The lyric from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” is “From California to the New York island.” The phrase presents the United States as a sweeping landscape stretching from the Pacific coast to New York.
Guthrie wrote the song in 1940, partly as a critical response to the patriotic optimism of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” He recorded it in November 1944, and the song was published in 1945. Its melody is based on the Carter Family tune “When the World’s on Fire.”
The “New York island” wording is sometimes misremembered as “New York harbor” or “New York skyline,” especially because those phrases sound geographically plausible. Guthrie’s original line is unusual but deliberate: it refers to the island of Manhattan, while “California” supplies the song’s western endpoint.
The song is often treated as an uncomplicated patriotic anthem, but Guthrie’s original lyrics also included verses about private property, hunger, and people being turned away. Many modern performances omit those critical verses and use only the best-known refrain and geographic lines.