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.
A beautiful anthem for political change, Sam Cooke's knows A Change Is Gonna Come. The song, both hopeful and filled with sorrow, doesn't hit you between the eyes with what's been done wrong - Cooke knows you know things need changing.
Billie Holiday would close her shows in 1939 and '40 with Strange Fruit. Waiters would stop serving. The bars would shut off the lights. A single light would shine on Holliday. The audience, and Holliday, would often weep after the performance.
Critics were concerned Spike Lee's movie Do The Right Thing would provoke riots. David Denby said Lee was "playing with dynamite in an urban playground" and Newsweek worried the movie would put "dynamite under every seat." Lee pointed out the critics were implying that black audiences were incapable of understanding they were watching a fictional motion picture.
Public Enemy's song Fight The Power played a critical role in the film. The character Radio Raheem walked around the neighbourhood playing nothing but this tune on his ghettoblaster. At the movie's climax, the local pizza shop owner demands Radio Raheem turn the music down and ends of smashing the ghettoblaster. A fight breaks out and Radio Raheem dies after police put him in a chokehold.
Public Enemy's Brian Hargrove explained:
Law enforcement is necessary. As a species we haven’t evolved past needing that. Fight the Power is not about fighting authority — it’s not that at all. It’s about fighting abuse of power.
Medgar Evers was a civil rights activist from Mississippi. He worked on a boycott of discriminatory gas stations (Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Restroom) and other white businesses in an effort to end segregation at the University of Mississippi.
The University of Mississippi was forced to enroll a black student in 1962. A subsequent riot left two people dead and Evers became a target of white supremacists. Evers work researching the murder of Emmitt Till (a 14 year old African American kid who was accused of flirting with a white woman) made him an even larger target. Evers house was fire-bombed, he was nearly the victim of a hit-and-run, and was eventually shot and killed in 1963.
Mississippi Goddam was written by Nina Simone in 1964. It's fantastic. Don't go slow when you're trying to change the world. Run.
If you're interested in politics that works for the people, and need a good laugh, read Helen Creighton and the Rise of Folklore.
Here's a passage from a letter Creighton wrote:
A few days ago I received a copy of Edith Fowke's new book, Songs of Work and Freedom. It is very well done, but what a subject, for these are communist songs. I am embarrassed to know how to thank her. She does this documentary type of study well; I would say it is her forte. But why is it that people like Alan Lomax, Pete Seegar, Peggy Seegar and now Edith, apply folk songs to communist propaganda? ... I remember years ago recording the song Solidarity Forever from a very nice young professor, and it made me shiver. Evangelist songs stir people to good, but trade union songs stir people to hate and to seek their own advancement!
And since we're less then a week from a Canadian election, here's a version by Leonard Cohen:
I've never understood why fans and critics will, on occasion, take offense with a singer's audacity to take a stand. Why should political questions of poverty, justice, equality and elections be left only to politicians and media moguls? The world is wiser for the artists we've listened to so far on this Top 100 Political Music Countdown. The world needs Nina Simone.
Ain't Got No - I Got Life was on an album released three days after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King.
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.
Political songs can build bridges. After war overseas and poverty at home, after assassinations and riots, Sly & The Family Stone's 1969 hit Everyday People was a call for justice that you could dance to.
Just after Josh White played at Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration, he released Southern Exposure, an album of 6 anti-segragationist songs including Bad Housing Blues.
Roosevelt heard the album after it caused some anger in the American South and he invited White to the White House for a performance. After the show, they spent a few hours talking about White's life, music and the Jim Crow South. At one point, Roosevelt reportedly asked White if the song Uncle Sam Says was about him. White answered:
Yes Mr. President, I wrote that song to you after seeing how my brother was treated in the segregated section of Fort Dix army camp. . . However that wasn't the first song I wrote to you. . . In 1933, I wrote and recorded a song called `Low Cotton,' about the plight of Negro cotton pickers down South, and in the lyrics I made an appeal directly to you to help their situation.
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.
Midnight Special is believed to have originated from prisoners in the southern US. The first recording was in 1926 but Huddy Leadbetter (Leadbelly) helped to spread the song into the 30's as well.
The Midnight Special was a train out of Houston. It's lights would momentarily flood the SugarLand prison as it turned down the tracks. Does the narrator see the train as a way out of prison, or is he saying he'd rather be under the train then spend another night in jail?
And another beautiful rendition of this traditional blues song by an artist who deserves to be on this Top 100 Political Music Countdown, but (with apologies) isn't - Odetta.
A few songs on the Top 100 Political Music Countdown thus far have a political take on religion and a few songs bring religion into politics. Marvin Gaye's Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) always struck me as beautiful and interesting for its transition from a fighting stance (Oh Make Me Want To Holler) to a position of prayer (God Bless You, And Keep You). Desperate times for desperate people. The Holy and the Profane.
Utah Phillips (mixed and with music by Ani DiFranco) can teach a person a lot in six minutes and 28 seconds. Anarchy from the album The Past Didn't Go Anywhere starts with a freight train ride and covers territory that includes patriotism, power, pacifism and privilege.
Amadou Bailo Diallo was born in Liberia in 1975, just 3 days after me. He grew up in Liberia, Guinea, Togo and Thailand. He liked to read, play soccer and was fluent in 6 languages. He studied in Thailand and Singapore and France. He believed an education meant you could achieve anything. He moved to the United States when he was 24 to continue studying computer science. One early morning in New York City, outside his apartment, while reaching for his wallet, police officers fired 41 shots at Amadou, and hit him with 19. Amadou Diallo is buried in a village in the highland region of Guinea.
The Dialo shooting has been written about by many artists, including Bruce Springsteen's haunting American Skin (41 Shots) and the furious 41:19 by Public Enemy.
Talib Kweli's The Proud deals with a wide range of topics from terrorism, war, violence, guns, racial profiling, and Amadou. It's both haunting and furious.
The verses of this Rise Against song are a bit scattered but that's alright by me. There could be more than one narrator in Prayer For The Refugee but it works as well if there's just one: a weary father talking to his tired son, who's also a slave wage worker thinking out loud about the people who have so much while he has so little, who then wakes his son and tells him they won't suffer in silence any more. And each verse is interrupted by a chorus that's an angry shove against people who might give a helping hand once in a while but just let the narrator down again.
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.
Stephen Biko was South African anti-apartheid activist famous for his slogan "Black is Beautiful", which he said meant: "You are okay as you are - begin to look upon yourself as a human being".
On August 18th, 1977, Biko was arrested at a police roadblock under the Terrorism Act and interrogated in Police Room 619 for 22 hours. His interrogation included torture and resulted in a coma. On September 11th police put Stephen Biko in the back of a Land Rover, naked and in chains, and drove him 1100 km to a prison that had hospital facilities.
He died on arrival at the prison, on September 12th. The police claimed his death was the result of an extended hunger strike.
Peter Gabriel would play Biko and encourage the audience to join him in the singing. As the song ends, all that was left was the drummer's beat and the crowd's cry.
