A Countdown of the Top 100 political songs, to help provide a soundtrack to the 2011 Canadian Election. Researched and written by a proud New Democrat.
Halifax journalist Alex Boutilier demanded This Land Is Your Land be Song No. 1 on the Top 100 Political Music Countdown. I'm contrarian by nature though, and dropped it to No. 10.
Here's Boutilier's defense:
This Land is Your Land has got to be #1. I’m not saying, of course, that anybody who has a lick of political sense is a communist, as Woody was labeled by various critics and friends. To paraphrase Woody: he was never a communist, but he was in the red all his life.
But listen. If you have a song that was recorded in the 1940’s that is still taught to school children – in Canada, no less – and still has some of the verses censored, you’ve got yourself one king hell of a political song.
Verses of Woody Guthrie they don't sing at summer camp:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
In Ira Nadel's Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen, he writes about a 16 year old Cohen's work as a camp counsellor at Camp Sunshine, where he was introduced to The People's Songbook - they sang from the book every morning: union songs and protest songs - songs of freedom. Parents! Send your kids to soccer camp!
Leonard Cohen's version of The Partisan is haunting. The first time I heard it, I was terrified for the narrator and desperate to figure out the French translation to see what happened next. There are a lot of songs about the futility of war on this Top 100. This one's different:
Canadian women make up 22% of the House of Commons, and there are 22 women on this Top 100 Political Music Countdown. Joni Mitchell's on this list twice, one of a handful of artists to break that barrier - a soft voice with big music.
A quote from Mitchell on the meaning of Big Yellow Taxi:
I wrote Big Yellow Taxi on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was this parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart... this blight on paradise.
Mary Lu Redden, Director of Halifax Humanities 101, wrote in to pitch Bread and Roses for the PoliMusic countdown:
This is one of my favourite songs of all time, especially as sung by Judy Collins, whose beautiful voice sustained me through some crazy teenage years.
Halifax Humanities 101, the education program of which I am director, is perfectly captured in the lyrics of this song. People who have experienced harsh lives and live on low incomes need all kinds of practical supports - "bread". However, to live a truly full life we all need art and beauty and literature. These are the "roses" for which the song pleads so beautifully. "Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread but give us roses!". I am so privileged to have a job that brings the richness of Humanities education into lives that have experienced poverty, disadvantage and hardship. This song has become something of an anthem for me.
Listen to Judy Collins' version of Bread and Roseshere.
With her call to get back to the Garden of Eden and her bombers that turn into butterflies, Joni Mitchell's Woodstock captured a new consciousness of the late 60's and early 70's.
The Almanac Singers believed music could play a role in achieving the goals of the left: equality, good jobs, and a government that worked for the people.
Almanac members over the years included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Josh White and Burl Ives. Their greatest and most influential album was their second one - Talking Union - a collection of six labour songs: Which Side Are You On?, Union Maid, Get Thee Behind Me Satan, I Don't Want Your Millions Mister, Union Train and Talking Union, all of which are worth checking out.
There's power in the union, yes, but there's humour too:
Joe Hill was an activist, songwriter and member of the Industrial Workers of the World. He was executed in Utah in 1915 for a crime of which most historians say he was innocent. Just before he faced the firing squad he wrote a letter to a union leader, saying, "Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize... Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don't want to be found dead in Utah."
Mary Lou Redden, the Director of Halifax Humanities 101, writes about Joan Baez' Joe Hill:
I first heard this song as part of the Woodstock compilation that came out when I was a teenager. I didn't attend Woodstock, but like many of my generation, was moved by the event and enamoured of the music. But what struck me so much about Joan Baez's performance of Joe Hill was first that it was so pure and simple in the midst of the noisy rock and roll of Woodstock. I've always loved her remarkable voice. But I was also struck by the union of that hippie event with the concerns of the trade union movement. In the city where I lived, there was a strong union movement, based in the dangerous and pollution ridden petro-chemical factories that dominated our landscape. I had naively associated factory workers with right-wing attitudes towards the concerns of my generation and this song made me reflect on those assumptions and see that the fight for a more just society needed to be inclusive.
Woody Guthrie left a thousand song lyrics with no music for them when he died. In 1995, his daughter asked Billy Bragg to write music for an album's worth of songs. Bragg and Wilco released two volumes called Mermaid Avenue in 1998 and 2000.
Christ for President is off the first album. Guthrie often combined biblical references and revolutionary music. This song's less ambiguous.
Little Boxes is a pretty delightful satire. As a country boy who likes cities just fine, I don't find Malvina Reynolds song about the suburbs, urban sprawl and conformity to be particularly sanctimonious, but I can see how the good people of the suburbs would.
In the blog post Political Music - The Criteria, I mentioned dropping a couple artists from the Top 100 list as I drafted and redrafted this countdown. To make up for leaving off The Decemberists, here's their cover of Little Boxes.
In 1931, deputies hired by a Kentucky mining company broke into Florence Reece's home and threatened her family. Which Side Are You On? was written by this wife of a union organizer after the ordeal, and the song has been recorded and rewritten by a great many artists in the decades since.
Phil Ochs described himself as a "singing journalist". In 1968 Ochs performed I Ain't Marching Anymore at the protests outside the Democratic National Convention, inspiring teenagers to burn their draft cards. Ochs was called as a witness during the subsequent trail of the Chicago Seven, who were charged with crimes around the organization of the protest. The judge wouldn't let Ochs sing the song, so Ochs recited the lyrics instead.
It's always the old to lead us to the war
It's always the young to fall
Now look at all we've won with the saber and the gun
Tell me is it worth it all
My friend in the great Halifax band Grassmarket invited me to a David Francey concert in Dartmouth's Celtic Corner a few years back. His music is elegant, traditional and seems like it was written fifty years ago - the stories are so familiar.
Torn Screen Door combines themes you'd see in other Francey material to form a beautiful tapestry of a song - there's a couple's romantic walk, a reminder of things that history has broken, an unforgiving economy that leaves people behind.
After a brief tour to promote his album Transit Byzantium in 1998, Bill Fox quit the music business. Like most people I know, I discovered My Baby Crying thanks to a piece by Joe Hagan in the July 2007 music issue of The Believer. In his article Hagen asked "Why is Bill Fox —one of America’s greatest contemporary songwriters— working in self-imposed exile as a telemarketer in Cleveland?". The song kinda answers the question, and includes this great line:
My little mate, is an embarrassment to heads of state In nervous speeches claiming they don’t hear, my baby crying
Every once in a while, when researching the Top 100 Political Music Countdown, I'd be asked "What do you mean by political songs? You mean protest songs?" My standard answer was "It's whatever 'political' means to you... songs about war and peace, the rich and poor, power and the powerless. Lawyers, guns and money, whatever." There were usually a few follow up questions, as people seemed to look for permission to be political. They'd say "What about feminism?". I'd say "Sure!". They'd say "What about rap music?" I'd say "What century are you living in? How could there not be rap music?".
And every once in a while, around 2 AM, someone would say something like "Hey you know there's this great song I forget the name of, it's about this woman who loves this guy and no one knows she loves him and she waits 7 years for him to come home but he dies in the war and she's heartbroken and no one knows, but she's gonna tell them how glad she is he's coming home, even though he's coming home in a coffin and it's great and so sad I mean it's heartbreaking and you really need to put it on your list."
It's not on the list, because there's nothing in the lyrics to tell me that Box of Cedar carries a soldier. The line 'drone of doom' may hint at war. But it might not. Ask Marissa Nadler the next time you see her. She's incredible. Listen to this song late at night a couple times when no one is around.
Both Dan Bern's parents survived the Holocaust. He once said he called his regular group of backup musicians The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy because he "wanted some way of telling my Mom that from now on when they talk about the international Jewish banking conspiracy they’re just talking about my band."
Jerusalem is a wickedly funny song. It makes me laugh every time I hear it. I wish that was an exaggeration. I really do. You'd think once you've heard a really funny joke told a few dozen times you'd learn to control yourself. Part of it is that it's about the sensitive topic of religion, part is the faux-folk style Bern sings in, part of it is the absurd, near non-sequitor transition from the kinda cruel opening and the story that follows.
I told a few people that Jerusalem was Song 100 on the Political Song Countdown. They were pretty excited. Sorry rugby fans. April Fools.
