Tone Deaf on Protest Songs? A Kind of Protest Against Loudon Wainwright III's List

In what is no doubt a nod to the Trumped up need for honest-to-goodness protest music, the New York Times saw fit to print a list of "10 Great Protest Songs" suggested by Loudon Wainwright III. Who better to take up the task than this noted folksinger? Yet his picks raise some significant questions about what we mean by "protest song".

Wainright acknowledges that his choices are "extremely subjective, and strong arguments could be made for" songs by other artists. Well... I'm not sure he makes "strong arguments" for his own choices, and I don't know if I'll make any either. But I will make some arguments regarding the term "protest song", and what counts as a clearcut or paradigmatic example of a protest song, which will tend to be arguments against many of his choices. So I hereby interrupt my (apparently endless and obsessive) series on the irksome NPR list of "Music Made By Women" before the long-awaited final post, in which I offer my own list, to offer my own list of protest songs. Yes, it's listmania here on the Lamppost, but don't worry, we will have heavier topics to discuss in the near future. (It is a culture blog, but it feels almost ridiculous to split hairs over the term "protest song" in the wake of pipe bombs, stock market crashes and Boston being up two games in the World Series.)

What is a "protest song"? To me, it's a song whose lyrics call for justice where it is notably missing. It's not a mere complaint or an airing of roughly anti-establishment sentiments. It is not a song that vaguely or passingly alludes to some sort of social issue. If those were enough there would be so many protest songs that the category would lose its meaning. John Lennon's "Imagine" fits all those criteria, and so, perhaps, do a long list of rock, R&B and hip-hop songs. People who want, but can't get no, "Satisfaction" or "Respect" may be protesting something that is roughly a social norm. But we should not call those "protest songs". There are rock protest songs – U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is an obvious one, or the Gang of Four's "Ether" (while we're on the subject of the "troubles") – but these have specific political targets.

It's also the kind of song that anyone can sing, which is to say, it is the songs and not a particular recording that counts. It should not depend much on production values, vocal or instrumental virtuosity or arrangement. Somebody strumming a guitar on a back porch can do it as effectively (or more) as an expensively mastered studio production job or an opera company with orchestra and chorus. I am blown away by Robert Goulet's opera-quality performance, with a gospel chorus, of Lee Hayes's great (but entirely metaphorical) protest song "Healing River", written after the murder of civil rights workers Cheney, Schwerner and Goodman. But the song has as much power in Pete Seeger's much simpler concert performance, and I think an a capella performance by a mediocre singer at a rally on a street corner would be just about equally moving.

Protest songs are meant to grab you, to get your attention, to rouse you to action, not primarily to entertain you. They have to be alluring enough that you can't help listen while they kick you in the pants and say, "Get out there and do something about it!"

But most importantly, a protest song has to be against some form of injustice, and make it's purpose plain. This is what I would call a classic protest song:

          Who will remember, the hands so white and fine
          That touched the finest linen, that poured the finest wine?
          Who will remember, the gentle words they spoke
          To name the lives of two good men, a nuisance or a joke...

          Who will remember Judge Webster Thayer

          One hand on the gavel, the other resting on his chair

          Who will remember the hateful words he said

          Speaking to the living in the language of the dead...

          Who will remember the hand upon the switch
          That took the lives of two good men
          In the service of the rich?...

          We will remember this good shoemaker,
          we will remember this poor fish peddlar,
          We will remember all the strong arms and hands,
          That never once found justice in the hands that rule this land.

Ending with the injunction that "all our lives we must struggle to rid the earth of all such crimes", Charlie King's "Two Good Arms", describing the railroading of Sacco and Vanzetti, is more generally a protest song about how the rich manipulate procedural justice to deny it to working people. Many protest songs came directly out of one labor struggle or another, from early ones like "The Man Who Waters the Workers' Beer" and "No Irish Need Apply" to Merle Haggard's "Sixteen Tons". They lay out what is wrong with the social order as it is and demand or at least make obvious the need for change.

The songs, in other words, usually wear their politics on their sleeves. "Healing River", which as I said is highly metaphorical, is an exception; but what is not an exception is that it is intended as a protest against a quite specific act of hatred, violence and racism. That is captured in lines like "wash the blood from off the sand" and "Oh seed of freedom away can flourish" even if it does not explicitly shout "we demand justice for the murdered civil rights workers!". Woody Guthrie wrote protest songs, like "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos", protesting the deplorable treatment of migrant workers. No one could mistake it for anything else.

But some of Loudon Wainwright's choices do not seem to me like "protest songs" at all. The most dubious is "Okie From Muskogee", Merle Haggard's defense of conservative Southern values against the cultural encroachments of hippies and peaceniks. Like "Sweet Home Alabama", it may be a good song but it just barks at the wrong people in the wrong way at the wrong time. It certainly does not demand justice of any sort, but rather takes issue with certain forms of freedom of expression that are themselves more legitimately conceived as "protests" than the song itself. The Lynyrd Skynyrd tune we just mentioned was a swipe at a couple of Neil Young songs, of which at least "Southern Man" does merit the title "protest song". (His "Ohio", about the Kent State massacre, is also a good example.)

The sort of reasoning that would makes Merle Haggard a protest singer would also apply to John Lennon's "Revolution" – it protests annoying Maoist demonstrators who fail to understand how a popular movement wins the hearts and minds of ordinary people. If that social complaint counts as "protest" it opens the door to almost any complaint at all as a "protest song", which takes the term way too literally. The Jagger/Richards song "Mother's Little Helper" is a protest against overprescription of Valium, or frozen food, or something. There are a zillion "protest songs" about unfair lovers (or former lovers). Everything's a "protest song" if there's something it's against, in this literal sense. But that's not what we mean by "protest song".

I start to get the impression that Wainwright's op-ed piece has a subtext when he offers as his last choice "America the Beautiful". Wainwright claims that, "Last year my friend Chaim Tannenbaum unearthed and recorded an unexpurgated version", and he reproduces the following lines: 

          America, America

          God shed his grace on thee

          Till selfish gain no longer stain

          The banner of the free.

and

          Till nobler men keep once again

          thy shining jubilee.

He comments: "Clearly the anthem was as much a protest as a prayer." Well, first let me say that Chaim Tannenbaum did a fine thing recording the verses he did; moreover, he's an inspiration to me – a philosophy professor (hello) and lifelong folk musician (hello) who released his first album at 68 (I released one at 43 but my next one will be at 68 if I don't get cracking). So I will be the last to say anything bad about him, but if Wainwright's choice of this song is in part motivated by the chance to promote his friend (he also records and produces with Tannenbaum, and his first wife Kate McGarrigle is close friends with him as well) it makes it a bit suspect. 

In fact, the original verses of "America the Beautiful" were not exactly "unearthed" by anyone, since the song's history has never been unavailabe if you wanted to read about it. Moreover, what we might call this "unexpurgated" version is far from being a "protest song". First of all, the lovely lyrics about "selfish gain" – without a clear target in the first place – were removed by the author herself (Katharine Lee Bates) in the next published version (1904) and replaced with,

          Till all success be nobleness

          And ev'ry gain divine

Whatever "selfish gain" was referred to in the first version, clearly the author did not have any wild anti-capitalist sentiments in writing those lines. Moreover, the second couplet is cited inaccurately: it was "thy whiter jubilee" (not "shining" jubilee) that "nobler men" were supposed to keep "once again". This couplet too was later replaced by the author, with the well-known final lines,

          And crown thy good with brotherhood

          From sea to shining sea!

Bates may well have had fine sentiments about equality and Christian beneficence, but what comes through in the original lyrics and any later version is just the anodyne injunction to use whatever you gain for good purposes. That's not a protest song, by my lights.

Some of Wainwright's more traditional "protest" picks are questionable models of this genre. Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes" is, sure, a protest song of a sort, but about some fairly vague gripe like conformity ("And the people in the houses / all went to the university / where they were put in boxes / and they came out all the same"). But if you're going to pick a Malvina Reynolds protest song there are so many others to choose from. For instance:

          It isn't nice to block the doorway

          It isn't nice to go to jail

          There are nicer ways to do it

          But the nice ways always fail

          It isn't nice, it isn't nice

          You told us once, you told us twice

          But if that's freedom's price

          We don't mind, we don't mind

Recorded by Judy Collins, it's a rousing call to civil disobedience against war and racism. That's what I would call a real "protest song", one of the relatively rare ones in which protest itself is the song's central theme.

There are so many clearcut examples of protest songs, with the most famous of all being "The Internationale", a protest song translated into dozens of languages. "Arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise ye wretched of the earth... No more starvation's chain will bind us... etc." – this is Protest Song #1; it is also Unity Song #1, a related category that does not always overlap (more on that later). I don't get why Wainwright is inclined to offer up songs with half-baked complaints when the folk song literature alone contains probably hundreds of examples of clearcut, serious protest songs.

His choice of "We Shall Overcome" illustrates another difficulty with the concept "protest song". Lyrically it is more an affirmation of unity and spiritual strength than a protest against anything in particular. It is most likely derived from spirituals that were a form of protest but also a form of religious worship. But it played a great role in the Civil Rights movement – surely a protest movement – and in many other struggles in the U.S. and around the world. Is it a "protest song" in virtue of having become associated with protests? I don't know if there is an answer to that question, but it is worth considering whether something can evolve into a "protest" song regardless of the lyrics or original intent. If so, then perhaps the old Mexican folk song "De Colores" is now a protest song in virtue of its adoption as an anthem and rallying song by the United Farm Workers union. Pete Seeger's "My Rainbow Race" is clearly a protest song of sorts, but against what – nuclear annihilation? – is not all that clear; but it has lately become associated with protests against global warming, due to lyrics the refer to the human race being bound together by "One blue sky above us, one ocean lapping at our shore." This is a version of so-called "folk process", a song gathering new meanings as it is put to different uses.

Personally I would generally be inclined to characterize the nature of a song by its original purpose. But many spirituals were rewritten by civil rights activists, and these may convey a protest in their revised form. "We Shall Not Be Moved", "Woke Up This Morning" and "Wasn't That a Mighty Storm" are some examples off the top of my head. Whereas "Down By the RIverside" is a spiritual that had a clear protest (antiwar) message from the beginning. 

There are a large number of older songs sung by slaves with a freedom message under the surface, like "Joshua Fit the Batte of Jericho" and "Raise a Ruckus". But I don't know if we want to call every song written partly in the spirit of resistance a "protest song". It might be better to say that sometimes singing a protest song is too risky, so resistance is captured in the implicit meanings of songs that lacked any explicitly contentious statements. Much of Latin American nueva cancion consisted in such subtly disguised songs that channeled the desire for freedom, equality and change under oppressive dictatorships that violently suppressed explicit dissent. Here we can see that the term "protest song" can have many gray areas, for nueva cancion should probably be thought of as "protest music" but many of the most famous songs of the genre say nothing controversial at all. Perhaps the most famous song of all is Violeta Parra's "Gracias a la Vida" – explicitly it is a joyous celebration of life. "Protest song" would be a difficult label to pin on it, though when Mercdes Sosa sings her all but mournful version of it we get a different impression.

There are also many songs that affirm some great cause –"El Pueblo Unido", for instance, or "If I Had a Hammer – without protesting anything specific. It is easy to confute songs that were used as rallying points for protest movements because some of the lyrics, or the song's history, communicated a sympatico message, with songs that actually protest something. We might take a cue from the title of Tom Glazer's book, Songs of Peace, Freedom and Protest – there are plenty of songs of peace and freedom that are not explicitly songs of protest, though one is at liberty to infer (and probably should) that people don't generally sing about peace and freedom when there is not some lack of one or both to protest.

A subtle protest can be achieved in many ways, but not, for example, merely by using the word "freedom" somewhere in a song. Songs like "Oh Freedom" and "Freedom Road" do not just say "let's be free", they mention the particular form of oppression they are opposing (slavery, and both racism and fascism, respectively). Richie Havens' version of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child", in which he sings the word "freedom" again and again, is not exactly a protest song, but performed on the stage of the Woodstock Music Festival it certainly seemed like it was. His "Handsome Johnny" is a protest song which sounds like a 2classic antiwar song. Listen again! Most of it is a protest against the need to bear arms, to defend freedom by force. The verses that mention the wars in Korea and Vietnam may have slightly different meanings than the others in which wars or struggles against oppression are the subject.

Wainwright counsels us to listen to Garland Jeffreys (another friend of his? I mean, two progressive, witty New York area folksingers with long careers behind them... just sayin') – in particular his Don't Call Me Buckwheat, the album and the song. I appreciate the reference, since I don't know his music well enough and my impression so far is that it is damn good (I just downloaded a couple of his recent albums to my Spotify offline collection). But I would hesitate to pick out one of the many songs Jeffreys has written about race, class and society as the protest song to listen to on these perennial issues. Isn't "Strange Fruit" a bit more obvious a choice of protest songs about racism? And there are other modern folk classics on this subject, notably David Masengill's "Number One in America". (I also find Pierce Pettis's song "Legacy" very moving. It's a little hard to come by, though, and it may be an example of yet another type of social justice song that is not quite a "protest" song – it's rather a lament, about the sordid history that artificially divides poor whites and poor blacks.) 

Like Jeffreys, the entire 2-tone movement in British rock, the Rock Against Racism groups and other trends in British punk rock and ska often addressed racism head on. The issue with using the term "protest song" here is roughly the same as with using it for Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On? It's a fantastic thing that one of the greatest albums ever made is a lengthy panegyric on social issues. But it has a bit too much value as pure entertainment and a bit too artsy an attitude to also fit neatly under the category of protest music. We can love and appreciate the songs for their embedded social messages as well as their musical genius without dubbing them "protest songs".

Cheryl Wheeler is another songwriter worth more of my attention than I've given her (even after a year of listening primarily to music by female songwriters), and once again I have to thank Mr. Wainwright for bringing her work to our attention. But her song "If It Were Up to Me", one of his "10 GreatProtest Songs", consists mainly of one line: "Maybe it's the..." repeated dozens of times, each line ending with a different cultural reference, with no clear connection between them. Some have a relationship to gun violence ("drugs", "skinheads", etc.) but many don't. Finally, at the end of the song she declares "if it were up to me I'd take away the guns". Okay, goood, me too. That's another "protest song" that protests everything and nothing. It's not clear from the song why Wheeler would "take away the guns", though one can always provide one's own reasons. According to her (apparently self-written) Wikipedia page the song got a lot of attention after the Columbine High School massacre. As I said, a lot of songs that do not really fit the profile of a "protest" song get associated with certain protest movements (in this case, the gun control movement, considered as a protest against inaction on controlling the availability of guns) due to a certain sympathetic line or feeling. I don't know if I agree with Wainright that that one line at the end of the song "says it all". Personally I would take away the Second Ammendment; maybe that says it all.

Another pick of his is one of Tom Lehrer's send-ups of the arms race, "We WIll All Go Together When We Go". I mean, I've been a fan since I was about 12, but a humorous, tongue in cheek, clever, ironic "protest song" is... come to think of it, not that unusual. There is Joe Hill's "Pie in the Sky", Country Joe's "Fixin'-to-die Rag", Phil Ochs' "Draft Dodger Rag", even oddball "protests" like Steve Goodman's "The Lincoln Park Pirates". Lehrer is a kind of Jonathan Swift of folk music. Still, if you're picking just ten protest songs I'm not sure that his sardonic humor makes the grade. If it does, then Tom Paxton's "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation" is perhaps a more poignant bit of protest sarcasm, one that directly spits in the face of Presidential hypocrisy:

          I got a letter from LBJ that said this is your lucky day

          It's time to get your khaki trousers on

          We've got a job for you to do, Dean Rusk has caught the Asian flu

          And we are sending you to Vietnam

          And Lyndon Johnson told the nation

          Have no fear of escalation

          We are trying everyone to please

          And though it isn't really war

          We're sending 50,000 more

          To help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.

Wainwright overlooks so many obvious choices of protest music, both the singers and the songs, that if I didn't know better I'd say he was new to the genre. Nothing written or made famous by Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Josh White, Pete Seeger, Odetta, the Weavers or many other singers of protest music makes his list; ditto for Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Buffy Saint-Marie or Judy Collins, to name a few of the folk revival protest songs of the sixties. Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, The Mighty Sparrow and the entire output of Cuban and Puerto Rican protest singers are overlooked as well. In rock, Eric Burdon, Neil Young, Tom Robinson and many others are passed over for his obscure choices. Cheryl Wheeler's somewhat dubious entry stands in for a large and for a time prominent feminist folk trend (Holly Near, Cris Williamson, etc.) that produced many clear examples of protest songs. Tracy Chapman? Nina Simone? I really wouldn't care who he missed in a list of ten songs if only he had picked ten clear examples of protest songs. He apparently wanted to do a protest song list for the Trump era, but he seems to be all over the place and nowhere at the same time.

Ok, enough protesting his list! I guess I'm glad he did it, even if I am nonplussed by the choices. Let's have a go at what I would call a list of protest songs that are (a) models of the genre, in having some particular form of injustice as a direct and explicit target (b) terrific, inspiring songs in their own right (c) capable of being sung or performed by almost anyone, anywhere, and (d) free of pretenses about entertainment value, other than to move an audience on the strength of a cry for justice.

1. Viva La Quince Brigada – A song of the Spanish Civil War, recorded several times by Pete Seeger. One of the outstanding songs that directly targets fascism, it declares: "We fought against the mercenaries and the fascists... but on the Jarama front we had no tanks, no canons... We are leaving Spain to go on fighting on other fronts." If they're still up for it I think there's a job to do in Washington.

2. Masters of War – Bob Dylan, to music arranged by Jean Ritchie. He was young and brash and suffered no fools, warmongers or hypocrites. "You fasten the triggers / for the others to fire / then you set back and watch / while the death count gets higher..." and on and on like that. A riposte against the military-industrial complex as a whole, it is possibly the most damning protest song of its type ever written.

3. Is There Anybody Here? – Phil Ochs. "Is there anybody here who'd like to change his clothes into a uniform?" is the lead-in to one of the most powerful antiwar songs I know. Ochs wrote so many great protest songs that the choice of any one seems arbitrary.

4. It Isn't Nice – Judy Collins, written by Malvina Reynolds. Discussed above.

5. Last Train to Nuremburg – Tom Paxton. I'd have to quote the entire thing. A direct strike on war criminals of all sorts, from rogue soldiers to the Presidents who dispatched them.

6. Save the Whales – Country Joe MacDonald, to roughly the tune of "What Shall We Do WIth the Drunken Sailor?". There are many good songs that raise consciousness about the effects of whale hunting, including an excellent one by Yes, the progressive rock group. But this much simpler Country Joe song rips the whaling industry apart almost like they do to the whales themselves, pointing out that romantic notions whaling from older times no longer apply: "A modern ship and a modern crew, with sonarscopes and exploding harpoons, a mechanical boat made out of steel, a floating machine going to kill the whales."

7. Now That the Buffalo's Gone – Buffy Saint-Marie. The kind of song that just about leaves you speechless, a hundred essays on the oppression of Native Americans folded into a few brilliant lyrics, with equally moving music behind them.

8. Freedom Road – lyrics by Langston Hughes, music by Emerson Harper, recorded most famously by Josh White. "United we stand, divided we fall / Let’s make this land safe for one and all / I’ve got a message, and you know it’s right / Black and white together unite and fight / That’s why I’m marching, yes, I’m marching / Marching down freedom’s road / Ain’t no fascists gonna stop me, no Nazis gonna keep me / From marching down freedom’s road." Hughes takes on domestic racism, Nazi racism, racism in the armed forces and international fascism in the dynamic sweep of his lyrics, and the music is almost enough to make you get up and run down to the recruiting center to sign up.

9. Bourgeois Blues – Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly). "Well, me and my wife we were standing upstairs / We heard the white man say "I don't want no niggers up there" /
Lord, in a bourgeois town." A plainspoken invective against housing discrimination in Washington D.C., this use of the blues for overt political protest is somewhat of a contrast to the more frequent airing of troubles that may be a result of poverty and racism without being directly attributed to a political cause.

10. The Ballad of Hurrican Carter – Bob Dylan. Than which there is no more powerful indictment of living "in a land where justice is a game". Sing it again every time a black prisoner is set free after wasting his or her life doing time for a crime they did not commit; every time cops are found to have engaged in racial profiling; every time the real criminals lie on the witness stand to pin blame on someone else; every time an unconstitutional "stop and frisk" operation is carried out.

11. I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister – Jim Garland. "We worked to build this country, Mister / While you enjoyed a life of ease / You've stolen all that we built, Mister / Now our children starve and freeze". A protest song if ever there was one.

I guess I don't count as well as Loudon – I had two #5's and decided I couldn't give any of these up. Like him, I admit the subjectivity of my list, which represents my own tastes in music as well as lyrics. I believe it could be replaced with ten equally valid choices, some of which I have mentioned above. But I don't think you can call any of my picks dubious or idiosyncratic choices of protest songs; they are all paradigmatic, and pretty widely known and sung, examples of the genre. They might be a bit incongruous on the Times' Op-Ed page, especially if they appeared alongside some of the neo-con writers that the Times in its infinite fairness and wisdom chooses to provide a platform for. I guess you could say that for Wainwright's list too.