The Protest Song

This Sunday afternoon at 4PM CST on the Fed Up American Show I will be discussing protest songs.

The oldest protest song on record is "The Cutty Wren" from the English peasants' revolt of 1381 against feudal oppression. Many songs were written during the American Revolutionary War and the abolitionist movement of the 19th century. During the American Civil War, traditional songs and spirituals served as protest songs. "We Shall Overcome" was a song popular in the labor movement and later the Civil Rights movement. Songs of protest continue to be written well into the 21st century.

The 1960s was a fertile era for the genre, especially with the rise of the Civil Rights movement, the ascendency of counterculture groups such as Hippies and the New Left, and the escalation of the War in Vietnam. The protest songs of the period differed from those of earlier leftist movements that had been more oriented towards labour activism, adopting instead a broader definition of political activism commonly called social activism, which incorporated notions of equal rights and of promoting the concept of 'peace'. The music often included fairly simple instrumental accompaniment including acoustic guitar and harmonica.

Bob Dylan produced a number of landmark songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" (1962), "Masters of War" (1963), "Talking World War III Blues" (1963), and "The Times They Are A-Changin'" (1964). Pete Seeger produced "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", "If I Had a Hammer" (which was written in 1949, but rose to Top Ten popularity in 1962), and "Turn, Turn, Turn" (also written earlier but released in the early 1960s), among others.

"We Shall Overcome", his adaptation of an American gospel song, continues to be used to support issues from labor rights to peace movements. Other notable voices of the period included Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie (whose anti-war song "Universal Soldier" was later made famous by Donovan) and Tom Paxton ("Jimmy Newman" - about the story of a dying soldier, and "My Son John" - about a soldier who returns from war unable to describe what he's been through), among others. The first ever protest song to reach number one in the States was Eve of Destruction by Barry McGuire in 1965.

Woody Guthrie's son Arlo Guthrie also wrote one of the decade's most famous protest songs in the form of the 18 minute long talking blues song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree", a bitingly satirical protest against the Vietnam War draft.

In the 1960s and early 1970s many protest songs were written and recorded condemning the War in Vietnam, most notably "Masters of War" (1963) by Bob Dylan, "The War Drags On" by Donovan (1965),"I Ain't Marchin' Anymore" by Phil Ochs (1965), "Requiem for the Masses" by The Association (1967), "Saigon Bride" by Joan Baez (1967), "The "Fish" Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" (1968) by Country Joe and the Fish, "One Tin Soldier" (1969) by Original Caste, "Volunteers" by Jefferson Airplane (1969), "Fortunate Son," (1969) by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and "Give Peace a Chance" by John Lennon (1969).

Protest songs about The Vietnam War continued in the 1970s, such as "War" (1970) by Edwin Starr, " Ohio" (1970) by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, "Imagine" (1971) by John Lennon. "Peace Train" by Cat Stevens (1971), " War Pigs" by Black Sabbath (1971), and Stevie Wonder's frank condemnation of Richard Nixon 's Vietnam policies in his 1974 song "You Haven't Done Nothin'." Protest singer and activist Joan Baez dedicated the entire B side of her album Where Are You Now, My Son? (1973) to recordings she had made of bombings while in Hanoi.

While war continued to dominate the protest songs of the early 70s, there were other issues addressed by bands of the time, such as The Rolling Stones' protest against police brutality with their single "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)" in 1973.

After the 90s the protest song found renewed popularity in the Western World after the turn of the century as a result of 9/11 in America, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in the Middle East, with America's president George W. Bush facing the majority of the criticism. Many famous protest singers of yesteryear, such as Neil Young, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Morrissey and Bruce Springsteen, have returned to the public eye with new protest songs for this new American war. Young approached the theme with his song, "Let's Impeach the President" - a stinging rebuke against President George W. Bush and the War in Iraq - as well as Living With War, an album of anti-Bush and anti-War protest songs.

Smith has written two new songs indicting American and Israeli foreign policy - "Qana", about the Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese village of Qana, and "Without Chains", about the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Tom Waits has also covered increasingly political subject matter since the advent of the Iraq war, with "Hoist That Rag" and "The Day After Tomorrow", while "Road To Peace" deals explicitly with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East in general. Ex-Smiths frontman Morrissey has also attacked both sides of the Atlantic with "America is Not the World" and "Irish Blood, English Heart" from his 2004 You Are the Quarry album.

Bruce Springsteen has also been vocal in his condemnation of the Bush government, among other issues of social commentary. In 2000 he released American Skin (41 Shots) about tensions between immigrants in America and the police force, and of the police shooting of Amadou Diallo in particular. For singing about this event, albeit without mentioning Diallo's name, Springsteen was denounced by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association in New York who called for the song to be blacklisted and by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani amongst other.

In the aftermath of 9/11 Springsteen released The Rising, which exhibited his reflections on the tragedy and America's reaction to it. In 2006 he released We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a collection of 13 covers of protest songs made popular by Pete Seeger, which highlighted how these older protest songs remained relevant to the troubles of the modern America. An extended version of the album included the track "How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live" in which Springsteen actually rewrote the lyrics of the original to directly address the issue of Hurricane Katrina.

Modern-day mainstream artists to have written protest songs on this subject include Pink with her appeal to Bush in "Dear Mr. President", Bright Eyes with "When the President Talks to God" (which was hailed by the influential Portland, Oregon, alternative paper Willamette Week as "this young century's most powerful protest song."), Dispatch's anti-war underground hit "The General", and Devendra Banhart's "Heard somebody Say" in which he sings "it's simple, we don't want to kill". Pearl Jam also included two anti-Bush songs ("World Wide Suicide", "Marker In The Sand") in their 2006 album Pearl Jam. Arcade Fire's 2007 Neon Bible contains many oblique protests against the paranoia of a contemporary America 'under attack by terrorism'.

The album also contains two more overtly political protest songs in the form of "Windowsill", in which Win Butler sings "I don't want to live in America no more", and "Intervention", which criticises religious fanatacism.

Utah Philips, and David Rovics, among many other singers have continued the folk tradition of protest. In John Mayer's 2006 release CONTINUUM, the lead single " Waiting on the World to Change", Mayer is critical of the desensitizing of politics in youths.

He goes on to say in "Belief":

"What puts a hundred thousand children in the sand?

Belief can.

What puts the folded flag inside his mother's hand?

Belief can."

However the protest album to achieve the most mainstream success has been Green Day's "American Idiot, which was awarded a Grammy for "Best Rock Album" in 2005, despite its strong criticism of current American foreign policy and George Bush. The title track from the album has been described by the band as their public statement in reaction to the confusing and warped scene that is American pop culture since 9/11.

While country music has offered the loudest voice in support of the war (through artists such as Toby Keith ("Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue (The Angry American)" - which Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, publicly criticised as "ignorant, and it makes country music sound ignorant."), Darryl Worley ("Have You Forgotten") and Charlie Daniels) many established country artists have released strongly critical anti-war songs. Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, the Dixie Chicks and Nanci Griffith have been the most vocal in this regard.