Songs of Social Protest

International Perspectives

Aileen Dillane, Martin J. Power, Eoin Devereux, Amanda Haynes

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786601278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Songs of Social Protest is a comprehensive, cutting-edge companion guide to music and social protest globally. Bringing together established and emerging scholars from a range of fields, it explores a wide range of examples of, and contexts for, songs and their performance that have been deployed as part of local, regional and global social protest movements, both in historical and contemporary times. Topics covered include:

• Aesthetics
• Authenticity
• African American Music
• Anti-capitalism
• Community & Collective Movements
• Counter-hegemonic Discourses
• Critical Pedagogy
• Folk Music
• Identity
• Memory
• Performance
• Popular Culture

Encompassing nuanced historical-political-economic contextualizations and detailed ethnographic, socio-musicological analysis, this comprehensive book offers new and critical perspectives on genres already associated with protest alongside explorations of rich music traditions which may not be readily familiar to Western readers interested in protest movements and song. By placing historical approaches alongside cutting-edge ethnography, philosophical excursions alongside socio-political and economic perspectives, and cultural context alongside detailed, musicological, textual, and performance analysis, Songs of Social Protest offers a dynamic resource for scholars and students exploring song and singing as a form of protest.

Part I

Protest and the African American Experience

Chapter 1

Social Protest and Resistance in African American Song

Traditions in Transformation

Robert W. Stephens and Mary Ellen Junda

Enslaved and free Africans have been the most disempowered people in the United States, but that does not mean they bore their servitude and disadvantages without complaint. From the earliest days of the new Republic, African Americans—free and enslaved—protested their subjugation. The first public act of protest occurred in 1817 when 3,000 African American men attended a meeting at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopalian (A.M.E.) Church in Philadelphia. This meeting ultimately grew into a national movement that rejected the proposals for a return to Africa movement (Garrison 1968), laying the groundwork for African American protest and resistance movements that are still occurring today.

Music—in particular song—has always been a part of these movements. Today, protest in this community is still rooted in traditions of resistance and protest that date back to slavery (Southern 1997; Levine 2007; Epstein 1977). The songs from this period, generally referred to as “spirituals” or “slave songs,” were embedded with coded meanings that contained strong elements of protest.¹ In the early and mid-twentieth century a few courageous artists abandoned the encoding of protest and, by the 1960s, the great-grandchildren of the enslaved began to sing openly about injustice (Peretti 2013). Every song in African Americans’ struggle for equality is a chronicle of their unique experience—from “Amelia’s Song,” carried from Sierra Leone to the Sea Islands of Georgia and passed orally through five generations (Stephens and Junda 2014), through spirituals and the stirring anthems of the civil rights movement.

An unbroken tradition of protest song has survived for centuries off the southeast coast of the United States maintained by the Gullah, descendants of enslaved West Africans brought to America for their rice-growing skills.² The Gullah people have resided on the Sea Islands and coastal lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia for generations. Their isolated geographic location allowed them to retain more of their African cultural heritage than any other group of African Americans (Opala 2009).

This chapter draws a direct connection between the African American singing tradition preserved by the Gullah and the continuous use of music and song as instruments of resistance and protest from slavery through the civil rights movement. We argue that African American protest music needs to be interpreted through a broad framework that takes into consideration the racial legacy of its founding history, where “tradition and ritual are understood as processes of identity and identification, and as encoded and embodied forms of collective meaning and memory” (Eyerman 1998, 44). The social relationship of African Americans to the larger society is unique among American ethnic groups. It is one of “interdependence and domination,” reflecting “the “double consciousness” of belonging to, while simultaneously separated from, American culture (Eyerman 1998, 44).

Protest music is usually associated with a social movement and, in the United States, with the European American experience of social and political upheaval. Damodaran (2016) more or less equates protest and resistance, considering “protest music or the music of resistance [as] a distinct category within the larger genre of political music” (2). According to Dunaway (1987), political subjects elaborated in music may include “political campaigns, labor relations, suffragists, and egalitarianism” (269). Denisoff (1970) suggests that protest songs are actually a symbolic substitute for social and political engagement. Following this logic, we argue that even songs whose lyrics criticised the exploitation of the enslaved surreptitiously represent enduring impulses to resist and protest African Americans’ disempowerment. According to Denisoff (1972), the lyrics of “protest songs basically … [attempt] to convince the listener that something is wrong and in need of alteration” (x). The listener need not necessarily be the exploiter; she could also be a fellow sufferer—and singer of the song. Denisoff also emphasises the importance of the lyrics, though he also maintains that good musical structure and a “singable” melody enhance the message of the song (Denisoff 1972).

Denisoff (1968) identifies two types of protest songs: “songs of persuasion” that garner support for a cause and “rhetorical song,” that focuses on a perceived injustice but offers no solution (230). Damodaran (2016) suggests that some protest songs also may be “descriptive of the conditions that foment discontent” and that these expressions “can be based on the individual, … part of collectives or musical communities, or part of organized political movements” (2). Though useful, Denisoff’s and Damodaran’s descriptions fail to recognise the particular political and social landscape that continues to give rise to African American protest songs. Such a perspective would reflect a different set of problems and possibilities born in racial animus and the human drama of America’s “peculiar institution,” slavery.³ The byproducts of the realities of life under slavery—music, song, protest and resistance—reflect the magnitude of the suffering of African American people. The heritage of slavery limited overt political and social advocacy for human rights, beginning with slavery itself through the Jim Crow era and eventually the civil rights movement. African American protest songs continue to articulate concerns and a sense of humanity amongst the people themselves and provide a cathartic release from abuse. These functions are not encompassed by standard definitions of protest songs, a gap in the literature we attempt to fill in this chapter.

Many of the enslaved were forced to develop and retain a resilient tenacity carved from a fractured connection to an African past that allowed them to sustain themselves. In America, as in Africa, singing has long been a daily part of work and play, prayer and protest. On southern plantations, body percussion replaced the forbidden rhythmic drive of the drums, so prevalent in Africa, accompanying two improvisatory song styles: “short musical phrases with variations in repetition; and call-and-response, in which one singer leads and is supported by a group” (Southern 1997, 14–15). These African-based performance practices also influenced how protest was conceived and represented through creative and expressive acts.

The act of conveying feelings through words, song, dance and art functions on two levels: communicating meaning within the group while simultaneously transmitting different meanings to an outside audience. Given that African Americans could not protest in a direct way, songs became a voice for the community. Song lyrics became public and hidden transcripts: sung among those who understand the code, they create solidarity and fellowship; sung in the presence of oppressors and outsiders, they become protest (Jones and Stewart 1983). Singing also served another purpose: self-directed messaging that provided “psychological refurbishing and affirmation” to assist in removing self-doubt, an impediment to self-worth (Gregg 1971, 74).

Protest songs often acknowledge both disdain for the oppressor and hope for a better future. Few slave songs, however, openly addressed the goal of freedom because it was simply too dangerous given the unequal relationship between the enslaved and slaveholders. Enslaved Africans lived in a world in which “a misplaced gesture or misspoken word can have terrible consequences” (Scott 1990, x). At the root of this experience is power, how it is negotiated and for what purpose. As Scott points out, “The relationship of discourse to power would be most sharply etched where the divergence between . . . the public transcript and the hidden transcripts was the greatest” (Scott 1990, x). Numerous African American songs provide examples of public and hidden transcripts. For example:

You mought be Carroll from Carrollton

Arrive here night afo’ Lawd make creation

But you can’t keep the World from moverin’ around

And not turn her back from the gaining ground. (Gellert 1936, 8)

Here the reference is to the Carrolls, a prominent family for whom Carrollton, Maryland, is named. Nat Turner killed some members of this family during the slave rebellion he led in 1831. The song uses both humor and sarcasm to point out that although this prestigious family is well established in the area (“arrive here night afo’ Lawd make creation”), they are not powerful enough to stop the slave rebellions in Maryland, Virginia, or, ultimately, the nation. Turner’s revolution is described as growing both in support and in geographic influence (“can’t keep the World from moverin’ around”) and Turner’s name is cleverly embedded in the chorus as “not turn her”—“her” being the movement that is gaining ground (Ames 1973). Visions of freedom were always cloaked in devices like fantasy, metaphor, humor, and puns to express a point of view that would otherwise be prohibited (Levine 2007).

The Oral Tradition

African American music is grounded in an oral tradition that represents a worldview that unifies groups and the relationship between the individual and the group. In this setting, music becomes a social text that reflects a collective reality created by the members of a community who bring information about how the music is created and performed. Every part of this process is context specific, occurring in a “bounded sphere of interaction” (Stone 1982, 3). Similarly, Culler (2013) describes “our social and cultural world as a series of sign systems” not of independent objects but, rather, “… symbolic structures, systems of relations [that] enable objects and actions to have meaning” (28). Culler’s observation helps us to understand that African Americans’ beliefs inform their behavior and the complexity of their creative process. From this perspective, music, protest and resistance have to be regarded in a manner wholly different from music informed by the western canon, where musical significance is located in “psychological constants” (Meyer 1973, 14) or “psychological laws of ‘rightness’” (Langer 1957, 240).

Functional analyses of oral performance traditions in non-western settings are common. Aadnani (2006), for example, conducted a survey that examined protest music and poetry of the Rai musical tradition of North Africa. Nueva Canción, a musical style associated with Latin American songwriters committed to social justice, has been the subject a number of studies, including those of Elliott (2011) and Gasparotto (2011). Likewise, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa has been studied by Ballantine (2012), Olwage (2008) and Schumann (2008). These studies locate engagements that express political and social positions in particular genres, but, conceptually, they fail to capture the diversity of experiences that define the deep relationships between protest, resistance and music. To address this gap, our functional analysis emphasises not the person(s) who wrote the music, their intent or motivation, but rather content and context, how music and lyrics are used historically and the social settings in which they are used (Dorson 1971).

Language

Most west coast Africans had developed multilingual skills well before they were forced to come to America (Wood 1974). Once in the United States, those living in the Sea Islands and coastal lowlands of Georgia and South Carolina combined elements of the English language with their native tongues, creating a pidgin language. As grammatical and syntactical structures developed and passed on to subsequent generations, pidgin became Gullah, a creole language complete with a specific syntax. Given the Gullah people’s isolation on the Sea Islands and their limited interaction with English-speaking whites, the Gullah language is still closely linked to its African roots, mixed with the English language and regional linguistic attributes (Dow Turner 2002; Holloway 2005; Wolfram and Clark 1971; Wood 1974). Consequently, the language is less easily understood by people outside the Gullah community and has always provided a means to communicate freely within the community without fear of retribution.

The Gullah language was considered broken English spoken by uneducated people until Lorenzo Dow Turner’s (2002) research showed that it was a “full and complete language with its own systematic grammatical structures.” The language is still spoken by over one hundred thousand people who strive to keep it alive (Opala 2009, 15). When contemporary Gullah speakers use this language, they assume the “role of the other” while simultaneously creating a sense of control and freedom for themselves. This idea is grounded in “symbolic interaction”: how people behave towards things based on the meaning they ascribe to them (Debray 2000, 3).⁴ Margie Washington, whose ancestors were enslaved on Butler Plantation, affirms this point when she says: “I didn’t know it was Gullah or didn’t know it was Geechee, until I got older and went to school and the teacher began to correct us. There were so many words that we got away from, because we were told that we had to” (Stephens and Junda 2014). Washington became “bilingual”: she continues to use Gullah at home and among friends in the community when she does not want to be understood by others. So, today, Gullah speakers use the language as it was used years ago—as a defining aspect of their cultural heritage and as a means of private communication.

Georgia Sea Island Singers

No one has captured and sustained the essence of Gullah and African American songs of protest and resistance better or longer than the Georgia Sea Island Singers. In 1915, Lydia Parrish, wife of renowned painter Maxwell Parrish, started spending ...