On this day in 1967, legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie dies.
“I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world,” Guthrie once said, “no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built. I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.”
On assignment for LIFE in 1943, photographed by EricSchaal.
(Source: life)
(Source: life)
We are the music-makers, / And we are the dreamers of dreams, / Wandering by lone sea-breakers, / And sitting by desolate streams; / World-losers and world-forsakers, / On whom the pale moon gleams: / Yet we are the movers and shakers / Of the world for ever, it seems. / With wonderful deathless ditties / We build up the world’s great cities, / And out of a fabulous story / We fashion an empire’s glory: / One man with a dream, at pleasure, / Shall go forth and conquer a crown; / And three with a new song’s measure / Can trample an empire down. / We, in the ages lying / In the buried past of the earth, / Built Nineveh with our sighing / And Babel itself with our mirth, /And o’erthrew them with prophesying / To the old of the new world’s worth, / For each age is a dream that is dying, / Or one that is coming to birth.
“We don’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors,
We borrow it from our children.”
~ The Machine
