Americans are responsible for some of the greatest music ever produced by human minds and hands. We’re also a feverishly patriotic people. It’s a shame how seldom those two intersect. There’s been some good patriotic music made over the last two-hundred thirty-three years, but most of it unfortunately falls into the same category as Lee Greenwood’s insufferable “God Bless the U.S.A.,” or Neil Diamond’s maudlin and overwrought “Coming to America.” I still dig Sousa, though not as much as I did when I was going through my super-nationalist period as a child during the first Gulf War. And I like our national anthem fine, though my two favorite recordings of it are both instrumental-only (guess — the first one’s easy).

So far as popular music goes, there have only been two truly great patriotic songs to my mind. Each was performed most famously by a legendary singer and musician, and each comes from a great American musical tradition — one from folk, the other from the blues. And they’re both about the same subject, approached from opposite directions. The songs are “This Land is Your Land,” written and popularized by Woody Guthrie, and “This Land is Nobody’s Land,” by John Lee Hooker.

(Ashley will be shocked that I have left out Ray Charles’s immortal rendition of “America the Beautiful,” given how enthusiastically, heedlessly, shamelessly I sing along whenever I play it. It’s definitely a lot more fun to sing than “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but it’s a smidge too close to a hymn — and in more ways than just form — for my taste. The Ray Charles version is an example of a great artist making something brilliant and timeless out of lesser source material. That recording, that performance definitely deserves to be mentioned as one of the great patriotic American songs, but the song itself isn’t inherently great. So there. Did that sound enough like some defensive bullshit I just pulled out of my ass?)

Guthrie’s song is great because it does what most other patriotic songs do — celebrate the size and natural beauty of the land belonging to the United States — and also because it does what few others even attempt — it claims ownership of that land for everyone. Check out that famous refrain that closes every verse: “This land was made for you and me.” It’s all-inclusive. He’s not singing “This land, America, is made for you and me, Americans.” He’s singing “this land is made for you and me,” whoever we are. He’s obviously talking about the United States, since he mentions California, New York, the Redwood Forest and the “Gulf Stream waters” of the Atlantic Ocean by name in the first verse. But that’s just where he’s singing from. He could be singing to anybody — native, immigrant, male, female, black, white, whatever. No matter who you are, no matter where you come from, this land with its golden valleys and waving wheat fields and diamond deserts can be your land. That frames the appeal of America directly and poetically, and puts it beyond petty politics. Nevermind all the self-serving bullshit about the “eternal principles” upon which we were founded, or how this is “the greatest country God ever gave man.” Guthrie boils the American dream down to its essence: whoever you are, this can be your country. It’s an ideal we don’t always live up to, but it’s still a great ideal.

The other song many of you may be less familiar with. It was released on John Lee Hooker’s first volume of The Real Folk Blues series from Chess Records. It makes the same point as “This Land is Your Land,” but in a much darker, sadder, more cynical way. Where Guthrie’s song is a jubilant sing-along that claims the wide space of America for everyone who wants it, Hooker’s declares that it can’t actually belong to anybody. “This land is no one’s land,” he sings over the measured noodling of his electric guitar. It’s not a denial of private property rights (that’s actually in Guthrie’s song, in a seldom sung verse). It’s something much deeper. To Hooker all claims of ownership over the land are meaningless because, ultimately, there’s only one thing we’re all going to need it for: “This land is your buryin’ ground.” It’s darker, more pessimistic, like a mirror-image of Guthrie’s song.  But Hooker goes on to state outright the question that Guthrie only implies: “Why are we fighting over this land?” Whether it belongs to all of us or to none of us, it’s an excellent question. Woody Guthrie reportedly wrote “This Land is Your Land” because he was sick of hearing Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” on the radio during World War II. When John Lee Hooker released “This Land is Nobody’s Land” in 1966, race riots were breaking out in cities across the country, and the militant black power movement was gaining steam. Put lines like “God made this land / Everybody equal / Why are they fighting over their buryin’ ground?” in that context, and you’ve got not just a great song about America, but one of the most powerful and penetrating sociopolitical statements of the century.

Both songs bring to mind the famous words of a letter to President Franklin Pierce, popularly attributed to Chief Seattle of the Duwamish and Suquamish Indians of Puget Sound, but more likely made up long after the fact by Dr. Henry Smith, who claimed to merely have translated the chief’s original words. Regardless of who wrote them, they’re worth remembering:

How can you buy or sell the sky — the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Yet we do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. . . . Every part of this earth is sacred to my people.

So should it be to all of us. This land, our home, was here long before there was a United States, long before there were any governments, long before the human species or any of its ancestors walked the earth. It will be here long after our country, our laws, our traditions, our artifacts, and every other trace of us has been washed away. And eventually, in the immensity of time, it will disappear as well. Then it won’t matter who the land belonged to.

Now, here in our brief moment in the sun, we should take a moment in between the hot dogs and the fireworks to appreciate the home we’re so fortunate to have, the beautiful land that belongs to all of us, and none of us, that is here for us to share. We should enjoy it, and respect it, and rejoice for it, while we — and it — are still here.