Maybe! The song may have been in the public domain since 1973. It’s one of those interesting but meandering stories that’s hard to untangle. The short version is that Woody Guthrie wrote the song in 1940 but didn’t copyright it until 1945. That original copyright was never renewed and so therefore would have expired 28 years later. But in 1956 Ludlow Music, which seems to have been Guthrie’s publisher, filed for its own copyright and apparently did keep it up to date. Why two simultaneous copyrights were allowed isn’t clear. So earlier this year the same law firm that successfully sued to get “Happy Birthday” put in the public domain tried to do the same with “This Land.” (You missed that breaking news about “Happy Birthday”? Tsk, tsk!) If the suit is successful, one requirement will be the refunding of all licensing fees paid since 2010.
This is yet another of those songs everybody sings and nobody thinks about. Come on, now. Have you ever asked yourself this question? I sure hadn’t.
When contemporary composer John Muehleisen set Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Psalm of Life” to music, he knew that the poet was not talking about actual weeping numbers in the first line, perhaps a number 7 with tears dripping from the end of the top bar. No. Here the word “number” means a piece, selection, or verse. When we refer to the songs in a Broadway show, for instance, we often call them “number,.” as in “a showstopping song-and-dance number.” Therefore, if we piece together the title, “A Psalm of Life,” the subtitle, “What the heart of the young man said to the Psalmist,” and the first two lines (“Tell me not in mournful numbers/Life is but an empty dream”), we get a message of hope, optimism, and action. 
We know that any true folk song will always have multiple versions, since they weren’t composed in any formal way and were passed down orally for some time before being written. One aspect or the other of the original may be prominent in each variant. “Cindy” has an almost infinite variety of verses and also has the characteristic of having been built at least partly from “call and response,” which in this case has someone start out with a line and then others in the group have to come up with a second line that rhymes with the first, whether or not the lines add up to a coherent story. (This type of activity is also common in some churches in which the preacher says something that is clearly asking for a response, even if it’s just “amen.” My favorite such line is something I heard at a wedding I attended many years ago; when the preacher performing the ceremony started to feel that he wasn’t getting enough feedback, he’d say, “Am I talkin’ to anybody out there?” which would be greeted with a chorus of “amens.”)
The meaning of the the Requiem text, part 4.