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Protest songs are frequently situational, having been associated with a social movement through context. "Goodnight Irene", for example, acquired the aura of a protest song because it was written by Lead Belly, a black convict and social outcast, although on its face it is a love song. Or they may be abstract, expressing, in more general terms, opposition to injustice and support for peace, or free thought, but audiences usually know what is being referred to. Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", a song in support of universal brotherhood, is a song of this kind. It is a setting of a poem by Schiller celebrating the continuum of living beings (who are united in their capacity for feeling pain and pleasure and hence for empathy), to which Beethoven himself added the lines that all men are brothers. Songs which support the status quo do not qualify as protest songs.
Protest song texts have significant cognitive content. The labor movement musical Pins and Needles deftly summed up the definition of a protest song in a number called "Sing Me a Song of Social Significance." Phil Ochs once explained, "A protest song is a song that's so specific that you cannot mistake it for bullshit".
An eighteenth-century example of topical song intended as a feminist protest song is "Rights of Woman" (1795), sung to the tune of "God Save the King", written anonymously by "A Lady", and published in the Philadelphia Minerva, October 17, 1795. There is no evidence that it was ever sung as a movement song, however. A more recent topical song advocation sexual liberation is "Sexo" (1985) by Los Prisioneros.
Denisoff subdivided protest songs as either "magnetic" or "rhetorical". "Magnetic" protest songs were aimed at attracting people to the movement and promoting group solidarity and commitment, as for example, "Eyes on the Prize" and "We Shall Overcome". "Rhetorical" protest songs, on the other hand, are often characterized by individual indignation and offer a straightforward political message designed to change political opinion. Denisoff argued that although "rhetorical" songs often are not overtly connected to building a larger movement, they should nevertheless be considered as "protest-propaganda". Examples include Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" (which contains the lines "I hope that you die / And your death'll come soon") and "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye.
Ron Ayerman and Andrew Jamison, in Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Tradition in the Twentieth Century (1998), take issue with what they consider Denisoff's reductive approach to the history and function of song (and particularly traditional song) in social movements. They point out that Denisoff had paid little attention to the song tunes of protest music, considered them strictly subordinate to the texts, a means to the message. It is true that in the highly text-oriented western European song tradition, tunes can be subordinate, interchangeable, and even limited in number (as in Portuguese fado, which only has 64 tunes), nevertheless, Ayerman and Jamison point out that some of the most effective protest songs gain power through their appropriation of tunes that are bearers of strong cultural traditions. They also note that:
There is more to music and movements than can be captured within a functional perspective, such as Denisoff's, which focuses on the use made of music within already-existing movements. Music, and song, we suggest, can maintain a movement even when it no longer has a visible presence in the form of organizations, leaders, and demonstrations, and can be a vital force in preparing the emergence of a new movement. Here the role and place of music needs to be interpreted through a broader framework in which tradition and ritual are understood as processes of identity and identification, as encoded and embodied forms of collective meaning and memory.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the freedom songs this way: "They invigorate the movement in a most significant way [...] these freedom songs serve to give unity to a movement."
Perhaps the most famous voices of protest at the time, at least in America, were the Hutchinson Family Singers. From 1839, the Hutchinson Family Singers became well-known for their songs supporting abolition. They sang at the White House for President John Tyler, and befriended Abraham Lincoln. Their subject matter most often touched on relevant social issues such as abolition, the temperance movement, politics, war and women's suffrage. Much of their music focused on idealism, social reform, equal rights, moral improvement, community activism and patriotism.
The Hutchinsons's career spanned the major social and political events of the mid-19th century, including the Civil War. The Hutchinson Family Singers established an impressive musical legacy and are considered to be the forerunners of the great protest singers-songwriters and folk groups of the 1950s and 60s such as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, and are often referred to as America's first protest band.
Many Negro spirituals have been interpreted as thinly veiled expressions of protest against slavery and oppression. For example, "Oh, Freedom" and "Go Down Moses" draw implicit comparisons between the plight of enslaved African Americans and that of enslaved Hebrews in the Bible. These spiritual songs antedated the Civil War but were collected and widely disseminated only after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. The first collection of African-American spirituals were appeared in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's famous book Army Life in a Black Regiment, which was published in 1870, but collected in 1862-64 while Higginson was serving as a colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first regiment recruited from former slaves for the Federal service. (Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton required that black regiments be commanded by white officers.)
A fervent abolitionist, Transcendentalist critic, and poetry lover, who was a friend and enthusiastic champion of American poet Emily Dickinson, Higginson had been deeply impressed by the beauty of the devotional songs he heard the soldiers singing around the regiment's campfires. Higginson wrote down the texts, in dialect, as he heard them, but failed to provide tunes. The second influential book about African-American spirituals was the 1872 collection Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, by Thomas F. Steward, comprising songs sung by students of Fisk University on their fund-raising tours throughout the county, arranged and harmonized according to nineteenth-century classical music conventions.
Arguably, one of the best known African-American spirituals is the anthem "Lift Every Voice and Sing". Originally written as a poem by noted African-American novelist and composer James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), it was set to music in 1900 by his brother John Rosamond Johnson (1873–1954) in 1900 and first performed in Jacksonville, Florida as part of a celebration of Lincoln's Birthday on February 12, 1900 by a choir of 500 schoolchildren at the segregated Stanton School, where James Weldon Johnson was principal. In 1919, the NAACP adopted the song as "The Negro National Anthem." This song contained strong appeals to the ideals of justice and equality, and singing it could be interpreted as an act of grass-roots self assertion by people who were officially still barred from speaking out too overtly against Jim Crow and the resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1920s. By the 1920s, copies of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" could be found in black churches across the country, often pasted into the hymnals by the congregation members.
A topical parlor song that is arguably a precursor of environmental movement is an 1837 musical setting of "Woodman, Spare That Tree!" The text is from a poem by George Pope Morris, founder of the New York Mirror and published in that paper, set to music composed by British-born composer Henry Russell. Verses include: "That old familiar tree,/Whose glory and renown/Are spread o'er land and sea/And wouldst thou hack it down?/Woodman, forbear thy stroke!/Cut not its earth, bound ties;/Oh! spare that ag-ed oak/Now towering to the skies!"
This song has never caught on as a movement song, however.
The vast majority of American protest music from the first half of the 20th century was based on the struggle for fair wages and working hours for the working class, and on the attempt to unionize the American workforce towards those ends. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in Chicago in June 1905 at a convention of two hundred socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists from all over the United States who were opposed to the policies of the American Federation of Labor. From the start they used music as a powerful form of protest.
One of the most famous of these early 20th century "Wobblies" was Joe Hill, an IWW activist who traveled widely, organizing workers and writing and singing political songs. He coined the phrase "pie in the sky," which appeared in his most famous protest song "The Preacher and the Slave" (1911). The song calls for "Workingmen of all countries, unite/ Side by side we for freedom will fight/ When the world and its wealth we have gained/ To the grafters we'll sing this refrain." Other notable protest songs written by Hill include "The Tramp," "There Is Power in a Union," "Rebel Girl," and "Casey Jones—Union Scab."
Another one of the best-known songs of this period was "Bread and Roses", by James Oppenheim and Caroline Kolsaat, which was sung in protest en masse at a textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts during January-March 1912 (now often referred to as the "Bread and Roses strike") and has been subsequently taken up by protest movements throughout the 20th century.
The advent of The Great War (1914–1918) resulted in a great number of songs concerning the 20th's most popular recipient of protest: war; songs against the war in general, and specifically in America against the U.S.A.'s decision to enter the European war started to become widespread and popular. One of the most successful of these protest songs to capture the widespread American skepticism about joining in the European war was “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” (1915) by lyricist Alfred Bryan and composer Al Piantadosi. Many of these war-time protest songs took the point of view of the family at home, worried about their father/husband fighting overseas. One such song of the period which dealt with the children who had been orphaned by the war was "War Babies," from 1916, with music composed by James F. Hanley and lyrics written by Ballard MacDonald, which spoke to the need for taking care of orphans of war in an unusually frank and open manner. For a typical song written from a child's point-of-view, see Jean Schwartz (music), Sam M. Lewis & Joe Young (lyrics) and their song "Hello Central! Give Me No Man's Land"(1918), in which a young boy tries to call his father in No Man's Land on the telephone (then a recent invention), unaware that he has been killed in combat.
The 1920s and 30s also saw a marked rise in the number of songs which protested against racial discrimination, such as Louis Armstrong's "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue" in 1929, and the anti-lynching song, "Strange Fruit" by Lewis Allan, which contains the lyrics "Southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze." It was also during this period that many African American blues singers were beginning to have their voices heard on a larger scale across America through their music, most of which protested the discrimination which they faced on a daily basis. Perhaps the most famous example of these 1930s blues protest songs is Leadbelly's "The Bourgeois Blues", in which he sings, "The home of the Brave / The land of the Free / I don't wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie."
In 1948 Hays and Seeger organized a quartet, which also included a young Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, to accompany international folk dancing to raise money for their organization People's Songs. Initially known as the No Name Quartet, by 1950 it was enjoying great popular success as The Weavers. Several of the Weavers most popular songs, such as "If I Had a Hammer", were protest songs or implicitly supported Israel (Tzena, Tzena, Tzena), although the political content was not explicit. Although some in the left wing press derided them as having sold out their beliefs in exchange for popular success, their fans nevertheless recognized what their songs were about because their international and multi-racial repertoire strongly suggested support for racial justice and world peace. Because of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, the Weavers' managers directed them to avoid appearing at progressive venues and prohibited them from performing or recording songs with political content. Former Almanac members Seeger and Hays were listed in the publication Red Channels and a former Communist who had worked at People's Songs, Harvey Matusow denounced the group as Communists Party members (he later recanted and admitted that he had lied). Although their manager went to the Red Channels office in person and with promises that the group would avoid trouble, they were placed under FBI surveillance and blacklisted by the entertainment industry during the McCarthyism era. Right-wing and anti-Communist groups protested at their performances and harassed promoters. As a result, a planned Weavers's television appearance was canceled, they lost radio airplay (and royalties), and Decca Records terminated their recording contract. Because of its New Deal and popular front associations, folk music itself was under a cloud as potentially subversive, regardless of content, and disappeared from the mass media. For the remainder of the 1950s, Seeger continued to appear at camps and schools and to write songs and pro-labor union and anti-war editorials, which appeared his column in the folk music magazine Sing Out! under the pen name of "Johnny Appleseed". The Weavers were temporarily silenced but returned to sing before a rapturous crowd of fans in a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall in 1955. Issued in 1957 the album documenting this concert, The Weavers at Carnegie Hall became a highly influential best-selling LP album.
A second Weavers LP, Folk Songs Around the World issued in 1959, was limited to traditional songs and spirituals.
Paul Robeson, singer, actor, athlete, and civil rights activist, was investigated by the FBI and was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for his outspoken political views. The State Department denied Robeson a passport and issued a "stop notice" at all ports, effectively confining him to the United States. In a symbolic act of defiance against the travel ban, labor unions in the U.S. and Canada organized a concert at the International Peace Arch on the border between Washington state and the Canadian province of British Columbia on May 18, 1952. Paul Robeson stood on the back of a flat bed truck on the American side of the U.S.-Canada border and performed a concert for a crowd on the Canadian side, variously estimated at between 20,000 and 40,000 people. Robeson returned to perform a second concert at the Peace Arch in 1953, and over the next two years two further concerts were scheduled.
In the 1940s, one of the leading musical voices of protest from the African American community in America was Josh White, one of the first musicians to make a name for himself singing political blues. White enjoyed a position of political privilege, especially as a black musician, as he established a long and close relationship with the family of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and would become the closest African American confidant to the President of the United States. He made his first foray into protest music and political blues with his highly controversial Columbia Records album Joshua White & His Carolinians: Chain Gang, produced by John H. Hammond, which included the song "Trouble," which summarised the plight of many African Americans in its opening line of "Well, I always been in trouble, ‘cause I’m a black-skinned man." The album was the first race record ever forced upon the white radio stations and record stores in America's South and caused such a furor that it reached the desk of President Franklin Roosevelt. On December 20, 1940, White and the Golden Gate Quartet, sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt, performed in a historic Washington, D.C. concert at the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which abolished slavery. In January 1941, Josh performed at the President's Inauguration, and two months later he released another highly controversial record album, Southern Exposure, which included six anti-segregationist songs with liner notes written by the celebrated and equally controversial African American writer Richard Wright, and whose sub-title was "An Album of Jim Crow Blues." Like the Chain Gang album, and with revelatory yet inflammatory songs such as "Uncle Sam Says," "Jim Crown Train," "Bad Housing Blues," "Defense Factory Blues," "Southern Exposure," and "Hard Time Blues," it also was forced upon the southern white radio stations and record stores, caused outrage in the South and also was brought to the attention of President Roosevelt. A month later, he sang as a member of the Almanac Singers on their much criticized anti peace-time draft album, Songs for John Doe. Despite this, however, and White's membership in the Almanac Singers, instead of making White persona-non-grata in segregated America, it resulted in President Roosevelt asking White to become the first African American artist to give a White House Command Performance, in 1941, for the Roosevelts were great fans of folk music.
After the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, many people the world over feared nuclear warfare, and many protest songs were written against this new danger. The most immediately successful of these post-war anti-nuclear protest songs was Vern Partlow's "Old Man Atom" (1945) (also known by the alternate titles "Atomic Talking Blues" and "Talking Atom"). The song treats its subject in comic-serious fashion, with a combination of black humour puns (such as "We hold these truths to be self-evident/All men may be cremated equal" or "I don't mean the Adam that Mother Eve mated/I mean that thing that science liberated") on serious statements on the choices to be made in the nuclear age ("The people of the world must pick out a thesis/"Peace in the world, or the world in pieces!""). Folk singer Sam Hinton recorded "Old Man Atom" in 1950 for ABC Eagle, a small California independent label. Influential New York disc jockey Martin Block played Hinton's record on his "Make Believe Ballroom." Overwhelming listener response prompted Columbia Records to acquire the rights for national distribution. From all indications, it promised to be one of the year's biggest novelty records. RCA Victor rush-released a cover version by the Sons of the Pioneers. Country singer Ozzie Waters recorded the song for Decca's Coral subsidiary. Fred Hellerman—then contracted to Decca as a member of the Weavers—recorded it for Jubilee under the pseudonym "Bob Hill." Bing Crosby was reportedly ready to record "Old Man Atom" for Decca when a right-wing "committee" headed by Bronx, N.Y., Rabbi Benjamin Schultz and closely associated with the publications Red Channels and Counterattack, began attacking Columbia and RCA Victor for releasing a song that Schultz alleged reflected Communist ideology. According to a New York Times report on September 1, 1950:
Rabbi Benjamin Schultz, national director of the Joint Committee Against Communism, conceded last night that members of his committee, acting as individuals, had made known their feelings of opposition to the song to the recording companies. Those who protested against the song's issuance on records insisted that it parroted the Communist line on peace and reflected the propaganda for the Stockholm "peace petition." Mr. Partlow said yesterday, according to an Associated Press dispatch from Los Angeles, that his song was "not part of the Stockholm or any other so-called peace offensive." He added, "It was written five years ago long before any of these peace offensives."Buckling under, both Columbia and RCA Victor withdrew "Old Man Atom" from distribution. Henceforth mainstream pop music would avoid songs that mentioned potentially controversial topics until the folk revival of the 1960s.
Other anti-nuclear protest songs of the immediate post-war period had included "Atom and Evil" (1946) by the Golden Gate Quartet, ("If Atom and Evil should ever be wed, / Lord, then darn if all of us are going to be dead.") and "Atomic Sermon" (1953) by Billy Hughes and his Rhythm Buckeroos
One of the key figures of the 1960s protest movement was Bob Dylan, who produced a number of landmark protest songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" (1962), "Masters of War" (1963), "Talking World War III Blues" (1963), and "The Times They Are A-Changin'" (1964). While Dylan is often thought of as a 'protest singer', most of his protest songs spring from a relatively short time-period in his career; Mike Marqusee writes:
"The protest songs that made Dylan famous and with which he continues to be associated were written in a brief period of some 20 months – from January 1962 to November 1963. Influenced by American radical traditions (the Wobblies, the Popular Front of the thirties and forties, the Beat anarchists of the fifties) and above all by the political ferment touched off among young people by the civil rights and ban the bomb movements, he engaged in his songs with the terror of the nuclear arms race, with poverty, racism and prison, jingoism and war."Dylan often sang against injustice, such as the murder of African American civil rights activist Medgar Evers in "Only A Pawn In their Game" (1964), or the killing of the 51-year-old African American barmaid Hattie Carroll by the wealthy young tobacco farmer from Charles County, William Devereux "Billy" Zantzinger in 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" (1964) (Zantzinger was only sentenced to six months in a county jail for the murder). Many of the injustices about which Dylan sang were not even based on race or civil rights issues, but rather everyday injustices and tragedies, such as the death of boxer Davey Moore in the ring ("Who Killed Davey Moore?" (1964) ), or the breakdown of farming and mining communities ("Ballad of Hollis Brown" (1963), "North Country Blues" (1963)). By 1963, Dylan and then-singing partner Joan Baez had become prominent in the civil rights movement, singing together at rallies including the March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech. However, Dylan, glancing towards the Capitol, is reported to have asked, cynically: "“Think they’re listening?” Then he is also reported to have answered: “No, they ain’t listening at all.” Anthony Scaduto contends that many of Dylan's songs of the period were adapted and appropriated by the 1960s Civil Rights and counter-culture "movements" rather than being specifically written for them. Scaduto reports that by 1964 Dylan was attempting to extract himself from the movement, much to the chagrin of many of those who saw him as a voice of a generation. Indeed, some of Dylan's topical songs appear to have been retrospectively aligned with issues which they in fact pre-date. For example, "Masters of War" (1963) which protests against governments who orchestrate war, is sometimes misconstrued as dealing directly with the Vietnam War. However, the song was written at the beginning of 1963, when only a few hundred Green Berets were stationed in South Vietnam and came to be re-appropriated as a comment on Vietnam in 1965, when US planes bombed North Vietnam for the first time, with lines such as “you that build the death planes” seeming particularly prophetic. In contrast to other topical singers of the day, Dylan never mentioned Vietnam by name in any of his songs. Dylan himself has stated rather mysteriously that, although the song "is supposed to be a pacifistic song against war. It's not an anti-war song. It's speaking against what Eisenhower was calling a military-industrial complex as he was making his exit from the presidency. That spirit was in the air, and I picked it up." This understandably must have seemed a distinction without much of a difference to his many anti-war fans. Similarly, "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall" (1963) was perceived by some as about the Cuban missile crisis, although, Dylan had composed and performed it more than a month before John F. Kennedy's TV address to the nation (October 22, 1962) initiated the Cuban missile crisis. Dylan's initial and extremely fruitful, 20-month period of overt protest songs, ended in 1964, when he changed his musical style from acoustic folk to an electrified, rock-orientated sound, and his increasingly personal, abstract lyrics became seemingly more purely aesthetic. As he explained to critic Nat Hentoff in mid-1964: “Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore—you know, be a spokesman. From now on, I want to write from inside me ... I’m not part of no movement ... I just can’t make it with any organisation...” Ray Pratt, professor of political science at Montana State University, believes that Dylan stopped writing anthems and other explicit protest songs because he felt that, under the highly repressive conditions prevailing at the time, there was no side with which he wanted to be associated: “‘It’s vulgar, the idea that somebody has to say what they want to say in a message type song. . . . 'Which side are you on?’ That’s such a waste? I mean, which side can you be on.’” His next explicit topical protest song would be "The Hurricane", written twelve years later in 1976.
Pete Seeger, founding member of the Almanac Singers and The Weavers, was a major influence on Dylan and his contemporaries, and continued to be a strong voice of protest in the 1960s, when he composed "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" (written with Joe Hickerson) and "Turn, Turn, Turn" (written during the 1950s but released on Seeger's 1962 album The Bitter and The Sweet). Seeger's song "If I Had a Hammer" written with Lee Hays in 1949 in support of the progressive movement, and rose to Top Ten popularity in 1962 when covered by Peter, Paul and Mary), going on to become one of the major Civil Rights anthems of the American Civil Rights movement. "We Shall Overcome", Seeger's adaptation of an American gospel song, continues to be used to support issues from labor rights to peace movements. Seeger was one of the leading singers to protest against then-President Lyndon Johnson through song. Seeger first satirically attacked the president with his 1966 recording of Len Chandler's children's song, "Beans in My Ears". In addition to Chandler's original lyrics, Seeger sang that "Mrs. Jay's little son Alby" had "beans in his ears," which, as the lyrics imply, ensures that a person does not hear what is said to them. To those opposed to continuing the Vietnam War the phrase suggested that "Alby Jay", a loose pronunciation of Johnson's nickname "LBJ," did not listen to anti-war protests as he too had "beans in his ears." Seeger attracted wider attention in 1967 with his song "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy", about a captain — referred to in the lyrics as "the big fool" — who drowned while leading a platoon on maneuvers in Louisiana during World War II. In the face of arguments with the management of CBS about whether the song's political weight was in keeping with the usually light-hearted entertainment of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the final lines were "Every time I read the paper/those old feelings come on/We are waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on." And it was not seriously contested that much of the audience would grasp Seeger's allegorical casting of Johnson as the "big fool" and the Vietnam War the foreseeable danger. Although the performance was cut from the September 1967 show, after wide publicity, it was broadcast when Seeger appeared again on the Smothers Brothers show in the following January.
Phil Ochs, one of the leading protest singers of the decade (or, as he preferred, a "topical singer"), performed at many political events, including anti-Vietnam War and civil rights rallies, student events, and organized labor events over the course of his career, in addition to many concert appearances at such venues as New York City's The Town Hall and Carnegie Hall. Politically, Ochs described himself as a "left social democrat" who turned into an "early revolutionary" after the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which had a profound effect on his state of mind. Some of his best known protest songs include "Power and the Glory", "Draft Dodger Rag", "There But for Fortune", "Changes," "Crucifixion", "When I'm Gone," "Love Me I'm a Liberal," "Links on the Chain," "Ringing of Revolution," and "I Ain't Marching Anymore". Other notable voices of protest from the period included Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie (whose anti-war song "Universal Soldier" was later made famous by Donovan Leitch the Elder), and Tom Paxton ("Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation" - about the escalation of the war in Vietnam, "Jimmy Newman" - the story of a dying soldier, and "My Son John" - about a soldier who returns from war unable to describe what he's been through), among others. The first protest song to reach number one in the United States was P.F. Sloan's "Eve Of Destruction", performed by Barry McGuire in 1965.
The American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s often used Negro spirituals as a source of protest, changing the religious lyrics to suit the political mood of the time. The use of religious music helped to emphasize the peaceful nature of the protest; it also proved easy to adapt, with many improvised call-and-response songs being created during marches and sit-ins. Some imprisoned protesters used their incarceration as an opportunity to write protest songs. These songs were carried across the country by Freedom Riders, and many of these became Civil Rights anthems. Many soul singers of the period, such as Sam Cooke ("A Change Is Gonna Come" (1965)), Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin ("Respect"), James Brown ("Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud"[1968]; "I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself) ” [1969]) and Nina Simone ("Mississippi Goddam" (1964), "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" (1970)) wrote and performed many protest songs which addressed the ever-increasing demand for equal rights for African Americans during the American civil rights movement. The predominantly white music scene of the time also produced a number of songs protesting racial discrimination, including Janis Ian's "Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)" in 1966, about an interracial romance forbidden by a girl's mother and frowned upon by her peers and teachers and a culture that classifies citizens by race. Steve Reich's 13-minute long "Come Out" (1966), which consists of manipulated recordings of a single spoken line given by an injured survivor of the Harlem Race Riots of 1964, protested police brutality against African Americans.
In the 1960s and early 1970s many protest songs were written and recorded condemning the War in Vietnam, most notably "Simple Song of Freedom" by Bobby Darin (1969), "I Ain't Marching Anymore" by Phil Ochs (1965), "Lyndon Johnson Told The Nation" by Tom Paxton (1965), "Bring Them Home" by Pete Seeger (1966), "Requiem for the Masses" by The Association (1967), "Saigon Bride" by Joan Baez (1967), "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" by Pete Seeger (1967), "Suppose They Give a War and No One Comes" by The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band(1967), "The "Fish" Cheer / I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" by Country Joe and the Fish (1968), "The Unknown Soldier (song)" by The Doors (1968), "One Tin Soldier" by Original Caste (1969), "Volunteers" by Jefferson Airplane (1969), and "Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969). Woody Guthrie's son Arlo Guthrie also wrote one of the decade's most famous protest songs in the form of the 18 minute long-talking blues song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree", a bitingly satirical protest against the Vietnam War draft. As an extension of these concerns, artists started to protest the ever-increasing escalation of Nuclear weapons and threat of Nuclear warfare; as for example on Tom Lehrer's ""So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)," "Who's Next?" (about Nuclear proliferation) and "Wernher von Braun" from his 1965 collection of political satire songs That Was the Year That Was.
In Jamaica, the ravages of poverty and racism were not lost upon the youth movement there. The birth of reggae music addressed issues of all kinds, but it can be argued that Bob Marley had perhaps the most impact on a generation there, with songs addressing his views on nuclear proliferation, and slavery, in his famous "Redemption Song", recorded shortly before his premature death shortly afterward.
The 1960s also saw a number of successful protest songs from the opposite end of the spectrum; the political right which supported the war. Perhaps the most successful and famous of these was "Ballad of the Green Berets" (1966) by Barry Sadler, then an active-duty staff sergeant in the United States Army Special Forces, which was one of the very few songs of the era to cast the military in a positive light and yet become a major hit. Merle Haggard & the Strangers's “Okie from Muskogee” (1969), despite being strongly nationalistic, was listed in PopMatters's July 2007 list of the top 65 protest songs because it is, as the webzine puts it,
in fact a protest against changing social mores, alternative lifestyles, and, well, protests[...] In a time when protest songs filled the airwaves, it is ironic that Haggard scored his biggest hit protesting the rise of a discontented culture.), Dead Kennedys (whose sweeping criticism of America, "Stars and Stripes of Corruption" (1985), contains the lyric "Rednecks and bombs don't make us strong/ We loot the world, yet we can't even feed ourselves"), and Bad Religion; a tradition carried on in the following decades by punk revivalists like Anti-Flag and Rise Against. Of the few remaining old-school punks still recording in the late 80s, the most notable protest song is Patti Smith's 1988 recording "People Have the Power".The 1990s; Hard-Rock Protest Bands, Women's Rights, and Protest Parodies
In 1990, singer Melba Moore released a modern rendition of the 1900 song "Lift Every Voice and Sing" - which had long been considered "The Negro National Anthem" and one of the 20th Century's most powerful civil rights anthems - which she recorded along with others including R&B; artists Anita Baker, Stephanie Mills, Dionne Warwick, Bobby Brown, Stevie Wonder, Jeffrey Osborne, and Howard Hewett; and gospel artists BeBe and CeCe Winans, Take 6, and The Clark Sisters. Partly because of the success of this recording, Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing was entered into the Congressional Record as the official African American National Hymn.the flag of the United States at Woodstock 1999]] --> Rage Against the Machine, formed in 1991, has been one of the most popular 'social-commentary' bands of the last 20 years. A fusion of the musical styles and lyrical themes of punk, hip-hop, and thrash, Rage Against the Machine railed against corporate America ("No Shelter", "Bullet in the Head"), government oppression ("Killing in the Name"), and Imperialism ("Sleep Now in the Fire", "Bulls on Parade"). The band used its music as a vehicle for social activism, as lead singer Zack de la Rocha espoused: "Music has the power to cross borders, to break military sieges and to establish real dialogue".
The '90s also saw a huge movement of pro-women's rights protest songs from most musical genres as part of the Third-wave feminism movement. Ani DiFranco was at the forefront of this movement, protesting sexism, sexual abuse, homophobia, reproductive rights as well as racism, poverty, and war. Her "Lost Woman Song" (1990) concerns itself with the hot topic of abortion, and with DiFranco's assertion that a woman has a right to choose without being judged. A particularly prevalent movement of the time was the underground feminist punk Riot Grrrl movement, including a number of outspoken protest bands such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Jack Off Jill, Excuse 17, Heavens to Betsy, Huggy Bear, Sleater-Kinney, and also lesbian queercore bands such as Team Dresch. Sonic Youth's "Swimsuit Issue" (1992) protested the way in which women are objectified and turned into a commodity by the media. The song, in which Kim Gordon lists off the names of every model featured in the 1992 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, was selected as one of PopMatters's 65 greatest protest songs of all time with the praise that "Sonic Youth reminds us that protest songs don’t have to include acoustic guitars and twee harmonica melodies stuck in 1965. They don’t even have to be about war."
But for the most part, the 1990s signaled a decline in the popularity of protest songs in the mainstream media and public consciousness—even resulting in some parodies of the genre. The 1992 film Bob Roberts is an example of protest music parody, in which the title character, played by American actor Tim Robbins, who also wrote and directed the film, is a guitar-playing U.S. Senatorial candidate who writes and performs songs with a heavily reactionary tone.
In the Twenty-First Century
The Iraq War and the Revival of the Protest Song
, pictured here on the CSN&Y; "Freedom Of Speech Tour '06," returned to the front of the protest music scene with his album Living With War.]] After the '90s, the protest song found renewed popularity around the world after the turn of both the century and the "Third Millennium" as a result of the 9/11 attacks in America, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in the Middle East, with America's former president George W. Bush facing the majority of the criticism. Many famous protest singers of yesteryear, such as Neil Young, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, and Bruce Springsteen, have returned to the public eye with new protest songs for the new war. Young approached the theme with his song, "Let's Impeach the President"--a stinging rebuke against former President George W. Bush and the War in Iraq--as well as Living With War, an album of anti-Bush and anti-war protest songs. Smith has written two new songs indicting American and Israeli foreign policy--"Qana," about the Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese village of Qana, and "Without Chains," about the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay.R.E.M., who had been known for their politically charged material in the 1980s, also returned to increasingly political subject matter since the advent of the Iraq War. For example, "Final Straw" (2003) is a politically-charged song, reminiscent in tone of "World Leader Pretend" on Green. The version on their Around the Sun album is a remix of the original, which was made available as a free download on March 25, 2003 from the band's website. The song was written as a protest of the U.S. government's actions in the Iraq War.
Tom Waits has also covered increasingly political subject matter since the advent of the Iraq war. In "The Day After Tomorrow," Waits adopts the persona of a soldier writing home that he is disillusioned with war and thankful to be leaving. The song does not mention the Iraq war specifically, and, as Tom Moon writes, "it could be the voice of a Civil War soldier singing a lonesome late-night dirge." Waits himself does describe the song as something of an "elliptical" protest song about the Iraqi invasion, however. Thom Jurek describes "The Day After Tomorrow" as "one of the most insightful and understated anti-war songs to have been written in decades. It contains not a hint of banality or sentiment in its folksy articulation." Waits' recent output has not only addressed the Iraqi war, as his "Road To Peace" deals explicitly with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East in general.
Bruce Springsteen has also been vocal in his condemnation of the Bush government, among other issues of social commentary. In 2000 he released "American Skin (41 Shots)" about tensions between immigrants in America and the police force, and of the police shooting of Amadou Diallo in particular. For singing about this event, albeit without mentioning Diallo's name, Springsteen was denounced by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association in New York who called for the song to be blacklisted and by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani amongst others. In the aftermath of 9/11 Springsteen released The Rising, which exhibited his reflections on the tragedy and America's reaction to it. In 2006 he released , a collection of 13 covers of protest songs made popular by Pete Seeger, which highlighted how these older protest songs remained relevant to the troubles of the modern America. An extended version of the album included the track "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" in which Springsteen actually rewrote the lyrics of the original to directly address the issue of Hurricane Katrina. His 2007 long-player, Magic, continues Springsteen's tradition of protest song-writing, with a number of songs which continue to question and attack America's role in the Iraqi war. "Last to Die", with its chorus of "Who'll be the last to die for a mistake....Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break," is believed to have been inspired by Senator-to-be John Kerry's 1971 testimony to the US Senate, in which he asked "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" "Gypsy Biker" deals with the homecoming of a US Soldier killed in action in Iraq, and Springsteen has said that "Livin' in the Future" references extraordinary rendition and illegal wiretapping.), Dispatch's anti-war underground hit "The General", and Devendra Banhart's "Heard somebody Say" (2005) in which he sings "it's simple, we don't want to kill." In 2003 Lenny Kravitz recorded the protest song "We Want Peace" with Iraqi pop star Kadim Al Sahir, Arab-Israeli strings musician Simon Shaheen and Lebanese percussionist Jamey Hadded. According to Kravitz the song "is about more than Iraq. It is about our role as people in the world and that we all should cherish freedom and peace." The Decemberists, while not normally known for writing political songs (or songs set in the present day, for that matter), contributed to the genre in 2005 with their understated but scathing song "16 Military Wives", which singer Colin Meloy described thus: "It's kind of a protest song, [...] My objective is to make sense of foreign policy decisions taken by the current Bush administration and showing how they resemble solipsistic bullying." Pearl Jam also included two anti-Bush songs ("World Wide Suicide", "Marker In The Sand") in their 2006 album Pearl Jam. Even the banking system can be the focus of a protest song as in "National Strike!" by Loren Dean, on showcaseyourmusic.com. Prince recorded the song "United States of Division," a 2004 B-side to the track Cinnamon Girl in which he sings "Why should I sing 'God Bless America'/ but not the rest of the world?"
The hip-hop group The Beastie Boys had a number of protest songs on their 2004 release To the 5 Boroughs. Songs such as "It Takes Time To Build" and "Right Right Now Now" take particular aim at the Bush administration and its policies.
American avant-garde singer Bobby Conn wrote an album of anti-Bush songs with his 2004 collection The Homeland. Conn has stated that "[a]ll the records that I've done are a critique of what's going on in contemporary America," Conn has admitted that while he actively protests what he sees as the evils of American society, he is not always at ease with such a label for himself. "I’ve always done lots of social commentary that I believe in pretty strongly but I am very uncomfortable with the role of the artist as a meaningful social critic...my whole generation [is] a confused group of people with an ambivalent way of dealing with protest." Discussing his 2007 album King For a Day, Conn stated "it's political, but just in a contemporary culture kind of way [...] Two of the songs are about Tom Cruise, and I don't know if there's a more political statement than Tom Cruise. He kind of symbolizes a lot of what's going on in this country right now and how people are responding to it."
Bobb Conn on being a "protest singer:"
Arcade Fire's 2007 Neon Bible contains many oblique protests against the paranoia of a contemporary America "under attack by terrorism." The album also contains two more overtly political protest songs in the form of "Windowsill," in which Win Butler sings "I don't want to live in America no more," and "Intervention", which contains the line "Don't want to fight, don't want to die," and criticizes religious fanaticism in general. However the protest album to achieve the most mainstream success in the first decade of the 21st century has been Green Day's "American Idiot", which was awarded a Grammy for "Best Rock Album" in 2005, despite its strong criticism of current American foreign policy and George Bush. The title track from the album has been described by the band as their public statement in reaction to the confusing and warped scene that is American pop culture since 9/11.
In particular, rapper Eminem has encountered controversy over protest songs directed towards George W. Bush. Songs such as Mosh, White America, and We As Americans have either targeted Bush or the U.S. government in general. Eminem, in fact, registered to vote for the first time in 2004, just for the sake of voting Bush out of office, which would ultimately prove unsuccessful.
Outside of pop music, folk, punk and country music continue to follow their strong traditions of protest. Utah Philips, and David Rovics, among many other singers have continued the folk tradition of protest. In John Mayer's 2006 release CONTINUUM, the lead single "Waiting on the World to Change," Mayer is critical of the desensitizing of politics in youths. He goes on to say in "Belief," "What puts a hundred thousand children in the sand? Belief can. What puts the folded flag inside his mother's hand? Belief can." Folk singer Dar Williams's song "Empire" from her 2005 album My Better Self accuses the Bush administration of building a new empire based on the fear of terror, as well as protesting the administration's policy on torture: "We'll kill the terrorizers and a million of their races, but when our people torture you that's a few random cases." Lucy Kaplansky, who has also performed protest songs with Dar Williams in their side project Cry Cry Cry, has written many songs of protest since 9/11, including her tribute to that day--"Land of the Living"--however, her most recognised protest song to date is "Line in the Sand," which includes the line: "Another bomb lights up the night of someone's vision of paradise but it's just a wasted sacrifice that fuels the hate on the other side." Tracy Grammer's song "Hey ho," from her 2005 album Flower of Avalon addresses how children are taught from a young age to play at war as soldiers with plastic guns, perpetuating the war machine: "Wave the flag and watch the news, tell us we can count on you. Mom and dad are marching too; children, step in line."
Punk rock still is a formidable force and constitutes a majority of the protest songs written today. Artists such as Anti-Flag, Bad Religion, NOFX, Rise Against, Authority Zero, to name just a few, are noted for their political activism in denouncing the Bush administration and the policies of the American government in general. The political campaign Punkvoter, which started the project Rock Against Bush, was kicked off with a collection of punk rock songs critical of President Bush called "Rock Against Bush, Vol. 1", and a sequel was released in 2004. Representatives from the punk community such as Fat Mike of NOFX, Henry Rollins (formerly of Black Flag), and Jello Biafra of The Dead Kennedys are noted for their continuing political activism. In 2009, Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band released Roosevelt Room, which among many things protests the perils of America's wealth gap specifically involving the United State's working class.
While country music has offered the loudest voice in support of the war through artists such as Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue (The Angry American)", Darryl Worley's "Have You Forgotten?" and Charlie Daniels, many established country artists have released strongly critical anti-war songs. These include Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, the Dixie Chicks ("Not Ready to Make Nice" (2006)) and Nanci Griffith.
Criticism
Some artists who are not traditionally right-leaning have questioned the validity of the recent spate of anti-war protest songs. Florida-based punk-folk band Against Me! released a song called White People For Peace that questions the effectiveness of people singing "protest songs in response to military aggression" when their governments simply ignore them.More recently anti-globalization writer Naomi Klein has attacked the replacement of grass-roots protest by celebrity-endorsed festivals or events, such as the Make Poverty History campaign; a trend which she calls the “Bono-isation” of protests against world poverty. She is quoted in The Times newspaper as attesting that "The Bono-isation of protest, particularly in the UK, has reduced discussion to a much safer terrain [...] there’s celebrities and then there’s spectators waving their bracelets. It’s less dangerous and less powerful [than grass roots street demonstrations].”
European protest songs
Protest songs from the U.K.
Early protest songs from Britain
English folk songs from the late medieval and early modern period reflect the social upheavals of their day. In 1944 the Marxist scholar A. L. Lloyd claimed that the "The Cutty Wren" song constituted a coded anthem against feudal oppression and actually dated back to the English peasants' revolt of 1381, making it the oldest extant European protest song. He offered no evidence for his assertion, however and no trace of the song has been found before the 18th century. Despite Lloyd's dubious claim about its origins, however, the "Cutty Wren" was revived and used as a protest song in the 1950s folk revival, an example of the importance of context in determining what may be considered a protest song. In contrast, the rhyme, "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?", is attested as authentically originating in the 1381 Peasant Revolt, though no tune associated with it has survived. Ballads celebrating social bandits like Robin Hood, from the 14th century onwards, can be seen as expressions of a desire for social justice, though although social criticism is implied and there is no overt questioning of the status quo.The era of civil and religious wars of the 17th century in Britain gave rise to the radical communist millenarian Levellers and Diggers' movements and their associated ballads and hymns, as, for example, "The Diggers' Song". with the incendiary verse:
''But the Gentry must come down, ''and the poor shall wear the crown. Stand up now, Diggers all! The Digger movement was violently crushed, and so it is not surprising if few overt protest songs associated with it have survived. From roughly the same period, however, songs protesting wars and the human suffering they inflict abound, though such song do not generally explicitly condemn the wars or the leaders who wage them. For example, "The Maunding Souldier" or "The Fruits of Warre is Beggery", framed as a begging appeal from a crippled soldier of the Thirty Years War. Such songs have been known, strictly speaking, as songs of complaint rather than of protest, since they offered no solution or hint of rebellion against the status quo.
The advent of industrialisation in the eighteenth and early 19th centuries was accompanied by a series of protest movements and a corresponding increase in the number of topical social protest songs and ballads. An important example is ‘The Triumph of General Ludd,’ which built a fictional persona for the alleged leader of the early 19th century anti-technological Luddite movement in the cloth industry of the north midlands, and which made explicit reference to the Robin Hood tradition. A surprising English folk hero immortalised in song is Napoleon Bonaparte, the military figure most often the subject of popular ballads, many of them treating him as the champion of the common working man in songs such as the "Bonny Bunch of Roses" and "Napoleon’s Dream". As labour became more organised songs were used as anthems and propaganda, for miners with songs like "The Black Leg Miner", and for factory workers with songs like "The Factory Bell".
These industrial protest songs were largely ignored during the first English folk revival of the later nineteenth and early 20th century, which had focused on songs that had been collected in rural areas where they were still being sung and on music education. They were revived in the 1960s and performed by figures like A. L. Lloyd on his album The Iron Muse (1963). In the 1980s the anarchist rock band Chumbawamba recorded several versions of traditional English protest songs as English Rebel Songs 1381-1914.
20th Century U.K. songs of protest
Colin Irwin, a journalist for The Guardian, believes the modern British protest movement started in 1958 when the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) organized a 53-mile march from Trafalgar Square to Aldermaston, to protest the Britain's participation in the arms race and recent testing of the H-bomb. The protest "fired up young musicians to write campaigning new songs to argue the case against the bomb and whip up support along the way. Suddenly many of those in skiffle groups playing American songs were changing course and writing fierce topical songs to back direct action." A song composed for the march: "The H-Bomb's Thunder", set the words of a poem by novelist John Brunner to the tune of "Miner's Lifeguard":''Men and women, stand together ''Do not heed the men of war ''Make your minds up now or never ''Ban the bomb for evermore." Folk singer Ewan MacColl was for some time one of the principal musical figures of the British nuclear disarmament movement. A former agitprop actor and playwright. MacColl, a prolific songwriter and committed leftist, some years earlier had penned "The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh", (1953) issued as single on Topic records and "The Ballad of Stalin" (1954), commemorating the death of that leader. According to Irwin, MacColl, when interviewed in the Daily Worker in 1958, declared that:
There are now more new songs being written than at any other time in the past eighty years—young people are finding out for themselves that folk songs are tailor-made for expressing their thoughts and comments on contemporary topics, dreams, and worries,In 1965, folk-rock singer Donovan's cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Universal Soldier" was a hit on the charts. His anti-Vietnam War song, "The War Drags On" appeared that same year.
" (1969).]] As their fame and prestige increased in the late 1960s, The Beatles—and John Lennon in particular—added their voices to the Anti-war. In the documentary The US Versus John Lennon, Tariq Ali attributes the Beatles' activism to the fast that, in his opinion, “The whole culture had been radicalized: [Lennon] was engaged with the world, and the world was changing him." Revolution", 1968, commemorated the world-wide student uprisings. In 1969, when Lennon and Yoko Ono were married, they staged a week-long “bed-in for peace” in the Amsterdam Hilton, attracting worldwide media coverage. At the second "Bed-in" in Montreal, in June 1969, they recorded "Give Peace a Chance" in their hotel room. The song was sung by over half a million demonstrators in Washington, D.C. at the second Vietnam Moratorium Day, on 15 October 1969. In 1972 Lennon's his most controversial protest song LP was Some Time In New York City, the title of whose lead single "Woman Is the Nigger of the World", a phrase coined by Ono in the late '60s to protest sexism, set off a storm of controversy, and in consequence received little airplay and much banning. The Lennons went to great lengths (including a press conference attended by staff from Jet and Ebony magazines) to explain that they had used the word "nigger" in an symbolic sense and not as an affront to African-Americans. The album also included "Attica State", about the Attica Prison riots of September 9, 1971; "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "The Luck Of The Irish", about the massacre of demonstrators in Northern Ireland and "Angela", in support of black activist Angela Davis. Lennon also performed at the "Free John Sinclair" benefit concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on December 10, 1971. on behalf of the imprisoned antiwar activist and poet who was serving ten years in state prison for selling two joints of marijuana to an undercover cop. On this occasion Lennon and Ono appeared on stage with among others singers Phil Ochs and Stevie Wonder, plus antiwar activists Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers party. Lennon's song "John Sinclair" (which can be heard on his Some Time In New York City album), calls on the authorities to "Let him be, set him free, let him be like you and me". The benefit was attended by some 20,000 people, and three days later the State of Michigan released Sinclair from prison.
The 1970s saw a number notable songs by British acts that protested against war, including "Peace Train" by Cat Stevens (1971), and "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath (1970). Sabbath also protested environmental destruction, describing people leaving a ruined Earth ("Into the Void" including, "Iron Man"). The Rolling Stones sang against police brutality in "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)" (1973). Renaissance added political repression as a protest theme with "Mother Russia" being based on One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and being joined on the second side of their 1974 album Turn of the Cards by two other protest songs in "Cold Is Being" (about ecological destruction) and "Black Flame" (about the Vietnam War).
, one of the pioneers of the punk movement, who protested class economics, race issues, and Authoritarianism]] As the 1970s progressed, the louder, more aggressive Punk movement became the strongest voice of protest, particularly in the UK, featuring anti-war, anti-state, and anti-capitalist themes. The punk culture, in stark contrast with the 1960s' sense of power through union, concerned itself with individual freedom, often incorporating concepts of individualism, free thought and even anarchism. According to Search and Destroy founder V. Vale, "Punk was a total cultural revolt. It was a hardcore confrontation with the black side of history and culture, right-wing imagery, sexual taboos, a delving into it that had never been done before by any generation in such a thorough way." The most significant protest songs of the movement included "God Save the Queen" (1977) by the Sex Pistols, "If the Kids are United" by Sham 69, "Career Opportunities" (1977) (protesting the political and economic situation in England at the time, especially the lack of jobs available to the youth), and "White Riot" (1977) (about class economics and race issues) by The Clash, and "Right to Work" by Chelsea. See also Punk ideology.
War was still the prevalent theme of British protest songs of the 1980s - such as Kate Bush's "Army Dreamers" (1980), which deals with the traumas of a mother whose son dies while away at war. However, as the 1980s progressed, it was British prime minister Margaret Thatcher who came under the greatest degree of criticism from native protest singers, mostly for her strong stance against trade unions, and especially for her handling of the UK miners' strike (1984–1985). The leading voice of protest in Thatcherite Britain in the 1980s was Billy Bragg, whose style of protest song and grass-roots political activism was mostly reminiscent of those of Woody Guthrie, however with themes that were relevant to the contemporary Briton. He summarised his stance in "Between the Wars" (1985) in which he sings "I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage."
Britain's current involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has also garnered criticism from native singers; including George Michael's anti-Tony Blair single "Shoot the Dog" (2002) - which criticised Blair's overly-friendly relationship with George W. Bush and support for the Iraq War - and the more recent example of Ian Brown and Sinéad O'Connor's "Illegal Attacks" (2007) ("So what the fuck is this UK/Gunning with this US of A/ in Iraq and Iran and in Afghanistan?/These are illegal attacks/So bring the soldiers back"). Ex-Smiths frontman Morrissey has also attacked both sides of the Atlantic with "America is Not the World" and "Irish Blood, English Heart" from his 2004 You Are the Quarry album.
Irish Rebel Songs
Irish rebel music is a sub genre of Irish folk music, played on typically Irish instruments (such as the Fiddle, tin whistle, Uilleann pipes, accordion, bodhrán etc.) and acoustic guitars. The lyrics deal with the fight for Irish freedom, people who were involved in liberation movements, the persecution and violence during Northern Ireland's Troubles and the history of Ireland's numerous rebellions.Among the many examples of the genre, some of the most famous are "A Nation Once Again", "Come out Ye Black and Tans", "Erin go Bragh", "The Fields of Athenry", "The Men Behind the Wire" and the Republic of Ireland's national Anthem "Amhrán na bhFiann" ("The Soldier's Song").Music of this genre has often courted controversy, and some of the more outwardly anti-British songs have been effectively banned from the airwaves in both England and the Republic of Ireland.
Paul McCartney also made a contribution to the genre with his 1972 single "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" which he wrote as a reaction to Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland on January 30, 1972. The song also faced an all-out ban in the UK, and has never been re-released or appeared on any Paul McCartney or Wings best-ofs. His former colleague John Lennon wrote a song called Sunday Bloody Sunday in 1972 shortly after the massacre of Irish civil rights activists; this song differs from U2's 1983 version of Bloody Sunday in that it directly supports the Irish Republican cause and does not call for peace. The same year John Lennon also released two protest songs concerning the hardships of war-torn Northern Ireland in the form of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "The Luck Of The Irish," both from his 1972 album Some Time in New York City.
The Wolfe Tones have become legendary in Ireland for their contribution to the Irish rebel genre. The band has been recording since 1963 and has attracted worldwide fame and attention through their renditions of traditional Irish songs and originals, dealing with the former conflict in Northern Ireland. In 2002 the Wolfe Tones' version of A Nation Once Again, a nationalist song from the 19th century, was voted the greatest song in the world in a poll conducted by the BBC World Service
Christy Moore is another famous figure in Irish rebel music, and together with his original band Planxty he recorded traditional music during the 1970s. Following his departure from the band in 1975 he embarked on a solo career, lending his support to a wide variety of left-wing causes. Until 1987 the Provisional IRA was among the groups he supported; however this came to an end following the Enniskillen bombing. During his career he has sung about human rights in El Salvador, republican volunteers from the Spanish Civil War, South African anti-apartheid activist and martyr Steven Biko, the murdered Chilean singer, songwriter, poet, playwright and activist Victor Jara, the late Palestinian solidarity activist Rachel Corrie, not to mention numerous events of Irish history.
An Irish alternative rock/post punk band from Dublin, U2 broke with the rebel musical tradition when they wrote their song, Sunday Bloody Sunday in 1983. The song makes reference to two separate massacres in Irish history of civilians by British forces (Bloody Sunday (1920) and Bloody Sunday 1972); however, unlike other songs dealing with those events, the lyrics call for peace as opposed to revenge.
The song Zombie by the Irish band The Cranberries - written in 1994 in response to the Warrington Bomb Attacks of 1993 - protests the cycle of violence and retribution in Northern Ireland and the pain and suffering it has caused to both communities.
French socialist anthem, protest songs and singers
French socialist anthems
The Internationale (L'Internationale in French) is a famous socialist, anarchist, communist, and social-democratic anthem and one of the most widely recognized songs in the world.The Internationale became the anthem of international socialism. Its original French refrain is C'est la lutte finale/ Groupons-nous et demain/ L'Internationale/ Sera le genre humain. (Freely translated: "This is the final struggle/ Let us join together and tomorrow/ The Internationale/ Will be the human race.") The Internationale has been translated into most of the world's languages. Traditionally it is sung with the hand raised in a clenched fist salute. The Internationale is sung not only by communists but also (in many countries) by socialists or social democrats. The Chinese version was also a rallying song of the students and workers at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
French "protest singers"
We can not speak in France about a protest song trend, but rather of a permanent background of criticism and contestation, and individuals who personify it. The 39-45 war and its horrors forced French singers to think more critically about war in general, forcing them to question their governments and the powers who ruled their society.Jazz trumpeter and singer Boris Vian's was one of the first to protest against the Algerian war with his anti-war song "Le déserteur" (The deserter), which was banned by the government.
Several French songwriters, such as Georges Brassens (1921–1981), Jacques Brel (1929–1978) (actually a Belgian singer, who died in Paris), Léo Ferré (1916–1993), Maxime Le Forestier (born 1949) or interpreters (Yves Montand, Marcel Mouloudji, Serge Reggiani, Graeme Allwright...) often wrote or sang songs aligned against majority ideas and political powers. Because racial tensions did not rise to the same levels as those in the United States, criticism was focused more toward bourgeoisie, power, religion, and songs defending liberty of thought, speech and action. After 1945, immigration became a source of inspiration for some singers: Pierre Perret (born 1934), well known for his humorous songs, started writing several more "serious" and committed songs against racism ("Lily" 1977), which critically pointed out everyday racist behavior n French society.
Brassens wrote several songs protesting war, hate, intolerance ("Les deux oncles", "The two uncles"; "La Guerre de 14-18", "14-18 war"; "Mourir pour des idées", "To die for ideas"; "Les patriotes", "The patriots"), against chauvinism ("La ballade des gens qui sont nés quelque part", "Ballad of People Who Are Born Somewhere"), against bourgeoisie ("La mauvaise réputation" = "The bad reputation", "Les Philistins" = "The Philistines"). He was often called "anarchist" because of his songs on representatives of law and order (and religion) ("Le gorille" = "The gorilla"; "Hécatombe", "Slaughter"; "Le nombril des femmes d'agents", "The navel of cops wives"; "Le mécréant" = "The miscreant"...). Brel's work is another ode to freedom ("Ces gens-là" = "These people", "Les bourgeois" = "The bourgeois", "Jaurès", "Les bigotes" = "The bigots", "Le colonel" = "The colonel", "Le Caporal Casse-Pompon" = "Corporal Break-Nots"), and Ferré was even classified as "red" singer.
All these songs reveal, more than a party anthem, awareness of human being, of universal human problems, and try to touch intimately (and change) individual souls rather than struggle against social or political movements, a government or another, even if the French government, involved in wars in Indochina and Algeria, has often tried to prohibit some of these songs.
German protest music: The "Deutschpunk" movement
Ton Steine Scherben, one of the first and most influential German language rock bands of the 1970s and early 1980s, were well-known for the highly political lyrics of vocalist Rio Reiser. The band became a musical mouthpiece of new left movements, such as the squatting movement, during that time in Germany and their hometown of West Berlin in particular. Their lyrics were, at the beginning, anti-capitalist and anarchist, and the band had connections to the German Red Army Faction terrorists before they latter turned to violent crime and murder. Later songs were about more complex issues such as unemployment (Mole Hill Rockers) or homosexuality (Mama war so). They also contributed to two full-length concept album about homosexuality which were issued under the name Brühwarm (literally: boiling warm) in cooperation with a gay-revue group.A dissatisfied German youth in the late 1970s and early 80s resulted in a strand of highly politicized new wave punk known as the "Deutschpunk" movement, which mostly concerned itself with politically radical left-wing lyrics, mostly influenced by the Cold War.Probably the most important Deutschpunk band was Slime from Hamburg, who were the first band whose LP was banned because of political topics. Their songs "Deutschland" ("Germany"), "Bullenschweine", "Polizei SA/SS", and the anti-imperialist "Yankees raus" ("Yankees out") were banned, some of them are still banned today, because they propagated the use of violence against the police or compared the police to the SA and SS of Nazi Germany. A 1983 protest song from Germany which gained considerable attention worldwide was "99 Luftballons" by Nena. The song protested the escalating rhetoric and strategic maneuvering between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Russian protest music
The most famous source of Russian protest music in the 20th century has come those known locally as bards. The term, (бард in Russian) came to be used in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, and continues to be used in Russia today, to refer to singer-songwriters who wrote songs outside the Soviet establishment. Many of the most famous bards wrote numerous songs about war, particularly The Great Patriotic War (WWII). Bards had various reasons for writing and singing songs about war. Bulat Okudzhava, who actually fought in the war, used his sad and emotional style to illustrate the futility of war in songs such as "The Paper Soldier" ("Бумажный Солдат").Many political songs were written by bards under Soviet rule, and the genre varied from acutely political, "anti-Soviet" songs, to witty satire in the best traditions of Aesop. Some of Bulat Okudzhava's songs provide examples of political songs written on these themes. Vladimir Vysotsky was perceived as a political song writer, but later he gradually made his way into the more mainstream culture. It was not so with Alexander Galich, who was forced to emigrate—owning a tape with his songs could mean a prison term in the USSR. Before emigration, he suffered from KGB persecution, as did another bard, Yuliy Kim. Others, like Evgeny Kliachkin and Aleksander Dolsky, maintained a balance between outright anti-Soviet and plain romantic material. Since most of the bards' songs were never permitted by Soviet censorship, most of them, however innocent, were considered to be anti-Soviet
Belgian anti-Iraq war song
Ira Dei composed "God is not with You !"Latin American protest songs
Chilean and Latin American protest music
While the protest song was enjoying its Golden Age in America in the 1960s, it also saw many detractors overseas who saw it as having been commercialized. Chilean singer-songwriter Victor Jara, who played a pivotal role in the folkloric renaissance that led to the Nueva Canción Chilena (New Chilean Song) movement which created a revolution in the popular music of his country, criticised the "commercialized" American ‘protest song phenomenon’ which had been imported into Chile. He criticized it thus:The cultural invasion is like a leafy tree which prevents us from seeing our own sun, sky and stars. Therefore in order to be able to see the sky above our heads, our task is to cut this tree off at the roots. US imperialism understands very well the magic of communication through music and persists in filling our young people with all sorts of commercial tripe. With professional expertise they have taken certain measures: first, the commercialization of the so-called ‘protest music’; second, the creation of ‘idols’ of protest music who obey the same rules and suffer from the same constraints as the other idols of the consumer music industry – they last a little while and then disappear. Meanwhile they are useful in neutralizing the innate spirit of rebellion of young people. The term ‘protest song’ is no longer valid because it is ambiguous and has been misused. I prefer the term ‘revolutionary song’Nueva canción (literally "new song" in Spanish) was a type of protest/social song in Latin American music which took root in South America, especially Chile and other Andean countries, and gained extreme popularity throughout Latin America. It combined traditional Latin American folk music idioms (played on the quena, zampoña, charango or cajón with guitar accompaniment) with some popular (esp. British) rock music, and was characterised by its progressive and often politicized lyrics. It is sometimes considered a precursor to rock en español. The lyrics are typically in Spanish, with some indigenous or local words mixed in.
Its lyrics characteristically revolve around about poverty, empowerment, the Unidad Popular, imperialism, democracy, human rights, and religion. There are some hundreds of songs with influences from British and American pop rock that was popular with college youths. The Chilean coup of 1973 impacted the genre's growth, as the musical movement was forced to go underground. During the days of the coup, Victor Jara, a well known singer/song-writer, was kidnapped, jailed, tortured and shot. Other groups, such as Inti-Illimani and Quilapayun found safety outside the country. The military government went as far as to ban many traditional Andean instruments, but as a testament to how far the country has come since then, the stadium where Victor Jara was murdered now bears his name.
Cuban and Puerto Rican protest music
A type of Cuban and Puerto Rican protest music, "Nueva trova", started in the mid-1960s when a movement in Cuban music emerged that combined traditional folk music idioms with progressive and often politicized lyrics. This movement of protest music came to be known as Nueva trova, and was somewhat similar to that of Nueva canción, however with the advantage of support from the Cuban government, as it promoted the Cuban Revolution. Though originally and still largely Cuban, nueva trova has become popular across Latin America, especially in Puerto Rico and Venezuela. The movements biggest stars included Cubans Silvio Rodríguez, Vicente Feliu, Noel Nicola and Pablo Milanés, as well as Puerto Ricans such as Roy Brown, Andrés Jiménez, Antonio Caban Vale and the group Haciendo Punto en Otro Son.African protest songs
Algerian Raï protest music
Raï (), which is the Arabic word for "opinion", is a form of folk music, originated in Oran, Algeria from Bedouin shepherds, mixed with Spanish, French, African and Arabic musical forms, which dates back to the 1930s and has been primarily evolved by women in the culture. Raï has been forbidden music in Algeria, to the point of one popular singer being assassinated, although since the 1980s it has enjoyed some considerable success. The song "Parisien Du Nord" by Cheb Mami is a recent example of how the genre has been used as form of protest, as the song was written as a protest against the racial tensions that sparked the 2005 French riots. According to Memi:It is a song against racism, so I wanted to sing it with a North African who was born in France [...] Because of that and because of his talent, I chose K-Mel. In the song, we say, ‘In your eyes, I feel like foreigner.’ It’s like the kids who were born in France but they have Arab faces. They are French, and they should be considered French.”South African anti-apartheid protest music
The majority of South African protest music of the 20th century concerned itself with apartheid, a system of legalized racial segregation in which blacks were stripped of their citizenship and rights from 1948 to 1994. As the apartheid regime forced Africans into townships and industrial centers, people sang about leaving their homes, the horror of the coal mines and the degradation of working as domestic servants. Examples of which include Benedict Wallet Vilakazi's "Meadowlands", the "Toyi-toyi" chant and "Bring Him Back Home" (1987) by Hugh Masekela, which became an anthem for the movement to free Nelson Mandela. Masekela's song "Soweto Blues", sung by his former wife, Miriam Makeba, is a blues/jazz piece that mourns the carnage of the Soweto riots in 1976. Basil Coetzee and Abdullah Ibrahim's "Mannenberg", became an unofficial soundtrack to the anti-apartheid resistance.Asian protest songs
Filipino protest music
From the revolutionary songs of the Katipunan to the songs being sung by the New Peoples Army, Filipino protest music deals with poverty, oppression as well as anti-imperialism and independence. A typical example was during the American era, as Jose Corazon de Jesus created a well-known protest song entitled "Bayan Ko", which calls for redeeming the nation against oppression, mainly colonialism, that also became popular as a song dealt against the Marcos regime.However, during the 1960s, Filipino protest music became aligned with the ideas of Communism as well as of revolution. "Ang Linyang Masa", a protest song came from Mao Zedong and his Mass Line and "Papuri sa Pag-aaral" was from Bertolt Brecht. These songs, although Filipinised, rose to become another part of Filipino protest music known as Revolutionary songs, that became popular during protests and campaign struggles.
Singer-songwriters of protest music include Ramon Ayco, a former rebel, who made a song entitled "Tano", which tackles about a farmer who, due to the prevailing conditions, forced himself to join the struggle, and "Babae" ("Woman"), which also deals with women's empowerment and national liberation, other singer-songwriters like Gary Granada, Inang Laya, and Noel Cabangon are also became popular in creating protest music and making it popular like the song "Tatsulok" ("Triangle"), that originally from Cabangon's album Buklod, and revived by Bamboo Mañalac.
Israeli protest music
singing Hebrew protest songs when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University in 2007.]] Israel's protest music has often become associated with different political factions.
" sung by Shuli Natan]] During the 1967 war, Naomi Shemer wrote Jerusalem of Gold, sung by Shuli Natan, about the recapturing of Jerusalem after 2000 years. Later on that year A different point of view of this song was introduced by the folk singer Meir Ariel, who recorded an anti-war version of this song and named it "Jerusalem of Iron".
Gush Emunim supporters have taken a repertoire of old religious songs and invested them with political meaning. An example is the song "Utsu Etsu VeTufar" (They gave counsel but their counsel was violated). The song signifies the ultimate rightness of those steadfast in their beliefs, suggesting the rightness of Gush Emunim's struggle against anti-settlement policy by the government.
Minutes before Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered at a political rally in November 1995, Israeli folk singer Miri Aloni sang the Israeli pop song Shir Lashalom (Song for Peace). This song, originally written in 1969 and performed extensively at the time by an Israeli military performing group, has become one of the anthems of the Israeli peace camp.
During the Arab uprising known as the First Intifada, Israeli singer Si Heyman sang Yorim VeBokhim (Shoot and Weep), written by Shalom Hanoch, to protest Israeli policy in the territories. This song was banned from the radio for a certain period of time on charges of subversiveness.
Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall is used as a protest song by many opponents of Israel's barrier in the West Bank, which is now half finished. The lyrics have been adapted to: "We don't need no occupation. We don't need no racist wall."
Since the onset of the Oslo Process and, more recently, Israel's unilateral disengagement plan, protest songs became a major avenue for opposition activists to express sentiments. Songs protesting these policies were written and performed by Israeli musicians, such as Ariel Zilber, Shalom Flisser, Aharon Razel, Eli Bar-Yahalom, Yuri Lipmanovich, Ari Ben-Yam, and many others.
Palestinian protest music
Palestinian music () deals with the conflict with Israel, the longing for peace, and the love of the Palestinian's land. A typical example of such a song is "Biladi, Biladi" (My Country, My Country), which has become the unofficial Palestinian national anthem.Another example is the song "AlKuds (Jerusalem) our Land", with words by Sharif Sabri. The song, sung by Amar Diab from Port Said, Egypt, won first prize in 2003 in a contest in Egypt for video clips produced in the West Bank and Gaza. DAM is an Arabic hip-hop group, rapping in Arabic and Hebrew about the problems faced by Palestinians under occupation and calling for change. Kamilya Joubran's song "Ghareeba", a setting of a poem by Khalil Gibran, deals with a sense of isolation and loneliness felt by the Palestinian woman.
Unlike during the Anti-Apartheid era, international artists have largely avoided the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as lyrical fodder. Since 2000, this has been changing, with Electronic Intifada cofounder Nigel Parry's 2001 album, This Side of Paradise This Side of Paradise (Nigel Parry album), an early example. The increasing number of lyrics dealing with the conflict is primarily noted in the hip hop community, particularly from underground artists such as Immortal Technique and Invincible.
South Korean protest songs
Commonly, protest songs in South Korea are known as Min-joong Ga-yo (, literally People's song), and the genre of protest songs is called Norae Undong, literally "Song movement". It was raised by people in 1970s~1980s to be against the military governments of President Park Jeong-hee (), Jeon Doo-hwan ().South Korea – United States have maintaining strong ties. According to American think tank organization Pew Research Center, South Korean have one of the most favorable view toward US
Chinese Protest Music
Chinese-Korean Cui Jian’s 1986 song Nothing to My Name was popular with protesters in Tiananmen Square. After the crackdown, he frequently played in public wearing a symbolic red blindfold when playing A Piece of Red Cloth, a practice which led to censorship officials canceling concerts.Malaysian Protest Music
Australian protest music
Indigenous issues feature prominently in politically inspired Australian music and include the topics of land rights, and aboriginal deaths in custody. One of the most prominent Australian bands to confront these issues is Yothu Yindi. Other Australian bands to have confronted indigenous issues include Tiddas, Kev Carmody, Archie Roach, Christine Anu, Neil Murray, Blue King Brown, the John Butler Trio, Midnight Oil, Warumpi Band, Powderfinger and Xavier Rudd.In addition to Indigenous issues, many Australian protest singers have sung about the futility of war. Notable anti-war songs include "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda" (1972) by Eric Bogle, and "A walk in the Light Green" (1983) by Redgum, most often remembered by its chorus "I was only nineteen".
Other notable themes in politically inspired Australian music include racism (for example, The Herd) and the environment (for example, Midnight Oil). In recent years increasing numbers of protest songs have emerged in support of imprisoned Australian Schapelle Corby
See also
Civil Rights anthem List of anti-war songs Nonviolent resistance Music and politics Topical song Wobblies Folk music Folk punk Political/Conscious hip hop References
Footnotes
Further reading
John Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest. [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953] New York: A.S. Barnes, 1960. Fowke, Edith and Joe Glazer. Songs of Work and Protest. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1973. Denisoff, R. Serge. Sing a Song of Social Significance. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983. Ray Pratt. Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music (Media and Society Series). Praeger, 1990. Ronald D. Cohen & Dave Samuelson. Liner notes for Songs for Political Action. Bear Family Records, BCD 15 720 JL, 1996. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Tradition in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Alan Lomax, Compiler and Editor. Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People. Woody Guthrie, Introduction and Song Notes. Pete Seeger, Music Editor, Transcriptions, and Afterword. John Steinbeck, Foreword. Irwin Silber, New Foreword. University of Nebraska Press, 1999. External links
Strange Fruit - a PBS Web site on the history of protest music Vietnam: The music of protest, Steve Schifferes, BBC News, Sunday, 1 May 2005 Arlan Feiles - "Come Sunday Morning" Modern Americana Protest Music Labor and Industrial Folksongs: A Select Bibliography from the Library of Congress
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
![PROTEST SONG WITH NO NAME - THE MIGHTY STEF [IRELAND FAN]](http://web.archive.org./web/20110105123753im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1viuMsZ0WMs/2.jpg "PROTEST SONG WITH NO NAME - THE MIGHTY STEF [IRELAND FAN]")
![The Humber Bridge is the fifth-largest single-span suspension bridge in the world, near Kingston upon Hull in England. It spans the Humber (the estuary formed by the rivers Trent and Ouse) between Barton-upon-Humber on the south bank and Hessle on the north bank, connecting the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. The bridge carries an average of 120,000 vehicles per week,[1] which pay a toll of £2.70 each way for cars (higher for commercial vehicles).](http://web.archive.org./web/20110105123753im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/d2/6b/886fe9fd0bb69337926f6d03ccb1_grande.jpg "The Humber Bridge is the fifth-largest single-span suspension bridge in the world, near Kingston upon Hull in England. It spans the Humber (the estuary formed by the rivers Trent and Ouse) between Barton-upon-Humber on the south bank and Hessle on the north bank, connecting the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. The bridge carries an average of 120,000 vehicles per week,[1] which pay a toll of £2.70 each way for cars (higher for commercial vehicles).")
![The Humber Bridge is the fifth-largest single-span suspension bridge in the world, near Kingston upon Hull in England. It spans the Humber (the estuary formed by the rivers Trent and Ouse) between Barton-upon-Humber on the south bank and Hessle on the north bank, connecting the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. The bridge carries an average of 120,000 vehicles per week,[1] which pay a toll of £2.70 each way for cars (higher for commercial vehicles).](http://web.archive.org./web/20110105123753im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/d2/6b/886fe9fd0bb69337926f6d03ccb1_thumb.jpg "The Humber Bridge is the fifth-largest single-span suspension bridge in the world, near Kingston upon Hull in England. It spans the Humber (the estuary formed by the rivers Trent and Ouse) between Barton-upon-Humber on the south bank and Hessle on the north bank, connecting the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. The bridge carries an average of 120,000 vehicles per week,[1] which pay a toll of £2.70 each way for cars (higher for commercial vehicles).")
