Where have all the protest songs gone? Have artists lost interest?
The protest song series
Welcome, everyone, to part 1 of our final post in the protest song series.
In case you’re new or missed anything, here are the latest posts in this series (you can access the earlier posts through the first one below):
Humor about protest songs from four brilliant comedians
‘Personal’ protest songs by 10 artists
Favorite protest songs of 25 Substack authors passionate about music
A guest post by Kev Nixon on John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero”
“The Want of a Nail” by Todd Rundgren: Is THIS a protest song?
The strange and supernatural events behind “Eve of Destruction”
What, exactly, is a protest song? And which songs qualify for this revered category?
Today I’m ending the series with a question raised in a post by Sean Johnson, which is “where are all the new protest songs at?”
Are there protest songs and we just don’t know where they are? Or are protest songs a thing of the past?
To answer this, we actually need to think about two things:
Which artists are most likely to write, record, and perform protest music, and do we still have those kinds of artists?
Historically, only a small proportion of artists have chosen to put out protest music and have succeeded at it. Who are those people?
What conditions enable them to do so, and what conditions prevent it?
If we’re not seeing as many protest songs, is that because artists are no longer interested in protesting? Or is something dissuading them from doing so?
I meant to write one post about this topic, but as you will see, grappling with the first question alone has resulted in a long post. So a follow-up post to address the second question will come next week.
Today we delve into the psychology of these artists and what sets them apart. Next time we’ll be looking at the history of rock music, of protest movements, and of the role of the individual vis-a-vis these movements.
I’m only giving you my current thoughts and observations to foment some thinking and discussion. They are only a starting point for engaging with these questions. This is a big and complex topic!
Believe me, there are a lot of rabbit holes we could go down here, because we are talking about society, government, individual agency, and the role of the artist and music. I’m going to try to avoid stepping in any rabbit holes, or disappearing down one like Alice in Wonderland.
This is not an episode of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”1 (video above), although maybe I am trying to “feed your head.”
When the White Knight is talking backwards
Who’s most likely to notice and protest when things are off or wrong, or heading in the wrong direction?
I’m talking about people in general here, not just artists.
If there’s some sort of indication or evidence of bad intent, wrongdoing, crime, corruption, or any level of injury or harm (including loss of life), who’s most likely to notice and take offence?
Especially when it involves the powers-that-be. When the ostensible White Knight is talking or acting backwards.
And who’s most likely to say or do something about it?
Here’s what I’ve observed.
The ‘See No Evil’ People
People with good parents — parents who did their best for them — and who also had teachers, coaches, religious leaders, and other authority figures who, for the most part, acted as appropriate adults and role models, are the least likely to notice bad actions or to acknowledge bad actors.
The benevolent authority figures they encountered during their formative years set up expectations that people are basically good in terms of their intentions and actions.
These ‘see no evil’ individuals have trouble believing that there are many bad apples in the world, and true evil is outside their frame of reference except in books and movies.
What they are doing, in essence, is projecting the goodness of their parents onto other people and other authority figures.
And in their everyday lives, this can often become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They expect it, and they get it. Like Pharrell Williams (above), they feel like “a room without a roof.”
But in the bigger ponds of the world, it becomes harder to maintain that projection, although they do whatever they can to make it stick.
They tend to explain away bad actions and bad outcomes as misguided or misdirected rather than intentional and deliberately harmful.
In their view, some authority figures might be incompetent, and some might be corrupt, but, generally speaking, most people in positions of power and influence are just human beings like everyone else trying to do their best.
People can, for the most part, be trusted. No one would deliberately put a product on the market knowing that it would harm people, or take the country into an unjust war and get young people killed just to line their own pockets, or steal from artists by talking them into exploitative contracts.
Psychopaths and sociopaths, and even garden-variety narcissists, are outside their realm of understanding.
‘See no evil’ people are the most resistant to perceiving bad behavior and acknowledging bad actors because this creates uncomfortable cognitive and emotional dissonance for them.
But once they see it, they are the most outraged, precisely because those bad actors have violated their closely held, cherished, and protected belief system that most people are good.
“Off with their heads,” they shout. “So the world can return to normal and be safe again.”
You’d be surprised how many people fall at or near this end of the spectrum.
The ‘’How Dare They!” People
On the other end of the spectrum are people who lost their fundamental trust in authority figures growing up.
Their caregivers were either abusive, negligent, missing in action, or failed to protect them from assaults on their health and wellbeing, including bullying, exploitation, or predations by others.
As a result, they were harmed when they were most vulnerable. Harm that is unforgivable — physical, sexual, mental, emotional, and/or spiritual damage — because it’s not supposed to happen.
Bad enough if it’s due to a lack of education, incompetence, personality disorder, or an addiction the caregiver can’t control, or to the caregiver not being around due to divorce, work (as in Harry Chapin’s song above), affairs, or passing the kid’s care to others.
Far worse if it’s intentional, a targeting of the child for being not enough or too much, or wrong in some fundamental way, even for being born, offending the caregiver and ‘making’ them have to correct and punish.
Some of these kids become hypervigilant and develop strategies for coping and taking care of themselves.
Some become the caregivers themselves, taking on the adult role in relation to their parent-child.
Others find escape from the pain of their reality in whatever way they can, addictions to food, alcohol, drugs, and sex being common.
Some act out and rebel; others run away or simply give up. Fight or flight.
As we know from research, the ones who come out the least wounded and scarred are the ones who find a way to ‘recruit’ the love and esteem of valued others, even if they remain subject to ongoing neglect or harm.
Kids who survive this kind of childhood — and many don’t — grow up expecting people to engage in harm towards others, because that’s been their experience.
Not only do they see bad behavior when it’s happening, they have a sixth sense to perceive it as it’s developing. They know the signs.
They know when to fight, and they know when to run and hide.
They know when to protest, and they know when to disappear physically or into themselves.
They become just as outraged by bad actors and bad behavior as the ‘see no evil’ people, but not because a belief in people’s goodness has been challenged.
For them, an existential outrage at fundamental unfairness and injustice in life has been triggered.
Someone needs to pay for this.
They may not have been able to do something about the wrong they experienced as a kid, but they can do something about it now.
The tempest and the fury
‘See no evil’ and ‘How dare they’ are two ends of the spectrum, and people obviously can fall anywhere along that spectrum.2
It’s not either-or, one or the other, given that every person has their own unique constellation of experiences with authority figures growing up, typically a combination of positive and negative interactions and outcomes.
But what’s useful about this, in my view, is whether it helps us explain and predict who will engage in protest, and more specifically, who will write, record, and perform protest songs.
As I said in my last post, artists who protest are like canaries in a coal mine, warning us about the harms plaguing us and the dangers we face as a society and a culture.
As I’m sure you’ve guessed, my theory is that people who write protest songs are more likely to come from difficult if not traumatic circumstances in one way or another, normally involving their caregivers. They come from the ‘how dare they’ end of the spectrum.
To test this theory, I decided to do an analysis of the writers and/or singers of the 56 protest songs included in this series, both the 24 that I profiled and the 32 others submitted by fellow substack authors.
The question is, do we see significant harm and trauma in the growing-up years of the primary writers and singers of these protest songs?
I’m talking about life events or circumstances that would have a major impact on one’s sense of safety and wellbeing in the world, not a life devoid of any of the normal challenges or conflict a kid could be expected to experience growing up.
Not having a great deal of time, I mostly looked at Wikipedia entries, but in some cases also looked at books and other websites.
There were some artists for whom I could not find information on their childhoods, so I was unable to determine if there was any significant trauma. By default, these artists are included among those who had non-traumatic childhoods, most likely inflating that category.
The findings are, frankly, more overwhelming and definitive than I expected. I was shocked.
The trauma and difficulties were varied, but you will start to notice some patterns.
Here’s a quick summary for each artist who experienced some level of childhood adversity:
Bob Dylan’s father had polio when Bob was six. Bob was quoted as saying about changing his name, “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens.”3 According to his girlfriend in the early 60s, Suze Rotolo, Bob felt bad that he couldn’t please his parents in the expected traditional manner as his younger brother did.
Joan Baez’s father uprooted the family many times to move to different towns across the U.S., England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Canada, and the Middle East. At school Joan was subject to racial slurs and discrimination because of her Mexican heritage. She suffered from anxiety and depression and later in life confronted her father with accusations of sexual abuse.
Judy Collins contracted polio at age 11 and was isolated in the hospital for two months. Her father was a blind singer and pianist.
Barry McGuire’s parents split when he was two. He went to around 12 schools, as his stepfather moved the family every time he got a new construction job. Barry started working on fishing boats at age 14, joined the Navy at 16, then became a drifter until he fell into singing.
P.F. Sloan’s father moved the family to West Hollywood and changed the family name from “Schlein” to “Sloan” to avoid the discrimination behind repeated denial of a liquor license for his store. Phil was put down by his father, mother, and sister throughout life despite his musical success.
When Stephen Stills was nine, he was diagnosed with partial hearing loss that increased as he got older. His military father moved the family around to a succession of US cities and foreign countries.
Keith Richards’ father was a factory worker who’d been wounded in WW2, and he openly disparaged Keith’s musical interests despite his father-in-law (Keith’s maternal grandfather) leading a big jazz band. Keith was expelled from high school for truancy and was estranged from his father for 20 years after his parents divorced.
About his upbringing, John Lennon said, “A part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouthed lunatic poet/musician. But I cannot be what I am not ... I was the one who all the other boys’ parents — including Paul's father — would say, ‘Keep away from him’ ... The parents instinctively recognised I was a troublemaker, meaning I did not conform and I would influence their children, which I did. I did my best to disrupt every friend's home ... [My mother] had a husband who ran away to sea and the war was on and she couldn’t cope with me, and I ended up living with her elder sister... I would infiltrate the other boys' minds. I could say, ‘Parents are not gods because I don't live with mine and, therefore, I know.’”4
Joni Mitchell had polio at age nine, which weakened her right hand. The family moved when she was 11 and she struggled with school, dropping out in grade 12 and hanging out with a rowdy bordering on criminal crowd. She wanted to play guitar but her mother didn’t like its country and hillbilly associations, so Joni settled for a ukelele instead.
Raised in Harlem, Norman Whitfield spent a lot of his teen years hanging out in pool halls.
Neil Young contracted polio at age five and was partially paralyzed on his left side. His family then moved around a number of times, and at age 12 his parents split up, his brother going with his father and Neil staying with his mother and settling in a working class area. He dropped out of high school to pursue music.
Marvin Gaye’s first home was a crowded, run-down housing project without electricity and running water. Although part of a conservative church, his father had extramarital affairs and gave Marvin “brutal whippings” for any mistake or shortcoming from age seven onwards, and often kicked him out of the house in his teens, Marvin describing it as “living with a king, a very peculiar, changeable, cruel, and all powerful king.” In his late teens, Marvin was discharged from the Air Force, his superior officer noting that he “cannot adjust to regimentation nor authority.”5
Due to premature birth and hospital incubator conditions, Stevie Wonder developed a disease that aborts eye growth and left him blind. At age four, his mother divorced his father and took the three kids to Detroit, later getting back with the oldest child’s father and having two more kids.
Steven Van Zandt’s mother remarried and relocated them to New Jersey when he was seven. He was expelled from high school for refusing to cut his long hair and later resumed going to appease his mom. As a teenager, he smashed his head through the windshield of a car, producing scars that he covers with bandannas.
Todd Rundgren’s mother admitted to banging his head against the wall when he was a toddler. He found home to be chaos and school to be torture and frightening. He damaged his teeth in a fall and had dental issues from then on, got hit by a car, and had a ruptured hernia. His dad called him a disappointment, Todd felt unwanted, and left home to live in a friend’s basement in high school.
His family poor and his father having abandoned the family when he was three, Harry Nilsson worked from an early age, at a movie house and then in his mid-teens at a bank, and only completed ninth grade. His brother for extended periods lived elsewhere with a succession of relatives.
Utah Phillips’ parents divorced and at age five Utah was adopted by his stepfather when his mother remarried.
Aurora Aksnes’ sisters worried she would be bullied in school because of her eccentric personality and style. Aurora was “terrified of people who wanted to hug me” and also “terrified of one of my teachers at school.”6
Peter La Farge’s parents divorced when he was six and he didn’t get along with his stepfather, and later also became estranged from his father.
Sonny Bono’s parents divorced soon after the family moved to Inglewood, California when he was seven.
Nina Simone was one of eight kids in a poor family. She experienced racial discrimination, her parents being told to sit at the back during her own concert debut and her entry to the Curtis School of Music denied despite having already been a summer student of Carl Friedberg at Julliard.
Phil Ochs’ father was discharged from the army after developing mental health problems as a doctor treating soldiers in WW II. He was hospitalized for bipolar disorder and depression, unable to relate to his wife and kids or to function well as a doctor, taking a series of posts and moving the family frequently.
Elvis Presley’s father couldn’t hold down a job, and the family had to rely on neighbors and government food assistance. When Elvis was three, they lost their home after his dad was jailed for eight months. The shy Elvis was bullied and teased for being a hillbilly and a mama’s boy.
Pete Townshend’s parents were heavy drinkers and fighters, splitting when Pete was a toddler and sending him to live with his maternal grandmother who Pete has said sexually abused him and was “clinically insane.” After two years, his parents got back together. He was bullied frequently at grammar school for his large nose, which had a profound effect on him.
Roger Waters’ father was killed fighting in WW II when Roger was only five months old. Roger “hated every second of [school], apart from games. The regime at school was a very oppressive one ... The same kids who are susceptible to bullying by other kids are also susceptible to bullying by the teachers.”7
Peter Sinfield of King Crimson had a bohemian activist mother and little contact with his father, and was raised largely by his mother's German housekeeper Maria Wallenda (a high wire walker with the circus group the Flying Wallendas).
The Isley Brothers, already successful and touring around the eastern US, were devastated and disbanded (later resuming) when lead singer Vernon was killed by a car at age thirteen.
Robyn Hitchcock stated that “At heart I’m a frightened angry person. That's probably why my stuff isn’t totally insubstantial. I’m constantly, deep down inside, in a kind of rage.”8 He also believes that he’s at the high-functioning end of autism.
Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks spent his spare time with friends hanging out under a pier and taking drugs. “I’d get off work, and we’d get up to trouble smoking angel dust, snorting elephant tranquilizers… If it was a good experience, then cool; if not, well, then it was just a real hard lesson learned.”9
Billy Bragg failed his eleven-plus exam.
U2’s The Edge grew up in Dublin with Welsh parents and talked with two accents, a Welsh accent at home and an Irish accent elsewhere. “The reason for this dual identity was mainly to be understood by my peers but also to be accepted.”10 He also felt frustration growing up in a Catholic country.
U2’s Bono was part of a street gang during childhood and adolescence. His mother died three days after his grandfather when Bono was 14, and a number of his songs are about losing his mom. “Because of the way I grew up in Finglas — sleeping on a couch, or because my mother died when I was a kid, I was in the house on my own a lot of the time, so I'd knock on the door of the Hanveys at teatime, or the Rowens at lunchtime.”11
Beyoncé's father resigned from his job to manage the girl group she was in, Girl’s Tyme, but as a result her parents were forced to sell their house and cars and reside in separate places. Girl’s Tyme had failed to win when they competed on the national TV show Star Search and, instead of being ‘discovered,’ became an opening act for established R&B girl groups. After their first recording with Elektra Records, they were cut by the label, causing strain within the family and her parents’ separation. (They later reunited when things turned around, when Bey was around 15.)
Thirty-three of the artists in our sample of 56 — almost 60% — appeared to have some significant level of turmoil or trauma in their childhood or adolescence. That’s quite astounding.
The types of trauma we see include the following:
childhood illness or injury - Collins, Stills, Mitchell, Young, Wonder, Van Zandt, Rundgren
illness, incapacity, absence, or death of a parent or sibling - Dylan, Collins, McGuire, Richards, Lennon, Young, Wonder, Van Zandt, Nilsson, Phillips, La Farge, Sonny Bono, Ochs, Townshend, Waters, Sinfield, Isley Brothers, Bono, Art Alexakis of Everclear (video above)
family poverty or turmoil - McGuire, Richards, Lennon, Young, Gaye, Wonder, Van Zandt, Rundgren, Nilsson, Phillips, La Farge, Sonny Bono, Simone, Ochs, Presley, Townshend, Sinfield, Isley Brothers, Bono, Beyonce
uprooting/moving/relocation - Baez, McGuire, Stills, Lennon, Mitchell, Young, Wonder, Van Zandt, Sonny Bono, Ochs, Presley, Townshend, Edge, Beyonce
physical or sexual abuse - Baez, Gaye, Rundgren, Townshend
victim of discrimination - Baez, Sloan, Simone, Presley, Edge
victim of bullying or denigration - Sloan, Richards, Rundgren, Presley, Townshend
anxiety, depression, rage, suicidal ideation - Baez, Gaye, Rundgren, Townshend, Hitchcock
problems coping with or staying in school - McGuire, Richards, Mitchell, Young, Van Zandt, Rundgren, Nilsson, Aurora, Waters, Bragg
getting into trouble outside of school - Lennon, Mitchell, Whitfield, Rundgren, Morris, Bono
Is this high?
According to a study of 234 professional performers (dancers, opera singers, actors, directors, musicians), only 18% had elevated childhood trauma exposure.12
We are talking about a 40% higher incidence of adverse childhood experiences among the population of protest song artists than among professional performers in general.
It suggests that people who write protest songs are, indeed, more likely to come from difficult if not traumatic circumstances.
Because I only skimmed the surface, my guess is that we may find an even greater incidence if we looked further, at more in-depth and authoritative sources about the artists’ lives such as autobiographies, or even by interviewing the artists themselves.
Pardon me, your eminence
But hold your horses. We do need to consider the role of artistic eminence and greatness in explaining this finding.
Because we know from research that eminent people across professions and down through history are more likely to have experienced adversity in childhood and adolescence.
“The family environment serves as the ‘cradle of eminence.’”13
Meaning, people who achieve greatness, including musicians, are not only more likely to have mastered the technical skills of their profession, but they’ve also come armed with a set of skills for coping with and overcoming adversity forged in their difficult growing-up years.
Go ahead and throw challenges at them — shyster managers, exploitative record companies, fickle fans, you name it — and they will find a way to overcome it. Because they’ve had plenty of practice dealing with the worst obstacles and circumstances growing up.
Our data for protest artists lines up nicely with the findings for artistic eminence.
Parental loss — to death, divorce, or desertion — is far higher among the eminent than the general population, and in particular among artists (as opposed to scientists). The only groups with equally high ‘orphan’ rates are juvenile delinquents and depressive or suicidal psychiatric patients. (In other words, the kids in families who are unable to adjust to the adverse circumstances.)
One-third of our protest artists (18 out of 56) experienced some form of parental loss.14
Physical and mental handicaps are also more prevalent among the famous, who overcompensate — as did Joni Mitchell and Neil Young — by learning to adapt to that handicap and in the process achieve superior skill.
Likewise, 60% of 20th century celebrities in one study despised school, and this attitude has been found in other studies of the historically eminent. We had at least ten artists who hated school.
Perhaps more than anything, the highly creative tend to be outsiders in one way or another. People who are uprooted from one place and migrate to another become “marginal” — someone who no longer belongs to the old place but is also not a native of the new one. We had 14 who fell into this category.
People are also considered outsiders if they are self-taught, as is Todd Rundgren and Pete Townshend, or if they moved from the provinces to a cosmopolitan area, like Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Nina Simone, and others in our group.
What this says to us is that the childhood adversity of our protest artists is, indeed, a significant element of their make-up and an important factor in their success, but it doesn’t explain why they are more likely to protest than other eminent artists.
For that, we have to look at another element of their growing-up years.
The power of example
No matter what the educational establishment would have you believe, the fact of the matter is that human beings (and animals) get most of their learning from the example of the others.
Monkey see, monkey do. Kids are masters at watching and emulating what they see.
And as we now know, quite a few of these protest artists did not take well to formalized learning in school.
What they did do was watch and learn from adults who actively engaged in protest.
In almost all cases in our sample, they were influenced by the protest singers who had come before them.
In some cases, they had a front-row seat for watching and learning from the masters of protest, people who dedicated their lives and careers to engaging in protest-related organizations, events, and activities.
These examples may just knock your socks off:
At age 17 Bob Dylan was wowed when he saw Buddy Holly perform days before he died, but then he discovered Woody Guthrie, who became his musical idol. “The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough ... There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms ... but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”15 Bob’s girlfriend early in his career, Suze Rotolo, whom he met at a folk concert, had Communist parents, her sister Carla was named after Karl Marx, and Suze was a civil rights and anti-nuclear political activist. Then, of course, he also got involved with Joan Baez (see next entry).
Joan Baez grew up in a Quaker family committed to pacifism and actively engaged in social justice issues. Someone gave her a ukelele, and she fell for folk music when her aunt took her to a Pete Seeger concert. She was a friend of Martin Luther King Junior and participated in and sang at many famous civil rights demonstrations.
Judy Collins grew up listening to traditional Irish folk music and became a folk singer.
“The folk scene was catching like wildfire in the late 1950s, and it really sparked something deep inside Barry [McGuire’s] soul.”16
Stephen Stills developed an interest in blues, folk, and Latin music as a kid and his dream was to “play folk music in a rock band.”17
Keith Richards’ paternal grandparents were socialists and Labour party mayors, while his maternal grandfather toured Britain with his jazz big band, Gus Dupree and His Boys, and encouraged Keith’s interest in the guitar.
One of Joni Mitchell’s teachers encouraged her in writing poetry, and she dedicated her first album to him. She taught herself guitar using a Pete Seeger songbook.
Neil Young became interested in popular music while in school and learned to play music on a series of ukuleles. He idolized Elvis, and Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan became big influences. He played in a number of local bands, following which he met Joni Mitchell working in folk clubs in Winnipeg.
Country Joe McDonald’s parents were Communist Party members and named their son after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, but later renounced Communism. Joe enlisted in the US Navy at age 17 and was stationed in Japan for three years (likely developing his anti-war stance then).
Utah Phillips’ father was a labor organizer and Utah was influenced by the activism of both parents, becoming a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. His stepfather, Syd Cohen, managed major vaudeville theaters in Cleveland and then Salt Lake City, a key influence on Utah’s career. Phillips served in the United States Army for three years, and the post-war devastation he witnessed in Korea had a profound influence on him.
Paddy and Tom Clancy were both members of the Irish Republican Army opposed to British rule of Ireland, and subsequently served in the Royal Air Force during World War II.
Peter La Farge’s father studied Native American history and culture and shared this with Peter. His stepfather was involved in rodeos and, as a teen, Peter began competing in bareback and saddle bronc events as well as singing cowboy songs on the radio and performing in local amateur theatrical nights.
Nina Simone started playing piano at the age of three or four and had a classical concert debut at age 12. She refused to play at this concert until her parents were allowed to move from the back where blacks were supposed to sit to the front where only whites were seated.
At college Phil Ochs met fellow student Jim Glover, who introduced him to the folk music of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, taught him how to play the guitar, and introduced him to socialist politics. Phil wrote political articles and started his own underground newspaper called The Word, which led to writing political songs.
Roger Water’s grandfather was a Labour Party activist and his father a devout Christian, a conscientous objector, and a Communist Party member who eventually joined the Territorial Army during WW II. At 15 Roger was the chairman of the Cambridge Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Bruce Cockburn learned piano and music theory, discussed jazz, and received encouragement from his church’s organist.
Fela Kuti’s parents were active in the anti-colonial movement in Nigeria, with his mother leading the Abeokuta Women's Riots in 1946. Fela was also influenced in his music and politics when he was exposed to the Black Power movement in Los Angeles in 1969.
Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys became interested in both rock music and international politics as a child, which was encouraged by his parents.
While at Winchester College (an elite school for kids), Robyn Hitchcock was introduced to the music that would influence him, in particular Bob Dylan and the English folk music revival of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as by Church of England hymns sung at mandatory church services.
As a teen, Billy Bragg practiced guitar with his next-door neighbour and was influenced by folk and folk-rock. Seeing The Clash on their White Riot tour in 1977 and the Rock Against Racism march and carnival in 1978 introduced him to music as a force for political activism and influenced his songwriting.
As you can see, the role models for our protest singers were people actively engaged in political activism of various kinds — civil rights, social justice, labor rights (socialism and communism), anti-colonialism, indigenous rights, and nuclear disarmament — and these tended to be family and close friends or musicians they esteemed.
Particularly striking was how many of the protest artists were influenced by folk music, with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger having notable influence during the sixties.
But if there is one figure who towers over the others as an inspiration for rock ’n’ roll protest songs, that person is Bob Dylan. He was named as an influence by many if not most of our 56 artists.
The power of music and love
I think it’s also important to add two other things that stood out in doing this little piece of research.
One was that virtually all of these artists discovered a love of music as children, a love that was noted and often encouraged by others. Some discovered the radio or the record player, some an instrument in their grandmother’s attic, some a love of singing at church, some an interest in the instrument one of their parents played.
The other thing that we know from research, and which also stood out in these examples, is that being given even a scrap of esteem from someone a kid cares about can make all the difference in whether they survive and even thrive in life (and go on to create music). Here are some examples:
P.F. Sloan received a one-string ukelele as payment for a babysitting job and drove his dad crazy playing it so much that his dad bought him a guitar. At age 12, Phil received an impromptu guitar lesson from Elvis at a serendipitous visit to a music store in West Hollywood.
Marvin Gaye credited his mother with keeping him from committing suicide by consoling him after beatings and encouraging his singing.
Stevie Wonder sang in the choir at his church from a young age and became a soloist at age eight.
Harry Nilsson’s maternal grandmother played piano, and his uncle, who was a mechanic, helped Harry improve his playing and singing.
When Elvis Presley was ten, he received a guitar for his birthday, and two uncles and a pastor at his family’s church taught him how to play. By then he had placed in a singing contest.
Pete Townshend’s father was a professional alto saxophonist and his mother was a singer with the Sidney Torch and Les Douglass Orchestras. He received his first guitar for Christmas at age 11, with his father teaching him a couple of chords and from then on teaching himself.
Bruce Cockburn discovered a guitar in his grandmother’s attic and played along to radio hits. His parents replaced it with a Kay archtop with flat wound strings and a DeArmond pickup when Bruce’s first guitar teacher called it unplayable.
Billy Bragg became interested in poetry at age twelve when his English teacher selected him to read a poem he’d written on a local radio station.
Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers is the son of David Hood, the longtime bassist of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
It’s amazing to realize what a little bit of positive attention and sharing the love of music can do for a child.
Next time:
No way is there a deficit of potential protest artists. There are plenty of musicians out there with traumatic backgrounds who have something they want to say about the wrong things they see, and they have been influenced by the protest music of artists who have come before them like Mr. Bob Dylan.
So why aren’t we hearing more protest songs?
I believe the answer lies with broader conditions in the music industry and society. In our next post, we look at what musicians are facing in getting a message out into the world, let alone just a little ol’ song. It ain’t gonna be pretty.
Jefferson Airplane, 1967.
I doubt that this is a normal distribution or bell curve. I suspect that it’s skewed towards the ‘see no evil’ end of the spectrum for the general population, but towards the ‘how dare they’ end for artists who engage in protest.
Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan. Source: Leung, Rebecca (June 12, 2005). "Dylan Looks Back". CBS News.
Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lennon. Source: Sheff, David (2000) [1981]. All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-25464-4.
Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Gaye. Source: Ritz, David (1991). Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-81191-X.
Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(singer). Source: Usinger, Mike (30 November 2016). "Aurora learns not to sweat things on All My Demons Greeting Me As a Friend". The Georgia Straight.
Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Waters. Source: Blake, Mark (2008). Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (1st US paperback ed.). Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-81752-6.
Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Hitchcock. Source: "Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Food, Death…and Insects | Otmoor Productions | Documentaries and Consultancy". Otmoor Productions.
Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Morris. Source: Chick, Stevie (2009). Spray Paint the Walls: The Story of Black Flag. London: Omnibus Press.
Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edge. Source: McCormick (2006).
Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bono. Source: "It's where I shaped my future, says Bono". Irish Independent.
Thomson P, Jaque SV. Childhood Adversity and the Creative Experience in Adult Professional Performing Artists. Front Psychol. 2018 Feb 9;9:111. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00111. PMID: 29479329; PMCID: PMC5812101. The researchers used the ACE (Felitti and Anda, 2010), “a dichotomous 10 item self-report instrument that assesses categories of childhood abuse, neglect, and household dysfunctions. A total score of yes responses are derived, regardless of frequency or intensity. The abuse category probes for emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, the neglect category assesses emotional and physical neglect, and the household dysfunction category includes mother treated violently, substance abuse, parental separation or divorce, household member imprisoned, and/or suffering a mental illness. An example of an ACE question is ‘Did a parent or other adult in the household often…Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? or act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt? Yes/No.’”
Greatness: Who Makes History and Why, by Dean Keith Simonton. (The Guildford Press, 1994)
Step-parents are not considered a substitute for the loss of one’s own parent, even if they were a positive force in the artist’s life.
Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan. Source: Biograph, 1985, Liner notes & text by Cameron Crowe.
https://barrymcguire.com/index.php?page=bio2
www.sociatap.com/TOMMYGUNN
This is a great piece of work, Ellen. You've woven a lot of different threads together into a composite picture of the kind of person who would put themselves out there in this way. Your findings on the role of personal trauma and your insight regarding the impact a single saving moment can have really ring true. Many people I know, even ones who are not artists or musicians, have said that there was a pivotal moment in their lives that saved them. For many, it was a song.
As to why there isn't as much (or as overt) protest music now? I see a few reasons. Despite youtube and streaming, the music industry has, if anything, a bigger stranglehold on artists than ever, and the industry has no incentive to allow people to rock the boat. I don't recall if you have touched on Sinead O'Connor in your series, but the music industry's vicious revenge on her for one act of protest has affected a whole generation of musicians since then. https://zapatosjam.substack.com/p/dont-let-them-turn-sinead-into-their?utm_source=publication-search
Second reason I see is the retreat into narcissism as the motivation for so much music today. From Swift to the tik-tokkers, it's all about self-absorption. Who has time to protest when you have selfies to edit? It is not just the narcissism of the artists, but of the audience. As Springsteen himself said, "People are only going to listen to your story if they see themselves in it." (from an interview with Terry Gross). Based on that thesis, I would not love Homer or Shakespeare!
It's partly a function of being the most spoiled society in history. After all, there is a lot of protest music coming from other places, all of them poorer and more desperate--right off the bat I can think of protest songs from Mali, India, Indonesia, Ukraine and Moldova.
You hinted at some dark stuff to come--I look forward very much to reading it.