America’s political movements used to be much more tuneful. The current unrest has no shortage of chants, such as the call and response “Whose streets? Our streets!” and the tired “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! [Fill in your nemesis here] has got to go!” But where are the anthems? They may be missing because today’s revolutionaries have too narrow a knowledge of the history of music in political movements.
It’s not that no one has thought to write music to jazz the throngs. Take BMI, one of the agencies that collect royalties for songwriters. The organization is encouraging its members to pen protest songs for our moment. For some tips on how to stick it to The Man with music, the folks at BMI point songwriters to a tutorial offered by the Juilliard of pop, Boston’s Berklee College of Music.
Berklee recommends studying “Strange Fruit.” The music college says the grim anti-lynching ballad, sung by Billie Holiday in 1939, is “often regarded as the first protest song.” That would be news to the composers of the labor movement’s Little Red Songbook, published in 1909. And what about the many 19th-century abolitionists who fought slavery with song? It would even be a surprise to the revolutionaries of 1776, who waged war with popular songs and cutting lyrics.
If there is any characteristic that most defines the protest music of the American Revolution, it is humor. Theirs was a Mad magazine aesthetic, taking popular songs of the day, whether boozy tavern tunes or churchy hymn book standards, and replacing the words with comic, rude, bawdy new lyrics contrived to insult their adversaries. Loyalists derided patriots as “barefooted tatterdemalions, / [Who] In baseness exceed all other rebellions.” Patriot poets asked for deliverance “from a junto that labour with absolute power, / Whose schemes disappointed have made them look sour.”
Or consider “Yankee Doodle.” Popular with both sides, the Brits first sang it with lyrics mocking the Colonials as bumpkins; Americans made it their own, including lyrics celebrating the British catastrophe at Yorktown: “Cornwallis led a country dance, / the like was never seen, Sir.” The lyric, as John Ogasapian points out in Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Era, taunts, if not threatens, the American loyalists who had sided with King George III: “That while your hopes are danc’d away, / tis you must pay the piper.”
Comic rewriting would persist in the Civil War. An old camp meeting song stuffed with “glory Hallelujahs” was adapted by abolitionists who sang of John Brown’s body “a-mould’ring in the grave.” The song would ultimately be sanitized by Julia Ward Howe, who sanctified it as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But in the meantime, Union soldiers used the song as a vehicle for heaping abuse on the rebels, and on Confederate President Jefferson Davis in particular. It’s not clear which verses were more popular while marching, the ones promising, “We’ll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree,” or those proposing to “feed him on the apples till he gets the diarrhea.”
Twentieth-century protest singers would maintain the tradition. Joe Hill took the hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By” and used it to mock the “Starvation Army” for promising that when you died, you’d eat your fill of pie in the sky.
Sometimes, the new lyrics were meant to be serious, as when the patriotic British air now known as “God Save the Queen/King” was refashioned as “America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee).” But even more serious were the anti-slavery lyrics written to that same air, one of dozens of abolitionist protest songs written in the 1800s.
Joshua McCarter Simpson penned many of them, and the Black Lives Matter crowds could do worse than to look at his songs and consider singing rather than shouting. And then maybe the protesters can do away with the lame and unimaginative chanting. Because “Hey, hey! Ho, ho!” has simply got to go.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
