She has just begun a series of posts about protest songs from the 60s and 70s (starting with "Blowing In The Wind", Judy Collins' cover of “Masters Of War”, and "Eve Of Destruction" ). I’m very curious to see what she has planned, and it got me thinking about my own favorite protest songs.
I tend to be invested in lyrics so it isn’t surprising that I have an appreciation for good protest songs which are carefully written. Most of the songs below are ones I heard as a child, all of them made a significant impression on me and, as a group, they offer a number of great examples of songwriting and performance craft.
Thinking about what makes a good (or bad) protest song, I started with the conventional wisdom that protest songs often fail because they tie themselves to closely to a topical concern and then quickly become dated or silly if that concern doesn’t resonate.
As I mull it over, however, I don’t think that’s quite right. As Mike Taylor noted, it can be a powerful songwriting technique to use very specific images and details. I’ve started to think that the reason for the poor reputation of protest songs is that (a) writing one presents certain challenges and someone who’s a good pop song writer may not be good at writing protest songs and (b) a protest song wants something — it is trying to convince the audience or motivate the audience — and when it fails to do so it can seem embarrassing to reveal that want and be unable to realize it. Bad protest songs get noticed or remembered in a way that bad love songs may not.
The biggest challenge, of course, is to take a position that feels significant and meaningful and approaches a topic with adequate thought without hectoring, patronizing, or overly flattering the audience. Hopefully all of these songs do that.
Part of what makes me excited to add to Ellen’s list is that we will likely be covering a different set of songs, and a different approach to the form (and, for whatever reason, my list skews British, and she has started out posting American songs). As she correctly notes:
I think there are different kinds of protest songs, and those from the folk tradition tend to be more specific and issue-based and have a very definite stance. I think protest songs in the rock tradition tend to be more broadly anti-authoritarian as opposed to protest about one specific incident or issue. But of course that's a generalization and doesn't always hold true.
I emphasize the ways in which I think the songs I’ve selected benefit from being grounded in specific moments or stories. I encourage people to read my list, read Ellen’s posts and share any thoughts about what you like or don’t like; which styles you are drawn to; and what makes a good protest song.
As a final note, I have omitted both feminist songs and songs from the civil rights/labor movements1. Both of which worthy of attention and felt like the would broaden the topic more than I wanted.
1: “Ira Hayes” — Peter LaFarge
Ira Hayes
Ira Hayes
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinking Indian
Or the marine that went to war
I first heard this on a collection of songs that influenced Johnny Cash (who covered “Ira Hayes”), and it stunned me. Peter LaFarge sings with passion and anger, telling the story of Ira Hayes fighting in WWII and then gradual decline and death after returning to the US. The chorus is unforgettable — when I think of the song I immediately hear “Call him drunken Ira Hayes / He won't answer anymore”
2: “My Name is Lisa Kalvelage” — Pete Seeger
The seed planted there at Nuremberg in 1947
Started to sprout and to grow
Gradually I understood what that verdict meant to me
When there are crimes that I can see and I can know
And now I also know what it is to be charged with mass guilt
Once in a lifetime is enough for me
No, I could not take it for a second time
And that is why I am here today.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that two of my favorite Pete Seeger songs were adapted from statements written by someone else2. Lisa Kalvelage was a peace activist in San Jose who was part of a group of women arrested protesting against shipment of napalm to Vietnam3.
On May 25, 1966, acting on a tip from a journalist friend, Kalvelage and three other women staged a protest at a storage yard in Alviso, California. Carrying picket signs and dressed conservatively with hats and gloves to counter the stereotype that all peace activists were long-haired hippies, the four housewives sat down in front of a forklift loaded with napalm destined for Vietnam. After a tense showdown with the forklift operator and his vicious dogs, the police and media arrived. The women were arrested, tried, and convicted of “trespassing to interfere with legal business.” A jury found them guilty but their ninety-day jail sentences were later suspended.
The story gained international attention. At the trial, Kalvelage invoked the Nuremberg principles and her eloquent statement at a later press conference became folk singer Pete Seeger’s song, “My Name Is Lisa Kalvelage.” Seeger came to San Jose three times to give fundraising concerts for the San Jose Peace Center and each time Kalvelage introduced him to the audience.
Her statement, as captured in the song, is dense, carefully composed, and makes a powerful argument. She directly connects her judgements about the morality of the Vietnam war, and the need to oppose it to her own history, and her connections with the US military. She was born in Nuremberg, was a teenager during the American bombing of the city, and ended up marrying a member of the US Air Force. She takes the question that was asked of German citizens — how could they go along with the Nazi war — and applies that same question to her own responsibility as an American to oppose an unjust war.
It sets a very high standard for addressing an issue of public debate with thoughtfulness and seriousness. Pete Seeger successfully adapts it into a song.
3: “Arthur McBride” — Paul Brady (trad)
“But,“ says Arthur, “I wouldn’t be proud of your clothes
For you’ve only the lend of them, as I suppose
And you dare not change them one night, for you know
If you do, you’ll be flogged in the morning
And although that we are single and free
We take great delight in our own company
And we have no desire strange faces to see
Although that your offers are charming
And we have no desire to take your advance
All hazards and dangers we barter on chance
For you would have no scruples for to send us to France
Where we would get shot without warning”
The best-known song of Irish singer Paul Brady. There are a number of different versions but his has been widely embraced4. The song tells the story of the narrator and his cousin Arthur McBride encountering a group of military recruiters as they walk along the beach. The two men end up besting the recruiters twice. First verbally, as they mock the claims about the good life in the army and then, when the soldiers take offense and draw their swords, physically — beating them and leaving them battered in the sand.
It is a rare protest song built around turning the tables and thumbing it’s nose at the powerful. As noted in the liner notes.
After the landlord’s agent, probably one of the most hated persons in Ireland was the recruiting sergeant. The Irish peasant, destitute of worldly possessions and ground down by poverty, was forced of necessity to fight for a power which he despised. The ballad maker, being aware of this, was not slow to express his feelings in some of his most vicious ballads, always with a sarcastic edge. ….
The sarcasm of the song cannot hide the terrible conditions under which soldiers were forced to serve after they had accepted the shilling, and Arthur’s words –
I would not be proud of your clothes, / For you’ve only the lend of them as I suppose, / And you dare not change them one night for you know / If you do you’ll be flogged in the morning.
are only too true when one considers that twenty five lashes with the cat-o-nine tails was the minimum punishment and a staggering 1500, the legal maximum. All this for eightpence a day.
4: “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” — The Pogues (Eric Bogle)
Then in 1915, my country said "son
It's time you stopped rambling, there's work to be done"
So they gave me a tin hat, and they gave me a gun
And they marched me away to the warAnd the band played Waltzing Matilda
As the ship pulled away from the quay
And amidst all the cheers, the flag-waving and tears
We sailed off for Gallipoli
A cover of a song written by Australian Eric Bogle in 1971. The Pogues cover is surprisingly close to the original but much more forceful. Eric Bogle has said:
I wrote it as an oblique comment on the Vietnam War which was in full swing... but while boys from Australia were dying there, people had hardly any idea where Vietnam was. Gallipoli was a lot closer to the Australian ethos – every schoolkid knew the story, so I set the song there. ... At first the Returned Service League and all these people didn't accept it at all; they thought it was anti-soldier, but they've come full circle now and they see it's certainly anti-war but not anti-soldier.
and
A lot of people now think the song is traditional. And a lot of people think that I died in the war, and penned it in blood as I expired in the bottom of a trench. I never thought the song would outlast me, but I have decided now there's no doubt it will. For how long, I have no idea. Nothing lasts forever. Hopefully it'll be sung for quite a few years down the track, especially in this country. And hopefully it will get to the stage where everyone forgets who wrote it.
5: “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” — Arlo Guthrie
… when we got to the police officer's station there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon, and we was both immediately arrested. Handcuffed. And I said "Obie, I don't think I can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on." He said, "Shut up, kid. Get in the back of the patrol car."
The most famous song on my list. Described as, “an 18-minute-long anti-war song about littering” I’m counting it as a protest song, and a clear example of the effectiveness of writing from personal experience about a specific incident and figuring out how to connect that to broader themes.
In Guthrie’s deadpan delivery, the whole story has a loopy, fever-dream quality, but most of what happens in it is true. Guthrie’s littering made the local paper that fateful Thanksgiving of 1965, with Police Chief William J. Obanhein (the Officer Obie of the song) remarking sternly that he hoped the case would serve “as an example to others who are careless about the disposal of rubbish.”
And Guthrie was, in fact, disqualified from the draft because of his arrest record. “I just couldn’t believe it,” he told NPR in 2005. “And so I turned it into a song. It took about a year to put together, and I’ve been telling it ever since just about.”
The song that Guthrie has continued singing ever since is a kind of scathing ode to bureaucratic idiocy, to a system that so prizes conformity that it treats littering as a scandalous sin even as it celebrates military violence. And at the end, it becomes a protest song.
6: “Moving On Song” — Ewan MacColl (Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger)
You better get born someplace else
So move along, get along, move along, get along,
Go, move, shift
Ewan MacColl has written a small number of well-known songs (“First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, “Dirty Old Town”) and a large number of political songs, often about labor or working-class life. This is one of the latter, but one that has been covered by a number of people and is still being performed. It was composed for the final radio ballad, “The Travelling People” in 1964.
From this summary
The format created for the series overturned the convention of using actors to read a written script, and used instead “actuality”, the actual recorded words of the people interviewed, slotted in with songs written by MacColl which also captured the words and thoughts of the people whose story it was.
…
MacColl and Peggy Seeger spent time living with travellers and recording their stories . . . Peggy told [Charles Parker]:
“Ask them to tell you about particular instances in which they’ve been ‘moved on’, or shifted. It’ll be a river you can’t block, the torrent of words and stories.” Peter Cox quotes Peggy in his book Set Into Song and goes on to quote traveller Minty Smith, recorded in Kent “on what Peggy described as a horrific piece of wet land they had been dragged to”:
“ I was expecting one of my children, you know, one of my babies, and my husband’s sent for the midwife and in the time he was going after the midwife the policeman come along. Come on, he says, get a move on. Shift on, he says, don’t want you on here, on my beat. So my husband says: Look, he says sir, let me stay, he says, my wife is going to have a baby. No, don’t matter about that, he says, you get off. They made my husband move, and my baby was born going along and my husband’s stayed in the van and my baby was born on the crossroads in my caravan. The horse was in harness and we was travelling along and the policeman was following behind, drumming us off and the child was born, born at the crossroads.”
7: “Broken English” — Marianne Faithfull
Lose your father, your husband
Your mother, your children
What are you dying for?
It's not my reality
A slight departure, both stylistically and much less wordy than the previous songs. Ahead of its time, the original was released in 1979, I think it has a very 80s feel combining emotional punch with a chilly, austere surface (the production details of the original are a little dated so I’ve linked to a live version which is stripped down, but still keeps the tone).
What makes it work is the performance and Marianne Faithful’s voice. This was the title track of her comeback album and the it sounds timeless. The song was inspired by a documentary about the Baader-Meinhof Gang, but it feels like a primal protest against the forces of war.
8: “Think Again” — Dick Gaughan
Do you think that the Russians want war?
They're the sons and the daughters
Of parents who died in the last one
Do you think that they'd want
To go through that again
The destruction, the bloodshed,
The suffering and pain?
In the second world war
Out of every 3 dead one was Russian
At one point in 5th grade I brought this in to play for the class. I don’t remember what the connection was but, between the small cassette player and Gaughan’s Scottish accent most of the class had no idea what he was saying. Even if they had understood the words, I think it confused them because it was so different from the music they were used to.
Dick Gaughan says that the song was, “written in February 1981 on the railway platform at Friedrichstrasse station which used to be no-man's-land between East and West Berlin.”
That railway station isn’t mentioned in the song, but I think it matters that it comes out of such a specific experience. Compared, for example, to the Sting song “Russians” it feels much more visceral and grounded.
It also takes a certain skill and temperament to perform that sort of lyric and have it feel sincere and direct rather than overheated. It’s hard to imagine Sting writing a line like, “Will you die because you don't / Like their political system? / There will be no survivors you know / No one left to scream in the night / And condemn our stupidity” Even if he had, could he sing it? That’s so far from his persona, but Gaughan makes it feel personal
9: “Stand Up For Judas” — Leon Rosselson
And Jesus knew the answer
Said, Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, said, Love your enemies
But Judas was a Zealot and he wanted to be free
Resist, he said, The Romans' tyranny
I think Leon Rosselson is a superb songwriter — particularly if you like cranky, opinionated, Jewish socialists. This song isn’t representative of his typical sound (let me know if you want other recommendations). It’s almost athematic, but the political content is consistent with his other writing.
He has written about the origins of the song — his irritation at seeing a sign at a church on Harrow Road which felt presumptuous, prompting him to read the bible and a variety of historical research to be able to respond appropriately . . . You can hear that they knew the performance needed to rise to the level of the songwriting and it does (actually sung by Roy Baily who has a slightly stronger voice than Rosselson). The song was controversial but also one of his better known songs (along with “The World Turned Upside Down” which was covered by Billy Bragg) and has some surprising fans.
The title of the song, Stand up for Judas, is deliberately provocative since it not only references and challenges the hymn Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus but also upends the image of Judas Iscariot as the very embodiment of venality and betrayal. Iscariot is derived from ‘sicarus’ meaning dagger-man. The Sicarii were the most militant of the Zealot party and the Zealots were the militant wing of the Pharisees. They believed in open resistance to Roman rule and that God would come to their aid but only if they showed ‘zeal’, like Phineas the Zealot in Numbers 25. So in the song, Judas the Zealot is the voice of the resistance and a critic of the passivity of Jesus in the face of oppression.
One May Day in the early nineties I gave a concert in Catholic Belfast. To my amazement I was asked if I would sing Stand Up for Judas. So I did. Nervously. Apparently, the IRA, or some members of it, identified with Judas as a hero of the resistance.
It’s been recorded by Roy Bailey, David Campbell and Dick Gaughan and sung in concerts around the country, including at least one church.
10: “Shipbuilding” — Robert Wyatt5 (Elvis Costello)
It's just a rumor that was spread around town
By the women and children
Soon we'll be shipbuildingWell, I ask you
The boy said, "Dad, they're going to take me to task
But I'll be back by Christmas"
Written by Elvis Costello and Clive Langer, inspired by the Falklands war it juxtaposes images of the families seeing extra money from the jobs in shipyards, with the dead from the war. It is remarkably sensitive for a protest song.
The very first words Wyatt sings, in what is a far more chilling and spare rendition than Costello’s lush jazz arrangement, really form the central pivot around which the rest of the song sits. ‘Is it worth it?’ Wyatt asks us. At the time ‘Shipbuilding’ was written, around 10% of the British population was unemployed. The Falklands conflict, however, led to the re-opening of the shipyards and offered many-a-jobseeker gainful employment. It is in this moral grey area that Costello’s narrator sits, listing “a new winter coat and shoes for the wife, and a bicycle on the boy’s birthday,” in what is essentially a selection of products that the shipbuilders can buy only because of the industrial uptake prompted by war.
David Bowie often cited ‘Shipbuiling’ – and specifically Robert Wyatt’s version of it – as nothing less than a masterpiece, frequently calling it one of the best songs to ever emerge come from the British Isles. . . .
This video includes brief introductory remarks provide a little more background for the song
Bonus: “Duffy’s Cut” — Christy Moore (Wally Page)
57 men signed up
Duffy promised to fill their cup
If they cut the Malvern Valley up
Mile 59 had to be on time for the railway line
A protest song written about an incident which occurred almost 200 years earlier. In 1832 Duffy hired 57 Irish immigrants at the Philadelphia dock. Within two and a half weeks all of them had died, reportedly from cholera. From that point there was a long and gradual process of unearthing information about the deaths.
In March 2009, after five tireless years of seemingly unproductive digging, the team finally found what they had been searching for. Amongst a grove of trees just behind a housing development near the R5, they discovered a tibia, skull fragments, and more than eighty other human bones. After 200 years the team expected to see decomposition, but they discovered more than that. This skull had blunt force trauma.
…
At UPenn, Dr. Monge was able to determine signs of blunt force head trauma in three more of the seven sets of bones. The team speculates that some of the immigrants escaped the quarantine and were slaughtered, only to have their bodies returned to the shantytown in nailed coffins to avoid a riot among remaining immigrants. According to Dr. William Watson, it is well documented that a local vigilante group named the East Whiteland Horse Company existed in the area. He continues: “It is likely the rest were victims of vigilantes driven by anti-Irish prejudice, class warfare or intense fear of the dreaded disease.”
Christy Moore sings a song which powerfully introduces the story:
Let me know which of these you think are successful protest songs.
The other is “Clara Sullivan’s Letter” originally composed by Malvina Reynolds.
There is additional coverage of their story in this documentary short.
This 5-minute video tells an interesting story of how he ended up finding the song in an historical American songbook, and the small changes that he made.
Great piece. The songs all resonate as protest songs. I was familiar with all except the Seeger and Rosselson, though I know other work by both musicians. I only mention my familiarity as that will presumably have a bearing on how effective I find the songs, what comes across clearly, what may need explaining, etc.
Which brings me to my first question or provocation. If a protest song needs explaining, is it an effective protest song? I don't think that's a simple question to answer. I'm not for a moment saying that songs shouldn't have their context and 'backstory' (much as I dislike that term) brought to new listeners (I hope my own writing shows that I feel it's always spending time on such things), but that first question does bring another as follow-up: what do we want (or expect) protest songs to do? If we want them to be almost immediately graspable, then that question about explanation and context becomes relevant. If, on the other hand, we see them as another 'first draft of history' (like journalism) or as an emotive vehicle for telling stories that need to be told and that we can trust listeners to put time into to follow their curiosity, that's a different matter (sorry for the convoluted sentence; I hope it makes sense).
I offer those questions because they are my ways of approaching that topicality/timelessness question. I agree with you that it's not as simple as the claim (which I have also made at times) that a song dense with topical detail will date badly; that doesn't have to be the case, as you've convincingly argued. But, at the same time, if I was to approach a collection like Smithsonian Folkways' The Best of Broadside 1962-1988 (https://folkways.si.edu/the-best-of-broadside-1962-1988-anthems-of-the-american-underground-from-the-pages-of-broadside-magazine/folk/music/album/smithsonian) for the first time, how many of the songs would speak to me without the extensive liner notes that accompany the collection? (I use this example because it's one I used to use with students when I offered a class on 'Protest' as part of an American Popular Music course I ran.
I think there's always also the interesting question of aesthetics in any political art (if we're classing protest songs as political art - are we?), which I think about with some of the songs you've chosen and also when I read your discussion with Ellen. The video you linked to with Paul Brady talking about how he found that song is a good example as he is keen to point out the structural changes he made to bring out the melodic line (and I note too that many commenters on the famous live clip also comment on the beauty of the melody and vocal flourishes). Wyatt's 'Shipbuilding' is a beautiful piece of music, which (and I say this as a huge RW fan) can't always be said for his more political work - by which I mean not 'Shipbuilding' but the albums of what he called 'non-misuseable music': that idea of use again. I wrote an article about that aspect of Wyatt's work, by the way, which I can link you to if it's of interest.
Okay, this comment's getting long. I do find protest songs fascinating and, as I say, the things that they bring to the fore: clarity of message, aesthetics, music/lyrics, use/purpose. Thanks for reminding me of this.
Thanks for engaging with me around protest songs and pointing readers to my posts so far, Nick.
As we've discovered, your list and mine are completely different and non-overlapping, which in itself is very interesting and raises questions about defining and populating this as a category. Are there sub-categories and you and I are just rustling around in different ones?
In that regard, what struck me is your saying that you really pay attention to lyrics and storytelling, whereas I have to be moved by the music. In fact, I may not even read the lyrics to a song or realize exactly what the artist is singing until years later, just having an overall understanding of what the song is about and the emotional impetus it's aiming to deliver to listeners.
The other difference I see between our lists is that I definitely inhabit the rock 'n' roll genre and folk music has never been my 'thing' so much (although I love "Alice's Restaurant" for the humor in the storytelling, however it's not a song I would listen to over and over), whereas folk (and related storytelling categories) seems to be an important genre for you. And folk is definitely where most of the protest songs over time seem to be situated, whereas protest in rock 'n' roll seems to surge with mass movements and then abate (like the anti-war movement in the 60s and early 70s when young men were being forced to go to war). As I said in a previous comment, I think rock tends to be anti-authoritarian in general but that's often in a taken-for-granted way and not topical.
I'm sure dissertations and books have been written on this, but it's much more fun for us to come up with our lists, because who doesn't like to listen to the music itself and curate and share the songs you love?!