Music has never been out of the grasp of social movements, putting marches into rhythm and rallies into hymns. But the passion of a protest song is always seen as symbolic, something added on to history by politicians and protesters as they pen it. But there have been recordings which went beyond having the function of serving to be something more than trite records of their era, but omens of benevolence which altered thinking, revealed concealed truths, and put real pressure on the power-holders. They are songs that have succeeded in doing more than express outrage; they made music and lyrics become weapons to cut through complacency and change the direction of events.
The power of such a song is that it makes an abstract political issue human. A statistic about poverty is one thing; a story in song about one person's situation is another. This emotional and personal identification makes a remote issue an instant moral issue for millions of listeners. And a great protest song distills a complicated issue into a simple, memorable refrain. It provides a shared language and rallying cry to a splintered movement, so that people across a variety of backgrounds feel they are part of a unified, powerful voice. The moment a song arrives there, it can no longer be entertainment for its own sake but an instrument of mass communication and psychological warfare on the establishment.
Arguably, the most exemplary one is Billie Holiday's performance of "Strange Fruit." Composed based on a poem by Abel Meeropol, the song is a bloody, graphic account of lynching in the Deep South. The vicious truth of lynching in the late 1930s was kept silent by the national media and tolerated by political leaders. There was no reaction from the public in the North. When Billie Holiday performed the song, its record company, Columbia Records, did not record it because it did not want to risk offending someone. She had to release it on a small independent record company. Her performances at her club were acts of titanic bravery. She would complete her set under the club's dimmed lights, a solitary spotlight burning down upon her face, and not sing until complete silence. No encore of "Strange Fruit"; the song was to remain in your mind, its horrific images branded upon your brain.
It was a breathtaking effect. The song pushed a conversation that white America didn't wish to have with all the will it had. It wasn't an oration or a diatribe; it was an artwork, and its message was that much devastating. It brought theoretical lynching fear into harsh, tangible reality for northern, urban listeners who had managed to banish it. Club crowds, some of them white and influential, were confronted with a reality they could not ignore. The song was used as a tool of the early civil rights movement, not by advocating specific legislation, but by shattering complacency and establishing the moral ground upon which the following movement was to be built. It changed the national conscience so that it was no longer possible to argue that lynching was an American barbarian atrocity.
Another, but no less revolutionary, exercise by Bob Dylan is "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," showing how a song can be an exercise in journalism of inquiry and unremitting denunciation of injustice. The song is a report on the actual killing in 1963 of black barmaid Hattie Carroll by affluent white tobacco plantation owner William Zantzinger, for which he was sentenced to only six months for manslaughter. The event is told in sensitivity by Dylan's song, putting against each other the senseless act of violence that Zantzinger committed and the simple, virtuous life of Carroll. The sad conclusion of the song teaches us that a system of justice that placed a black woman's life at a lower value than a white elite woman's life was not fair.
Even though the judicial ruling was not overturned, the song served an essential role: it kept things honest in people's heads. There were news accounts of the case that cropped up and faded away, but the song by Dylan ensured that Hattie Carroll and William Zantzinger's tale would be remembered for millennia. It fueled an otherwise local miscarriage of justice into a national symbol of a faulted system. The tape did more than simply record the facts; it placed them in the moral starkness beyond the grasp of newsprint and created an indelible public outcry that further stimulated the nascent movement for judicial reform and civil rights. It showed that a tape could be a more potent and enduring document of fact than a front-page headline.
Taking the step into the age of television, the protest song gained a new international audience with Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in 1984. The song responded to news accounts of a crippling famine in Ethiopia. While earlier protest songs grappled with political oppression, this song confronted Western indifference. The one, written by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure and performed by an all-star supergroup of the biggest British and Irish pop acts of the moment, was a phenomenon. It was designed to be cheesy, straightforward, and squarely aimed at the purse and heart.
It was phenomenal in its impact and quantifiable. The record was the historical best-selling single in Britain and raked in millions of dollars within one night. More importantly, it put the Ethiopian famine onto the front pages of the media and into people's sitting rooms otherwise completely unaware of the disaster. The record gave the world a feel for global civic responsibility and embarrassed Western governments into acting. It placed pressure upon world leaders, including obstinate British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, to increase their aid donations themselves. "Do They Know It's Christmas?" proved that a pop song could provoke an international humanitarian crisis, and the power of music to change minds was not limited to the kind of change only in the sphere of ideas. It set down the blueprints for all future charity singles, from "We Are the World" to the Live Aid concerts to which it led.
These examples demonstrate that a protest song changes history by working on many different levels. It is an empathy machine, as with "Strange Fruit," when faraway pain is brought near and made personal. It is a chronicler of wrong, as with "Hattie Carroll," reminding us of stories of institutional error. And it is a mobilizer of public opinion, as with the example of "Do They Know It's Christmas?", taking opinion and turning it into action and aid.
The final test of the strength of a protest song, then, is not so much how far it goes to change a specific law, though that may happen. Its higher authority is in the way it re-wires the public mind. It puts faces and names on the faceless victims of prejudice and policy. It provides a sense of shared outrage and shared membership to strangers. It makes a problem of politics or economics in the abstract turn concrete in human terms. And in the process of doing these things, these songs are more than songs. They are events unto themselves, turning points where politics meets culture, and a lyric, a melody, and a voice can nudge history's arc, if only infinitesimally, towards justice.