Seeking a new theme for this week, after four weeks of work songs, one candidate seemed to be a natural. Several of my American blogging friends have posted recently about the state of affairs in their country – some with tunes, some without – and after the weekend’s vanity parade and the many more, hugely better attended, counter events under the ‘No Kings’ banner, it seemed to me that protest should be my theme this week. As always, I have collected more possibilities for this than I can fit into one post, and will probably continue for at least a further week, but for today I am concentrating on the US: all of these tunes come from there, and they are very much in the mould of political commentary. I watch the news and read the paper, so I know what the orange moron and his toadies are doing in their attempts to destroy your democracy, so I stand with you by doing my own little bit.

Three of today’s five tunes date back to the late Sixties/early Seventies, showing that protest has been around for a while. One is more recent, and the other feels just about timeless.

I’m starting in the Sixties. I played this band a couple of weeks ago in a non-Tuesday piece and it struck me then that this song, though it wasn’t on the album I featured, would be a good starting point for a theme like this. So, with absolutely no apologies for playing another of their songs, here we go. A new official video was released for this song a few years back, but I think this one makes its point better:

Creedence Clearwater Revival released Fortunate Son on their fourth album, Willie And The Poor Boys, in October 1969, and it got to #2 in Canada, #3 in the US, and #10 in the UK. As the video shows, this track became a Vietnam anti-war movement anthem, a symbol of opposition to the draft and solidarity with the soldiers fighting the Vietnam War. It has been featured extensively in pop culture depictions of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement, and with a gung ho maniac in the White House who can say that history won’t repeat itself? If it does, remember who lost that war!

I’ve played this next one before but, given the recent apparently illegal deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles, I think it offers a timely reminder of how that can go terribly wrong:

Ohio was written by Neil Young in reaction to the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970. It was recorded on 21 May, just 17 days later, and was rush released as single in early June, peaking at #14 in the US and #16 in Canada. It wasn’t a UK hit but I can recall it getting much airplay here, as befits one of the most powerful protest songs I know. The shootings of Kent State students received much news coverage here and around the world, and rightly so: they were outrageous, and it is sad that more than fifty years on there is another US President doing the same thing to quell protests. I would say that he should learn the lessons of history, but as he seems incapable of reading and is trying to rewrite that history, I fear I would be wasting my time. The song has been on live CS&N albums and compilations, but never on a a studio release, and it remains as powerful now as it ever was.

I played this next one four years ago when I ran a short series on the music of the 1969 Woodstock Festival. It has become an iconic moment, not just of that event but in American protest culture generally, and I think it is another that bears a further hearing:

To give the song its proper title, that was the I Feel Like I’m Fixing To Die Rag, the title track from Country Joe And The Fish’s second album, which was released in November 1967 and reached #67 in the US. The song became very much the signature tune for anti-Vietnam War protestors, and was the high spot of the band’s Woodstock performance. As you can see, it is preceded by the ‘Fish Cheer’ which comprised the ‘gimme an F’ beginning. More often than not (as here) the four letters didn’t spell out ‘FISH,’ which led to the band being banned from tv, perhaps not surprisingly! But the song and its message live on.

I promised you a more recent song of protest and this is it, originally released in 2004 but still very much a part of the band’s repertoire, as their recent appearance at the Coachella Festival shows:

If you don’t know it, that was Green Day with American Idiot, the title track of their seventh album, which was released in September 2004 and sold by the truckload. It was #1 in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and many other countries, and has to date sold 16m copies worldwide, including 6m in the US and 2.5m in the UK. As a single the track only made #61 in the US, but topped the Canadian chart and peaked at #3 in the UK. The lyrics are delivered at breakneck speed so you may not have picked them all up – here’s a link to the full set. The song is a protest about the way the band felt that the mass media had orchestrated paranoia and idiocy among the public. That was over twenty years ago, and it has got considerably worse since then, deliberately manipulated to suit political agendas – one in particular.

During Trump’s presidential run in 2016, Billie Joe Armstrong, who wrote the song, began changing the lyric “the subliminal, mind-fuck America” to “the subliminal mind-Trump America” during live performances and in 2019 he added another change, shifting “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” to “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda.” That was the version they sang in this video, as it is still just as valid. They also modified the same lyrics to “I’m not part of the Elon agenda” at a recent concert in South Africa.

I’m closing today with a song written in 1940 which has since become a standard in American folk music. This performance at Obama’s first inauguration brings together two iconic American musicians:

Pete Seeger (who was nearly 90 at the time) and Bruce Springsteen played Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land at a special concert, called We Are One, which took place two days before the actual inauguration as part of a three day series of events. The show was free to attend, and it is estimated that more than 400,000 were there, and it was shown on big screens to the estimated 1.8m who turned up for the inauguration two days later. Various changes have been made to the lyrics by Guthrie himself, including the removal of verses critical of the country once it became involved in WW2, as he felt these were unpatriotic for a song which he intended to show why citizens should value their country. Pete Seeger has become associated with the song over the years, and it was fitting that he and a more recent American icon should perform this together.

“This land was made for you and me” – and long may it stay that way after the current mess is cleared up.

I would imagine that this song featured in some of the protest marches last weekend, though maybe not in the official show! To be honest, I have absolutely no wish to seek out coverage of that – I just enjoy the photos in news reports where we can play the games of ‘spot the spectator’ and ‘is he asleep?’

That’s all for today, and for my little piece of solidarity with my American blogging friends. I hope you understand why I felt the need to do this, and the upside is that there is some good, meaningful music in here, isn’t there.

I’ll see you again soon, so until then stay safe and well 😊