Martin Luther King, Jr. once called freedom songs the soul of the Civil Rights Movement. And in fact, many people would argue this was true, not just for movements such as that for civil rights, but also for protests against the Vietnam War and other causes.
Throughout the 1960s, songs, especially those in the pop genre, were used to raise awareness for and promote activism within the different political movements of the time. This was not the first time songs were used for social justice.
Beginning in the 1930s and ‘40s with the labor movement, songs were used to unify people into a cohesive movement and to easily distribute a clear message at rallies and protests.
“The reason that [it was] all done through song is because [these were] working class people, so they weren’t highly educated,” said Amanda Edgar, a professor of rhetoric in pop culture at the University of Memphis. “If you want people to remember the message and spread [it], you can’t just write it down in a pamphlet because people might not know how to read.”
As a result, songs became an essential part of the protests at the time, and artists such as African-American singer Billie Holiday and folk musician Pete Seeger began to notice how music could be used as a tool to raise awareness for a cause.
In her song “Strange Fruit,” for example, Holiday sheds light on the circumstances in the southern United States of which people from the North might not be aware. Performing the song in nightclubs, Holiday informed people of the lynchings occurring in the South around the time the song was released in 1939.
“It began as a poem set to music and was performed in nightclubs that weren’t accustomed to political messages,” said Dorian Lynskey, a music journalist and author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs. “It’s incredibly important because it brought protest singing into the world of Saturday night entertainment rather than marches and picket lines, where it usually lived.”
After Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Seeger continued to bring awareness to political movements of the time, starting by spreading the song that would soon become the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, “We Shall Overcome,” before later transitioning to songs against the Vietnam War.
Soon after Holiday and Seeger started singing songs in protest, others began to follow in their tracks. In the North, popular jazz artist Nina Simone sang about the injustices in the South with songs like her “Mississippi Goddamn.”
“She started to sing ‘Mississippi Goddamn,’ and that was a very bold song, very outspoken,” said Richard Flacks, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of Playing for Change: Music and Musicians. “She started to perform that at pop concerts, and I think the fact that she did that sort of freed up other people to do that.”
Other artists, such as those who were producing at Motown Records in Detroit, also began to add songs to their repertoire that could be used for the cause of social justice. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” is now seen as a major contribution to the movement at the time.
“These songs when you hear[d] them on pop records or pop music radio, they spread the news you might say to people in northern cities, particularly of what was happening in the South,” Flacks said. “They [had] a sort of inspirational, magnetic effect on people.”
While artists such as Simone and Gaye were raising awareness for the Civil Rights Movement, others such as Bob Dylan were doing the same for protests against the Vietnam War.
When Dylan first entered the musical scene, he was singing folk songs without any intention of setting out to create music for a specific movement, said Jonathan Friedman, a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and editor of The Routledge History of Social Music in Protest. It wasn’t until later that Dylan’s work began to be adopted by both movements as he crossed into mainstream music.
“By the late part of the ‘60s, there was all kinds of black music, popular music, that was reflecting the war, some, very consciously, like John Lennon, who wrote ‘Give Peace a Chance,’ for one example,” Flacks said. “He literally wrote that to be used in rallies and stuff like that.”
The tradition of using popular music in protest did not end in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement and protests against the Vietnam War. Even today, artists use music as a form of protest.
Lupe Fiasco is a popular rap artist who uses his craft to shed light on today’s issues. In fact, Fiasco raps about current events in his song, “Words I Never Said,” referencing the war on terror, tax cuts and election votes.
Music, especially pop music, has been a platform for social justice since the 1940s, and it continues to be one today — raising awareness and unifying people around issues of the time.
“A truly important protest song takes pop music and the people who listen to it, to a different place,” Lynskey said. “It expands the boundaries of what can be said in a song.”
