Protest songs in the United States

)[9] A fervent abolitionist, Transcendentalist critic, and poetry lover, who was a friend and enthusiastic champion of American poet Emily Dickinson, Higginson had been deeply impressed by the beauty of the devotional songs he heard the soldiers singing around the regiment's campfires.

This song contained strong appeals to the ideals of justice and equality, and singing it could be interpreted as an act of grass-roots self-assertion by people who were officially still barred from speaking out too overtly against Jim Crow and the resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1920s.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in Chicago in June 1905 at a convention of two hundred socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists from all over the United States who were opposed to the policies of the American Federation of Labor.

One of the successful protest songs to capture the widespread American skepticism about joining in the European war was "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier", (1915) by lyricist Alfred Bryan and composer Al Piantadosi.

[16] The 1920s and 30s also saw the continuing growth of the union and labor movements (the IWW claimed at its peak in 1923 some 100,000 members), as well as widespread poverty due to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, which inspired musicians and singers to decry the harsh realities which they saw all around them.

Their first release in May 1941, an album called Songs For John Doe, performed by Seeger, Hays, Lampell, Josh White, and Sam Gary, urged non-intervention in World War II and opposed the peacetime draft and unequal treatment of African-American draftees.

The Almanacs were widely criticized in the press for switching positions, especially by Dr. Carl Joachim Friedrich, a Harvard political scientist who was in charge of military propaganda for domestic consumption and wrote prolifically for popular magazines.

Although some in the left wing press derided them as having sold out their beliefs in exchange for popular success, their fans nevertheless recognized what their songs were about because their international and multi-racial repertoire strongly suggested support for racial justice and world peace.

In a symbolic act of defiance against the travel ban, labor unions in the U.S. and Canada organized a concert at the International Peace Arch on the border between Washington state and the Canadian province of British Columbia on May 18, 1952.

[24] White enjoyed a position of political privilege, especially as a black musician, as he established a long and close relationship with the family of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and would become the closest African American confidant to the President of the United States.

On December 20, 1940, White and the Golden Gate Quartet, sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt, performed in a historic Washington, D.C. concert at the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which abolished slavery.

Influenced by American radical traditions (the Wobblies, the Popular Front of the thirties and forties, the Beat anarchists of the fifties) and above all by the political ferment touched off among young people by the civil rights and ban the bomb movements, he engaged in his songs with the terror of the nuclear arms race, with poverty, racism and prison, jingoism and war.

By 1963, Dylan and then-singing partner Joan Baez had become prominent in the civil rights movement, singing together at rallies including the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

Dylan's initial and extremely fruitful 20-month period of overt protest songs ended in 1964, when he changed his musical style from what he termed "finger pointing" acoustic folk to increasingly personal, abstract lyrics.

To those opposed to continuing the Vietnam War, the phrase suggested that "Alby Jay", a loose pronunciation of Johnson's nickname "LBJ", did not listen to anti-war protests as he too had "beans in his ears".

[41] Some of his best known protest songs include "Power and the Glory", "Draft Dodger Rag", "There but for Fortune", "Changes", "Crucifixion", "When I'm Gone", "Love Me, I'm a Liberal", "Links on the Chain", "Ringing of Revolution", and "I Ain't Marching Anymore".

Many soul singers of the period, such as Sam Cooke ("A Change Is Gonna Come" (1965)), Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin ("Respect"), James Brown ("Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud" (1968);[47] "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I'll Get It Myself)" (1969)), Curtis Mayfield & The Impressions ("We're a Winner") (1967); and Nina Simone ("Mississippi Goddam" (1964), "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" (1970)) wrote and performed many protest songs which addressed the ever-increasing demand for equal rights for African Americans during the civil rights movement.

The predominantly white music scene of the time also produced a number of songs protesting racial discrimination, including Janis Ian's "Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)" in 1966, about an interracial romance forbidden by a girl's mother and frowned upon by her peers and teachers and a culture that classifies citizens by race.

[48] Steve Reich's 13-minute-long "Come Out" (1966), which consists of manipulated recordings of a single spoken line given by an injured survivor of the Harlem Race Riots of 1964, protested police brutality against African Americans.

In the 1960s and early 1970s many protest songs were written and recorded condemning the war in Vietnam, most notably "Simple Song of Freedom" by Bobby Darin (1969), "I Ain't Marching Anymore" by Ochs (1965), "Lyndon Johnson Told The Nation" by Tom Paxton (1965), "Bring Them Home" by Seeger (1966), "Requiem for the Masses" by The Association (1967), "Saigon Bride" by Baez (1967), "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" by Seeger (1967), "Suppose They Give a War and No One Comes" by The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band (1967), "The "Fish" Cheer / I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" by Country Joe and the Fish (1968),[49][50] "The Unknown Soldier" by The Doors (1968), "One Tin Soldier" by Original Caste (1969), "Volunteers" by Jefferson Airplane (1969), "Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969), and the album Back to the World by Curtis Mayfield.

Warshaw, a draft resistor exiled in the UK, wrote several anti-Vietnam songs during his period with The Critics Group specifically for their "Off Limits" series of radio shows aimed at GIs in Vietnam.

Perhaps the most successful and famous of these was "The Ballad of the Green Berets" (1966) by Barry Sadler,[42] then an active-duty staff sergeant in the United States Army Special Forces, which was one of the very few songs of the era to cast the military in a positive light and yet become a major hit.

[citation needed] While the subject of war continued to dominate the protest songs of the early 1970s, there were other issues addressed by bands of the time, such as Helen Reddy's feminist hit "I Am Woman" (1972), which became an anthem for the women's liberation movement.

The album's 15 tracks dealt with myriad themes, protesting the superficiality of television and mass consumerism, the hypocrisy of some would-be Black revolutionaries, white middle-class ignorance of the difficulties faced by inner-city residents, and fear of homosexuals.

Reagan came under significant criticism for the Iran-Contra Affair, in which it was discovered that his administration was selling arms to the radical Islamic regime in Iran and using proceeds from the sales to illegally fund the Contras, a guerilla/terrorist group in Nicaragua.

A fusion of the musical styles and lyrical themes of punk, hip-hop, and thrash, Rage Against the Machine railed against corporate America ("No Shelter", "Bullet in the Head"), government oppression ("Killing in the Name"), and Imperialism ("Sleep Now in the Fire", "Bulls on Parade").

The recurring lyric "it's gonna be a long walk home" is a response to the violation of "certain things", such as "what we'll do and what we won't", in spite of these codes having been (in the words of the narrator's father) "set in stone" by the characters' "flag flyin' over the courthouse."

In 2003 Lenny Kravitz recorded the protest song "We Want Peace" with Iraqi pop star Kadim Al Sahir, Arab-Israeli strings musician Simon Shaheen and Lebanese percussionist Jamey Hadded.

In 2009, Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band released Roosevelt Room, which among many things protests the perils of America's wealth gap specifically involving the United States' working class.

Rossi wrote and recorded a protest song expressing his feelings about a grand jury's decision not to charge a white police officer in the death of the unarmed black teen in Ferguson, Missouri.