The songs and the struggles
irishtimes.com | Mar 12th 2011
PHILIP KING
MUSIC: 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs By Dorian Lynskey
Faber and Faber, 688pp. £17.99
MUSIC AND songs are the companions of struggle. The musical history of the 20th
century abounds with memorable songs often overlooked or hidden from the view
of historians. Some of these have slipped out of their time to become, in the
words of Jacques Attali, “heralds of the future”, visions of what is to come or
what may be possible. In our own time the South African song Nkosi Sikelel
i’Afrika is a perfect example: banned by the apartheid regime, it became part
of the national anthem of the country that proscribed it.
Some protest songs, revolutionary songs, songs of freedom became classics. JM
Coetzee defines a classic as “that which is not time bound, which retains
meaning for succeeding ages, which ‘Lives’ ”. Of the more than 1,000 songs
mentioned in the text of 33 Revolutions Per Minute some are indeed classics,
some part of music history, some just footnotes.
Dorian Lynskey has been writing about music for the Guardian, the Observer,
Q magazine and other publications since 1996. He chooses 33 songs as his
chapter titles here, spanning the years 1939-2005. Many of you will know – and
will be able to hum – these songs. I found myself heading to the record shelf
to pull down old vinyl copies of Strange Fruit, This Land Is Your Land, We
Shall Overcome, Poverty Poverty Knock, Masters of War, Give Peace a Chance,
Living for the City, White Riot, Free Nelson Mandela, Pride (In the Name of
Love), John Walker Blues and many, many more. More than 30 Bob Dylan songs,
spanning five decades, are referenced. Protest music, Lynsky tells us, “was one
thing before Bob Dylan, and quiet another afterwards”.
The past 100 years or so, more than any previous age, has been characterised by
the uprising of people everywhere, from the suffragists of the early decades of
the 20th century to the campaigners for African-American civil rights to the
anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. This book looks at the role of songs
in the fight for civil and religious liberties and human rights and in doing so
engages with some of the issues that have dominated political struggle, such as
race, nationalism and war. Some of those struggles continue, some were lost,
some were won and some have been superseded or abandoned.
Many of the political structures of the 20th-century society that facilitated
those movements have broken down as the ideological base that supported them
crumbled. Robin Denselow, the writer of When the Music Is Over: The Story of
Political Pop, told me when I spoke with him for our film Freedom Highway:
Songs that Shaped a Century that without music there to inspire, to bring
cohesion, to bring a sense of community, a lot of the great political movements
of the 20th century would not have turned out the way they did.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, veteran civil-rights campaigner and member of Sweet
Honey in the Rock, told me, “Singing was a way of visualising a community with
sound. It actually made what was and what was not the community, and so if the
sheriff came into a mass meeting, singing could roll back the terror and keep
you in the room so that you did not run from fear.” And the actor and singer
Ruben Blades, speaking of his executed friend Victor Jara, said, “It’s a
reminder, really, that music can have an extraordinary power, because here was
someone who was killed for his music in the way that other people have had
their songs banned or attacked.”
It is true that when people are singing they go to a different place. Tom Waits
says, “We drop down from our minds to our hearts, and somehow we all unite
there.”
READING DORIAN LYNSKEY’S book has reminded me of some of these things for the
first time in almost 10 years – and what a time to be reminded. His book is an
admirable piece of work, with a thorough index, and even a list of 100 songs
not mentioned in the text.
There is very little of Ireland here. No Christy, no Moving Hearts, no rebel
songs, no Orange songs, no songs of emigration. Chapter 23 does, however,
reprise the U2 of October, War and The Unforgettable Fire, and the Conspiracy
of Hope tour. A young Bono is quoted as saying, “Here I am, a 22-year-old with
a head full of Gothic dread, looking around at a world full of millions of
unemployed and hungry people.” When I finished reading this chapter I was moved
to listen again to the gentle, steely, insistent Mothers of the Disappeared.
Usefully, there is in an appendix a short history of protest songs before 1900
that offers good context and background. Lynskey lets us know that, in the 16th
and 17th centuries, cheap printing presses allowed the circulation of hundreds
of thousands of topical ballads attached to folk melodies and named after the
one-sided sheets that bore them, the broadsides. Indeed The Star-Spangled
Banner started life in 1814 as a broadside called Defence of Fort McHenry , set
to the tune of a British drinking song – only to be playfully and viciously
deconstructed by Jimi Hendrix 153 years later at Woodstock.
The first song mentioned in the book is Strange Fruit – as Nina Simone would
have it, “the ugliest song I have ever heard . . . Ugly in the sense that it is
violent and tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in
this country”.
Lynskey believes that Strange Fruit was a significant departure. Up to this
point protest songs functioned as propaganda, but Strange Fruit proved they
could be art. He also believes that Barack Obama is the first protest-song
president, growing up on the politicised soul of Stevie Wonder and using Curtis
Mayfield’s civil-rights anthem Move on Up at his election rallies. At his
inauguration concert Pete Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen to sing Woody
Gurthrie’s This Land Is Your Land.
Lynskey’s own top-10 protest songs include Florence Reece’s Which Side Are You
On? (1931), Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come (1964), Creedence Clearwater
Revival’s Fortunate Son (1969), The Specials’ Ghost Town (1981), Frankie Goes
to Hollywood’s Two Tribes (1984) and Gil Scott-Heron’ s The Revolution Will Not
Be Televised (1970).
This is a great story book. Each one of these songs has a story and is a story
in itself. There are songs of love, loss, longing, triumph, despair, exultation
and rejection here. As Norma Waterson once said to me, “Traditional music,
particularly protest music and union music, is written by the people. It’s our
oral history. It’s what made us do things, it’s what made us march, it’s what
made us sing, it’s what made us happy. And I feel that it does deserve as much
respect and dignity as any of those history books high on the shelf. This is
oral history.”
So let’s leave the last word to Woody, from Bound for Glory, as quoted by
Dorian Lynskey in his preface. “Remember, it’s just maybe, someday, sometime,
somebody will pick you up and look at your picture and read your message, and
carry you in his pocket, and lay you on his shelf, and burn you in his stove.
But he’ll have your message in his head and he’ll talk it and it’ll get around.
“I’m blowing, and just as wild and whirling as you are, and lots of times I’ve
been picked up, throwed down, and picked up; but my eyes has been my camera
taking pictures of the world and my songs has been messages that I tried to
scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and in
the window sills and through the dark halls.”
And who will scatter our messages now?
Philip King is a musician, writer and film director. His credits include
Bringing It All Back Home, U2: The Joshua Tree, John McGahern, The Limits Of
Liberty and Freedom Highway: Songs That Shaped a Century. He is the series
editor of Other Voices and presents The South Wind Blows on RTÉ Radio 1 on
Sundays at 9pm. He performs regularly with the band Scullion
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