Music and Social Movements Andrew Jamison

Songs and Movements social movements provide spaces for collective creativity where culture and politics can blend together contributing to new ”structures of feeling” songs provide a shared, or collective memory

The Mobilization of Tradition movement artists combine different traditions a kind of hybridization process leading to new forms of music-making as well as changes in cultural values

American Traditions From slavery to the African American from the songs of sorrow to civil rights From populism to the popular front the making of a folk song tradition From the thirties to the sixties from protest songs to rock music

The Sorrow Songs ”They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days – Sorrow Songs – for they were weary at heart...” W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

Paul Robeson, ”Water Boy” (1926)

The Civil Rights Movement The March on Washington, 1963

...and the folk revival of the sixties

A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read but once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over... Joe Hill, 1914 The IWW (Industrial Workers of the World)

The people is a myth, an abstraction. And what myth would you put in place of the people? And what abstraction would you exchange for this one? And when has creative man not toiled deep in myth? Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes

Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly: The Songs of the Popular Front

The Almanac Singers

From the 30s to the 60s: The Weavers...

...and Pete Seeger – keeping traditions alive in the 1950s

”Woody’s Children”

The Dialectic of Dylan and Ochs Phil Ochs ( ) Bob Dylan, still going strong

Phil Ochs