Protest Songs
Protest songs, also referred to as topical songs, have played a significant role in the cultural and musical heritage of the United States, serving as a vehicle for social and political commentary throughout history. These songs have addressed various issues, from the fight against British colonialism to the abolition of slavery and the women's suffrage movement. In the 1940s and 1950s, artists like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger emerged as key figures, using music to advocate for the rights of the working class and to promote social justice. The 1960s saw a resurgence of protest music, coinciding with the Civil Rights Movement, where songs became intertwined with activism and a tool for raising awareness about racial and political injustices. Artists such as Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and others contributed to a vibrant protest music scene that resonated with a generation eager for change. These songs not only unified and motivated activists but also encouraged broader public discourse on critical societal issues. As a result, the music of this era transformed popular music, shifting away from commercial norms to include personal and political expressions from the artists themselves.
Protest Songs
Songs that attack prevailing political and social attitudes and conditions. Protest songs provided a soundtrack for the civil rights and antiwar struggles of the 1960’s and helped establish an atmosphere in which it was acceptable to question and criticize the status quo.
Origins and History
Protest songs also known as topical songs have long been a part of the musical heritage of the United States. Songs accompanied the nation’s rebellion against Britain, agitated for the abolition of slavery, and urged the enfranchisement of women. During World War II, protest songs, often set to traditional folk tunes, became one vehicle through which the Left advanced the interests of the working class. Prominent in that effort were Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who performed together as part of the Almanac Singers, a group dedicated to the creation of a singing labor movement. In 1950, Seeger helped start Sing Out! magazine, a periodical devoted to the promulgation of “people’s music,” which it defined as all music that served the “common cause of humanity.” When blacklists, fueled by anticommunist hysteria, deprived Seeger and his colleagues of meaningful avenues of communication. It appeared, for a time, that the forces of the status quo had silenced all songs of social change.
Topical Songs Emerge
In the early 1960’s, the growing commercial popularity of folk music, along with a relaxation of the more conservative mores of the previous decade, provided an opportunity for Seeger and other folk performers interested in political song to return to public prominence. Believing that many people were writing topical songs, Seeger decided that they needed an outlet. He lent advice and some funds to a new publication, Broadside, founded by two of his old friends, Agnes “Sis” Cunningham and her husband, Gordon Friesen. Broadside, subtitled “a handful of songs about our times,” debuted in February, 1962. The premier issue included the words to “Talkin’ John Birch,” by the still unknown Bob Dylan, who would soon become a legend through his socially conscious song lyrics. It was the first publication of a Dylan song, but by the end of 1963, Dylan had published twenty-one songs in the pages of the new periodical.
When the first issue of Broadside appeared, the nation as a whole was unaware of any burgeoning topical song movement. In the spring of 1962, the Kingston Trio had a minor hit record with the Seeger composition “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” It was the first time in roughly a decade that Seeger received significant radio play, albeit as a composer. Though the song’s political message war is terrible was benign, it is unlikely that radio would have played it only a few years earlier, when Seeger was in open conflict with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a Congressional investigating committee. In the fall of 1962, folksingers Peter, Paul and Mary had a hit with “If I Had a Hammer,” a song composed by Seeger and his activist colleague, Lee Hays. Though written at least a dozen years earlier, the song’s cry for “justice,” “freedom,” and “love between my brothers and my sisters” was plainly applicable to the civil rights battle then gripping the nation.
Activism Gains a Voice
It was through the Civil Rights movement that the nation as a whole began to link songs with social activism. On August 20, 1962, The New York Times ran a front-page story entitled “Songs a Weapon in Rights Battle,” which described how African American folk music had become a “vital force” in the ongoing battle for integration. The songs, the article stated, reflected the activist attitude of a younger generation who were no longer thinking “about pie in the sky, in the bye and bye, but a piece of that pie now.” Peter, Paul and Mary’s next big hit, the Dylan composition “Blowin’ in the Wind,” expressed this mood of discontent unequivocally. The song, which dominated the airwaves in the summer of 1963, asked bluntly, “How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?” In the world of popular music, such lyrics were revolutionary. In the song’s wake, the still largely unknown Dylan became a star and went on to compose a body of stirring protest songs that attacked injustice, war, and conformity and that signaled the vocal emergence of a new culture founded on youthful idealism.
Dylan was not the only young composer of the 1960’s whose lyrics challenged the status quo. In July, 1963, Time magazine noted that performers had not sung about current events “in such numbers or with such intensity” since the Civil War. That same month, Look magazine reported that a “whole generation of young Americans” was singing, listening to, and buying records of protest songs. In the realm of folk music, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, and Woody Guthrie’s son, Arlo Guthrie, achieved fame with songs that commented upon the racial and antiwar struggles of the decade. Other genres of popular music also contributed to the decade’s canon of protest material. Some of the better known songs in this vein were Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” which decried the seemingly omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation; James Brown's “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which reflected the more militant attitude of the late 1960’s Black Power movement; and “Volunteers,” in which the rock band Jefferson Airplane urged revolution and declared that U.S. leaders had turned the nation’s youth into “outlaws.”
Impact
One can never be certain if the political songs of the 1960’s, by themselves, actually motivated large numbers of people to take to the streets in protest. The songs did, however, unify and energize those who were politically active. More important, the songs demanded that people think, and their popularity contributed to the atmosphere of open commentary, questioning, and criticism that characterized the period. After 1963, the pop music of the decade was never the same. Increasingly, pop songs ceased being merely the commercial product of professional songwriters as listeners demanded that performers write their own songs and express their own viewpoints, both politically and personally.
Additional Information
David Pichaske’s A Generation in Motion: Popular Music and Culture in the Sixties (1989) examines the social and political impact of music throughout the decade. Ray Pratt’s Rhythm and Resistance: The Political Uses of American Popular Music (1994) and Reebee Garofalo’s anthology, Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements (1992), provide broader surveys of the political uses of popular song, with discussion of the 1960’s and later decades.