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ABSTRACT
Political song, especially that which fits new words to existing melodies’ semiotic associations, has been used by Americans as an oppositional tool throughout the history of the United States. Activists employed tunes’ “virality” to disseminate political stances and these practices played a key role in the rise of the modern labor movement. This article traces that history, through a succession of contextualized examples linking nineteenth-century political song to contemporary activism.
KEYWORDS:
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Connolly, Selected Writings, 48.
2 For the purposes of this essay, I take “radical” as a stance regarding group action that disobeys existing laws and statutes. Both “conservative” and “progressive” positions may yield such action; “radical,” in my usage, therefore connotes a rhetoric that expresses willingness to violate existing laws and statutes. So, for example, both the paramilitary “Sons of Liberty” (c. 1765–1784) in the American Revolution, conventionally understood as “progressive” and literally revolutionary, may be described as “radical,” but so also may be the paramilitary First Ku Klux Klan (c. 1865–1871), conventionally mapped as “conservative.” In both cases, each group’s rhetoric expressed willingness to operate outside the rule of law, and thus qualifies as “radical,” under my definition. As regards “underclass,” I take methodological and critical frameworks from the historians E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Peter Linebaugh, and Marcus Rediker.
3 See, for example, Ratcliffe “The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787–1828”; Gronningsater, “Expressly Recognized.” On the perception of imminent change during this period see, among others, Conlin, “The Dangerous Isms. I am indebted to Billy Coleman for these citations.
4 See, for example, Alexander, “Yankee Doodle Rides into Town,” in To Stretch Our Ears; Goodman, “Transatlantic Contrafacta,” 392–419.
5 Disclaimer: Parallel to these usages is the very rich and complex tradition of slavery-era Black song, especially the early spirituals and work songs that sometimes encoded resistance. Though a comprehensive analysis of this latter repertoire is beyond the scope of the current article, it must be acknowledged that the tradition of Black sung resistance, including spirituals, hollers, gospel songs, Civil Rights songs, and so forth, is rich and complex.?
6 Jackson’s parentage, marriage, slaveholder status, harshness as a military commander and governor, and actions in various campaigns against Native Americans were all the targets of pamphlet attacks. See, among others, Basch, “Marriage, Morals, and Politics,” 890–918; Watson, Liberty and Power, chapter 3.
7 Most tangibly, by dissolving the Second Bank of the United States in 1832.
8 Church fathers had long inveighed against this kind of defiant musical apostasy. See Ford (ed.), Diary of Cotton Mather, 2:693.
9 On Jackson as an archetype, the foundational text is Ward, Andrew Jackson.
10 Sung in New Orleans in 1833 by Noah M. Ludlow; “The Unfortunate Miss Bailey.”
11 As Steven Tyler of the American rock band Aersomith once said, “If you want to write a hit single, start by repeating the title.”
12 The hunters of Kentucky. Online Text. https://www.loc.gov/item/amss.sb20165a/. Accessed 1.8.2024.
13 Jackson and the nullifiers. Library of Congress, https://goo.gl/xVTerL Accessed 1.8.2024.
14 “Jackson and the nullifiers” (1833). https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:277529/.
15 “Jack Munro.” Roud 268; Bodleian 9061. http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/search/roud/268. See also https://studylib.net/doc/8199023/lowell-factory-girl---fund-for-labor-culture-and-history Accessed 2.15.2023.
16 Anonymous broadside tentatively dated 1830s, https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1445159 Stecher & Brislin, “Jack Monroe.”
17 See, for example, Davis, Maryland, My Maryland.
18 On the difficulty of legally parsing the multiple meanings of songs like “Maryland, My Maryland” and “Bonnie Blue Flag” during the American Civil War see Coleman, “Confederate Music,” 95–7.
19 See, for example, Lhamon, Raising Cain; Lott. Love & Theft; Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask; Cockrell, Demons of Disorder; Smith, Creolization.
20 Gac, Singing for Freedom. See also Runzo, Theatricals of Day, and Roberts, Blackface Nation.
21 Though beyond the scope of this article, the association of the locomotive with technological advance, modernization, internal immigration, and the industrial/urban north meant that trains continued to be a central metaphor in, particularly, southern Black folklore and song.
22 See, for example, Stroman, “The Etude Magazine,” 21ff.
23 Quoted in Crawford, An Introduction to America's Music, 224.
24 As Yingze Huo has pointed out, working-class and nativist resentment of Chinese guest workers plays out in a significant body of contrafacts based upon borrowed minstrel tunes. See Huo, “Strange Affinities,” 50–2.
25 N.a., Labor Songs.
26 http://www.yiddishpennysongs.com/2015/05/dos-lid-fun-nokh-dem-fayer-fun-di.html Accessed 2.15.2023.
27 Peppler, Yiddish Songs. Thanks to Jane Peppler for her musical detective work in collecting and publishing these songs.
28 Cited and reproduced in Crawford, 450.
29 Quoted in Foner, 152.
30 The Alliance And Labor Songster. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735061820746/viewer#page/6/mode/2up
31 1892 Homestead Strike (https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-events/1892-homestead-strike) Accessed February15, 2023. See Pilon, The Monopolists. I am indebted to Billy Coleman for this citation.
32 See for example: “At the trial the court brought out the fact that Pennell and Burdick's wife found their heaven in the lascivious Waltz at their Buffalo dancing club. The faithless woman on the witness-stand was compelled to make profession of criminal degradation. She admitted that Pennell's love-letter stated the fact, that he found ‘paradise within her arms‘.” Quoted in Everitt and Francis, Immorality of Modern Dances.
33 The Alliance and Labor Songster, 29. https://www.kansasmemory.org/item/209603/page/13 Accessed January 31, 2023.
34 Quoted in Luectefeld, “Petitioning in Boots,” 179.
35 “Muscular Christianity” as a moral aesthetic emerged in Victorian-era England and is particularly associated with the 1857 schoolboy novel Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes (1822–96) in the UK and with Theodore Roosevelt in the USA. It was particularly attractive to Anglo-Saxon Protestant activists who were suspicious of foreign creeds and immigrant identities.
36 James, “Cotton, Rum, and Reason,” 44–5.
37 Haywood, Autobiography, 181.
38 Baker, The American Magazine, quoted in Brenner, Day, and Ness, The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, 109.
39 Lindsey Jacobson. Robert B. Reich, who served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, likened it to a “general strike.” “The ‘Great Resignation’ is a reaction to ‘brutal’ U.S. capitalism: Robert Reich.”
40 Bragg. “There is a Power in a Union.”
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Notes on contributors
Christopher J. Smith
Christopher J. Smith is Professor and Chair of Musicology, and director of the Vernacular Music Center (www.vernacularmusiccenter.org) at the Texas Tech University School of Music. In addition to an active career as performer, conductor, and arranger, he has also authored The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (Illinois, 2013) and Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (Illinois, 2019); his next monograph is Situational Genius: The Practice of the American Bandleaders (Illinois, forthcoming).