie quotes). The pattern repeats itself until the end of the book, where the last stanza is displayed on a three-page spread that shows people of many cultures and ethnicities crowded onto a grassy plain representing the United States; here there are no borders nor sections, but rather everyone is collected together into one large group. This is representative of the lyricist’s and illustrator’s hope for acceptance and racial tolerance among all people. The ideologies supported by these lyrics and images are of diversity and brotherhood.
The images in this book were created in oil on canvas, and the book states that the painted borders were inspired by notch carvings found in traditional “tramp art”. Both the detailed pictures and the borders of the images speak to the extensive research the illustrator conducted on Woody Guthrie’s life, as the illustrations feature people and places that were important to him. At the end of the book there is a biography on Woody Guthrie and sheet music for the song.
