Hello! I hope you find this material helpful for your own personal music journey.
It’s pretty challenging to be a professional guitarist as you might imagine! I’ve been using the paulelwood.com website as a repository for my lessons and tutorials but I’ve recently moved over to www.patreon.com/guitarcat. Patreon offers artists and musicians a way to monetize their work by making it easy for subscribers to provide a little financial support monthly.
If you like my stuff and you’re interested in helping to support a veteran and guitar instructor- hey! That’s a twofer! Please do consider subscribing to my Patreon channel.
$5/month gets you access to all my existing videos, lessons and tutorials plus four new video song lessons every single month, with supporting material. And as a patron of Paul Elwood Guitar Coach, your suggestions for song demos, lessons and technique tutorials determine what I’m going to work on next! Want to see how to play a solo fingerstyle version of your favorite tune? just let me know!
So, if you find my stuff is useful, help a brother out and let’s get working on your next tune. See you soon!
Written by Woody Guthrie in 1943, “This Land Is Your Land” is one of the United States’ most famous folk songs. Woody Guthrie wrote the lyrics 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 wrote “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. This is a lovely, simple tune and perfect for ukulele in standard tuning! Click here for the chord sheet pdf and you can follow along with the video if you like.