When social movements need to march in beat, Dick Flacks gives them a song
Dick Flacks has a long and storied history in the progressive movement.
He was a co-author of the Port Huron Statement by the Students for a Democratic Society, the 1962 manifesto credited with launching the New Left movement of the 1960s. For 44 years, he has hosted a radio show on KCSB in Santa Barbara, California, while also working as an activist, sociologist and author.
In 2018, he and his wife Mickey chronicled their long journey in their memoir Making History Making Blintzes, How Two Red Diaper Babies Found Each Other and Discovered America (Rutgers University Press). He is co-author of Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Routledge, 2010).
Dick and I had a long conversation about the power of song. What follows is a brief tour through influential songs and poems of protest and resistance in American history, many with rural roots, with Flack’s extensive knowledge as a guide. His commentary is provided here, in addition to lyrics and links for you to follow along. – Suzan Erem
In 2013, I was approached by Peter Dreier, a friend of mine, to co-author a piece on the theme of progressive patriotism. I had been discovering that a lot of the expressions of patriotism that are most well-known in this country had come from people on the left, not the right, and that story was centerpiece of the article. Here’s the key examples:
On the base of the Statue of Liberty, is an excerpt from “The New Colossus,” a poem by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887), who was very consciously left wing.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
The poem speaks to fact that we are the society that welcomes the downtrodden and the homeless to our shores. That is the essence of what our country is about.
Francis Bellamy (1855-1931) was a minister who lost his pulpit because he preached that Jesus was a socialist. He and his cousin Edward were both socialists. In 1892, on the 400th anniversary of Columbus arriving to America, he thought it would be a great idea to create a school pledge that immigrant children could speak alongside American-born kids that would unite them around a vision of America. Of course, the socialist line when you think of it having that history is “with liberty and justice for all.” And that’s how he understood the purpose of the pledge.
I didn’t know that its author Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) was in a lifelong same-sex relationship with a fellow Wellesley College professor Katharine Coman. Bates had written a whole lot of poetry including a book of anti-imperialist poems America the Beautiful and Other Poems (1912).
If you look at all the verses, the message is America is beautiful, but its beauty is also in danger of corruption unless we rescue it, so to speak. I don’t think she used the word “rescue” but that’s the America we have to fight for. She clearly intended to make the point that there’s two sides to America the beautiful. Of course it’s beautiful physically. Is it beautiful socially? Is it a land of brotherhood? This is a verse that is seldom sung.
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!
So, here’s another person consciously on the left who is creating a very important patriotic symbol. The national anthem was only decided in the 1930s, and “America the Beautiful” was one of the key contenders for that.
Then comes Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), who said that he was listening to “God Bless America” on the radio and thought, “That’s not the way to talk about America.” America is for the people of America, not God. And “God Bless America,” when you hear it, doesn’t have any content about what America is supposed to be really. So he wrote “This Land is Your Land” as an answer to that.
There were very political verses that he wrote about the poor in America. He didn’t think the political side of what he was writing about people on welfare and so forth could be sung in schools. So, the verses that are really famous, those sung by most people most of the time, didn’t include two verses:
As I was walkin’ – I saw a sign there
And that sign said “No trespassin’”
But on the other side …. it didn’t say nothin’!
Now that side was made for you and me!
In the squares of the city – In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office – I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me
It wasn’t really because of censorship by others. It was Woody’s own view of how to make that song useful. It is amazing how far that song has gone given he was a Communist—and now those class conscious verses are typically included by performers.
Woody is now the one of the great icons of American culture. I’m amazed because it seems even truer from year to year. I keep meeting kids in their early 20s who are Woody Guthrie fans. I’ve had students who said, when the punk movement was starting, that he’s the father of punk. It makes sense because he was rejecting corporate culture very consciously.
Earl Robinson (1910-1991) was another Communist Party composer of note. He wrote for radio in the 1940s and had a time in Hollywood before he was blacklisted. The lyrics to “The House I Live In” were written by another Communist, Abel Meeropol (1903-1986). Meeropol, writing under the pseudonym Lewis Allen, earlier wrote the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit,” famously sung by Billie Holiday.
The first verse of “The House I Live In” goes:
The house I live in
A plot of earth, a street
The grocer and the butcher
And the people that I meet
The children in the playground
The faces that I see
All races, all religions
That’s America to me
I was raised with “The House I Live In,” sung by Frank Sinatra at the height of his teen idol popularity. He initially performed it in a Hollywood short that won an Oscar. The short was a kind of little documentary where he teaches children how to be anti-racist by singing that song.
Sinatra made the song popular and he continued to sing it throughout his career. The song made it the finale of the national celebration of the centenary of the Statue of Liberty.
Robinson also wrote the music for a popular cantata that recounted the history of liberty in America called “Ballad for Americans.” Norman Corwin, the great radio producer, heard it off-Broadway, went to CBS and said this 10-minute work could be a great short radio program. It really fit with the anti-fascist, win the war struggle leading up to World War II. A CBS executive said, “Wouldn’t Paul Robeson be the best singer for that?”
Robeson was one of the most famous Americans in the 1930s and certainly the most famous African American, during his heyday, in the world. And yet he was completely denied the opportunity to make a living out of his art once the blacklist hit him in 1950.
But a decade earlier, in 1940, “Ballad for Americans” was performed at two political conventions. One was the Communist Party convention, I guess Robeson must have sung it there, and the Republican convention. Bing Crosby made a recorded version of it. It became for a while a very well-known patriotic anthem.
Did they all believe in liberty in those days?
Nobody who was anybody believed it.
Ev’rybody who was anybody they doubted it.
Nobody had faith.
Nobody but Washington, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin,
Chaim Solomon, Crispus Attucks, Lafayette. Nobodies.
The nobodies ran a tea party at Boston. Betsy Ross
organized a sewing circle. Paul Revere had a horse race.
And a little ragged group believed it.
I think younger people might listen to the “Ballad for Americans” and think it’s pretty corny. If you listen more carefully you realize there is a strong progressive populist message in it.
A friend the other day said, “Can’t we get as many of us as possible to play ‘Ballad for Americans’ on July 4th this year at noon to observe the 250th?” You can find a recording of it online. If everyone plays it at noon, the walls of Jericho will come down. No doubt at this point!
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson (1871-1838) has for a long time been regarded as the African American national anthem.
Is this just an African American national anthem? No. This is one of the greatest American songs that has ever been written. And it what made me realize it should be brought together with all the other patriotic songs was when it was sung pre-game by Coco Jones at the Super Bowl this year alongside the Star-Spangled Banner.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
And of course, the right-wing didn’t like that. Jon Root, a Christian Nationalist sports commentator put it this way on X in a post promoted by Fox News:
The United States of America has ONLY ONE national anthem. Kicking off the #SuperBowl, in the year of our great nation’s 250th birthday, with the “Black National Anthem,” is a disgrace & racially divisive. …
To me the most important protest songs come out of the movements themselves in the street. When people are occupying a space in protest, they need to start singing if they want to keep their sanity and spirits up. Protest songs come from below, from the grassroots, as soon as there’s that kind of occupation or strategy, whether it’s in the civil rights movement, people sitting in their churches preparing to go out in the streets, they’re singing freedom songs in the church and then out into the street. Whether it’s in union halls preparing to go on strike, whether it’s in Occupy Wall Street sitting down across the country, in those places if there’s prolonged sitting there’s going to be people starting to sing songs, the old songs but also making new songs.
The gospel hymn, “We Shall Overcome” is the most important American protest song ever. It wasn’t made famous because it was recorded by a popular singer. It was made famous through the civil rights movement and the singing in the streets.
What’s happened now is amazing to me because there’s never been more production of protest songs of both the street kind and the commercial kind than has been happening now. It dwarfs even the 1960s, partly because of YouTube and the internet disseminating stuff. But also, in the streets.
In Minneapolis there’s Singing Resistance, a group deliberately and consciously forms itself as a group to go in the streets and sing alongside the protest. And they made new songs and that has of course gotten on to YouTube. That kind of resistance singing has spread to other parts of the country to other places where people are hanging out in protest and gathering.
In more recent years, Bruce Springsteen (b. 1949) has been very conscious. He’s made recordings of “This Land is Your Land,” he’s honored Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and at the Obama Center celebration he played “Land of Hope and Dreams,” a great American song that is so pertinent to this time. And “Born in the USA,” as everyone who’s not right-wing knows, was a very critical song.
Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hands
Send me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man
Born in the USA
I was born in the USA
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burnin’ down the road
Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go
And Jesse Welles, recorded an anti-Trump song “No Kings” with Joan Baez. And I thought that was a great inter-generational moment that they did.
No hatred, no violence
No starvation and no greed
And no kings, no kings
No kings
Beyoncé and other African American artists have always had some political content to some of the songs that they’ve been doing.
Look at Bad Bunny. This is the most popular singer on the planet and very political on top of which he’s singing in Spanish and yet he’s able to make great popular music.
In the country music world, there have been artists like the Dixie Chicks whose CDs have been thrown into fires and melted because people didn’t like their politics. But the artists who are being attacked are the ones who win in popularity as well as memory.
If you really look at who are the most powerfully important country singers of all time, it’s Johnny Cash who was very political. It’s Willie Nelson who was political. Dolly Parton has been quite political. Roanne Cash, Johnny Cash’s daughter, is quite political.
On June 14, the Committee for the First Amendment hosted Rise Up Sing Out. Jane Fonda has gotten the bug that protest songs are really important.
“Nothing brings people together more powerfully than music,” she said. “Music speaks a truth that’s beyond words. It’s a primal unifying force, a common language of resistance and hope. A great speech can inspire a following. A song can define a movement.”
And that’s exactly the line I’m preaching.
We’re in a new era of song about that’s socially conscious and that’s trying to empower people, that is producing choruses and individual troubadours who have that intention and are having that kind of impact.
I have to say that it’s still sort of mysterious why music has that power.
Dick Flacks’s radio show is called Culture of Protest, posted on KCSB.org, Thursdays at 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time and on demand at https://spinitron.com/KCSB/show/169092/Culture-of-Protest
Suzan Erem is a fruit and nut farmer, working writer and community organizer in rural Cedar County, Iowa. Her Substack is Postcards from the Heartland. Her farm can be found at DracoHill.org.
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Comments
Excellent! I did a quick read before an afternoon appointment, but will come back for a closer read and listen. It reminded me that we have been at this struggle for a "more perfect union" for a LONG time, certainly all my life. Thanks again!
Good to see you here Paul! Yes, I think we all need that reminder sometimes. Helps keep things in perspective.
Great article, thank you. Some of these songs I knew, some I didn't. Thanks for mentioning Jesse Welles, in my mind he's the new Woody Guthrie. He has a great song about Boeing among many others. One thing though. You didn't mention where ANY of these artists are from. Where's the rural connection? I would have liked to read about it esp. in Barn Raiser.
Good idea for a story! We're always looking for writers so if you know one who'd be good to write it, please let us know.
Hi Suzan, GREAT PIECE!!! Love to repost it on the ALTE substack if OK with you. Yours Esther
Of course, Esther! So good to see you here. Share as widely as possible.
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