Blog 6

Sorry, I was having computer problems...anyway...

When one thinks of the Civil Rights Movement various flashes of images of faded black and white photographs and of choppy “home video” quality snippets of aged newsreels spring to the mind.  It fills you with images of police dogs, of lunch room sit ins, of lynches and white robed men,  of “Bull” Conner scowling at the crowds of protesters, of burning churches, and of Martin Luther King, Jr. embellishing his speeches with fantastical rhythmic flourishes.   Everything from this time, at least to me, was learned on a purely academic level with rather shallow and superficial understandings of the events until I stumbled across this article written by Bernice Johnson Reagon(www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/reflect/r03_music.html). In it one phrase in particular captured my attention, “If you were in the Movement, many times you were in danger.”  Such a simple but profound sentence that was.  From that point, my perspectives of the Moment changed.  No longer was it filled with outdated film reels, but filled with images of real people-people who look, think and feel the same way as you and me, as our neighbors, and our neighbors’ neighbors.  While the Movement happened in the 60’s, there was nothing anymore mystical about the decade than the 21^st century.  These people weren’t god-like idols immune to human desires of anger, resentment, and pain.  They weren’t incapable of hopes and dreams for their children.  They were just humans.  They were just humans like you and I...and they were in danger.  They were in danger every single day when they walked down the street.  “Is this the day I get lynched? Or my church bombed?  Or my children thrown into the prison?”  Yes, just living in the South was dangerous.  Yes, hoses and dogs were turned on children.  Yes, the police broke in for illegal raids.  How easy must it have been to become frightened and want to return to the “normal” segregated South instead of pushing back against the authorities?  How easy would it have been to just give up?  But they did not.  They could not.  They fought for minds and hearts over body counts.  They fought for simple equality with those who were oppressing them.  They struggled so much for so little.  What drove them forwards?  What, then, against all human instinct of survival, pushed them into history and onto those faded black and white photos?  I believe it was because of the music.

Freedom songs were the broadside ballads of the Civil Rights Movement.  Using their cultural emphasis on music, activists were able to spread their message quickly, efficiently, and imprint it upon the participants.  Many, like “This Little Light of Mine” (www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/09_summer.html#music) were sung in churches and at mass congregations as it were spiritual in nature.  However, others like “Freedom Medley” (www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyID=123599617) were sung regardless of were groups of people came together large numbers.  Many times, the religious and the political blurred lines between each other for the activists.  Freedom Riders, Freedom Singers, marchers, church goers, protesters of all shapes and form used these songs to give them courage in their inevitable moments of weakness and all too human frailties.  These songs gave them unified purpose, courage, and solidarity.  It was because of these songs that created a sort of super-natural strength that took their minds off of individual worries and woes to look at communal interests and “the big picture”.

The legacy of the Movement is written in black and white ink all over our legal laws and documents.  It is calculated by statisticians in terms of integration of sports teams, of clubs, of schools, of boards of director meetings.  Yet, what lasting musical contributions these Freedom Songs had?  Well, to a little white girl in Missouri, they made the past come alive (www.pbs.org/newshour/bbentertainment/jan-jun10/music_02-11.html). 

Blog 4

‘Diversity’ is often used as an antonym to ‘community’ as an increase in individuality seems contradictory to a goal of unity.  With a nation as large and diverse as ours this makes unity during crisis a tricky subject.  For example, Staten Island during at the turn of this century had little sense of community to help them unite reeling from the effects of 9/11.  They organized the local leaders to quickly identify the problems as well as possible solutions.  What they soon discovered was that they favored personal contact and forged out a general understanding of themselves and their shared cultures.  This, in turn, created building blocks for community organization, mobility and support for those suffering in their society. 

To increase diversity co-operation at Westminster we need the support of religious, political and student organizational leaders to invest their time and energy on the task.  We need to identify shared common interests.  We need to have shared optimistic beliefs in communal benefits.  We need involvement on all levels of our school (from teachers, to parents, to students and alumni). 

Blog 5

During the 1920’s unions and their employers battled for dominance and control over wages, standards of living, time demanded in a work day, health and insurance options and benefits.  Exemplifying the ‘working man’ in this highly electric setting through music was a man known as “Joe Hill”.  In 1902, Joe Hill (also, known as Joel Emmanuel Haggland) emigrated from Sweden to New York as an orphan when he was only 12.  At this point, he had already been a child laborer for four years and had contracted TB.  Because of this disease, he had to suffer many skin operations that butchered his face.  Being alone and friendless in a strange place, he quickly left New York in favor of traveling.  During 1906-1910 for some unknown reason, he changed his name to “Joseph Hillstrom” and settled in San Pedro, California where he began to work with the “Wobblies” (Industrial Workers of the World).  He used the pen name “Joe Hill” as he wrote an angry letter about police brutality to the IWW’s newspaper editor.  He began his career as a song writer jotting down songs for the IWW’s Little Red Songbook for the labor union.  In 1916 in Salt Lake City, Utah, however, he met much less luck.  He was suspected of robbing a store, and killing two people in the process, but the case had plenty of holes in it.  He was found guilty.  “Big Bill” Haywood, a leader in the union rights movement for many years, used Hill’s case as a rally cry for the IWW and made Hill a public martyr for their cause.  His broadside, like this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Kxg9uFDes) speaks about the injustices facing the labor movement during the 1920’s.  His style of theme of music inspired Woody Guthrie, who in turn, inspired Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones.  Thus, reverberations of Joe Hill can still be seen in modern singers and song writers, still battling between employee and employer, though with less ferocity that there once was. 

As Courtney Brown explained in the “Industrialization and the Rise of Labor Music”, music worked as a common underlying thread of the American Labor movement during its fledgling years.  This was practical as well as artistic, for music was exceptionally easy to disseminate to the masses and spread quickly.  The IWW’s Little Red Songbook was vital for the labor movements at that time, for as they shared common goals and understandings of the world around them, they were not co-ordinated enough to organize efficiently.  All it took was one person to know the song and teach it to others, and so on and so forth until the entire union knew it and could stand behind its message.   Joe Glazer, himself, equates the unifying spirit of labor music to church and the military for the masses (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaQ7qWo6120).  He also explains the importance of broadside ballads as a way of communicating ideas and concepts to undereducated working class people and having them better received in song form than in any other format.

Joe Hill published in 1911 “The Preacher and the Slave” as a sarcastic comment about depending on the church and other religious institutions filled with promises about the afterlife rather than depending on yourself and fulfilling your wants and desires today through hard work by yourself.  A more contemporary version of this by Ani DiFranco and Utah Phillips in 1999(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhhzElzTZJw) includes in the second verse a brief, well believed rumor that the original writer of the song “Joe Hill” was actually executed due to his union ties, rather than the crime he was convicted of.  The fact that this very song survived 88 years with the central message intact speaks volumes for the value of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, as it were, which has now become part of American values as deeply as democracy to us.

Blog 3

Blog 3

Bob Dylan (Robert Allen Zimmerman) is an American singer-songwriter, author/poet, and even an occasional painter; though, he’s most famous for his popular broadside ballads that spanned across his nearly fifty year long career.  His musical tastes ranges anywhere from jazz to folk and gospel to rock and beyond.  His preferred musical instruments include the piano, harmonica, and the acoustic guitar.  He’s most recognizable works, like “Blowin’ in the Wind”; discuss the civil rights movement during the 60’s.  This particular song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, and made the Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’ at number 14. 

http://broadsidemagazine.com/

The above is Paul Kaplan’s remake of “Blowin’ in the Wind” called “The Answer”.  Instead of discussing civil rights, it focuses on the use of wind energy as an alternative to fossil fuels.  The topic of alternative energy, while not extremely up to date, is still current and a major political platform issue for American’s today.  This is what makes it a great subject for the broadside ballad.  The topic is not so recent or complex that few people have heard of or understand it.  In other words, it is a concern of the average American, and it is still contemporary to today’s society. 

To tell the truth about broadside ballads in general, I’m still not exactly sure I’m sold on their “power” or their ability to “raise awareness”.  I certainly would argue that they are not “powerful” in the traditional sense of the word.  How I evaluate the “power” that a song has a two-fold criteria: what they prompt people do and the uniqueness of their ideas. 

Reasoning 1.) Half of the point of being a broadside ballad is that the subject must be ‘vanilla’ in substance.  As explained in paragraph two, the topic matter (not just what they say) must be by now mainstream enough for the politically moderate populations to have already weighed in on it and find it’s relevance to their daily lives.  A broadside does not introduce a novel injustice but repeatedly reminds and engrains it into the listener’s/singer’s mind, until it is unthinkable to ignore it anymore and motivates that person to action.  Now, this starts sounding a bit like the chicken and the egg paradigm to say that either a person’s political beliefs are influenced by their musical preferences or vice versa.  Perhaps, there have been psychological studies that dispute this logic and unequivocally show that it is the music that defines a person’s thoughts, beliefs and interactions with others.  I have not heard of any such case study and am more than willing to read anything you could suggest for me. 

Reasoning 2.) As discussed briefly in paragraph two, the broadside is ideally supposed to represent the average person’s views on the world around them.  With this in mind I would claim that the other half of being a true broadside ballad is that it is, essentially, the art of being the ‘moderate’.  Moderates, while arguably having the best grasp of the complexity of a social issue or a public policy, are not known for the ‘innovative’ thinking, nor known for their commitment to strong political beliefs.  Thus, the songs’ “power” cannot lay in the novelty of what they say, as their thoughts are not unique, simply at best, a synthesis of one or more extremes.    

I would like to point out, that I am not saying that music, itself, has no point or that broadsides have no value or place in our society.  No doubt, the songs can be an emotional experience on the whole.  They incite passion in the most conservative of us.  They can inspire patriotism, unity, hope, anger, and understanding.  They are strong, in the sense that they can give comfort to the scared and disheartened with a simple tune and melody, in ways that a speech would be ill-suited.  However, I would argue that it is a broadside’s relevance to the current social/political climate that is its true valuation of its strength.  The historical application of it is critical to evaluating broadside ballads strength.  If you hear a happy song while being sad, does it not more dramatically affect your mood than if you were happy at the time anyway?  In the words of an economic theorist, it is a case of diminishing returns.  In the end, all things are relative.  If you cannot sympathize with the pain and suffering of the plight of the African American community, for example, how strong can the words to Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” be to you?

Thus, I would summarize the argument above, that the true “power” of the broadside ballads cannot be evaluated by what they prompt people to do or in their novel approaches to a problem, but in its context and empathy with fellow human beings.  What do you think?

Irish Rovers

For this week’s section, I would like to look at an international modern day broadside ballad.  Played to the simple, easy tune this song is still predominantly sung in bar taverns, at sporting events, during festivals and any time a group of people come together in Ireland, with the sole purpose of eliminating and educating about social ills and injustices.  This is as close to an authentic popular broadside ballad that one would have seen back in historical times.  I also chose this particular song, because it represents what we are trying to do with our presentation: trying to unify a divided community.

During the Age of Enlightenment, there was a 30 year long war between England and Ireland, a bloody pursuit of dominance between warring factions of protestant and catholic monarchies to whom the victor would have the right to rule but also dictate the religion of its inhabitants.  To explain this to an American, imagine how it would be like if America had no separation of church and state?  Imagine if JF Kennedy winning the Presidency meant that everyone in America must convert to cat holism, or if GW Bush was allowed to dictate national religious programs for eight years during his reign?  As one can expect, Ireland is extremely sensitive to religious tones because of this time period.  Eventually, England (Protestant) conquered some of Ireland and secured it successfully.  However, there were still a few rebels, as there are today, who are still fighting against English rule on Irish soil.  The sentiments of the average modern Irishmen can be found in the Irish Rover’s “The Orange and The Green”.

The Irish Rovers are an Irish folk band located in Canada.  Typically, they are one or two generations removed from Ireland, but are non-discriminatory.  They were frustrated by all the violence in Ireland (where their families still are) and how little the dominant British-French culture was giving credit to their ethnic identity.  Using common Irish folk songs, they wrote songs to express their frustration, to educate the masses, and to advocate for peace.  Their songs are still rallying cries for the moderate Irish population located in Ireland and abroad.  The band has played in many international festivals, and was chosen to represent Canada several times by various heads of State.  They are still quite popular to this day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqs4EbU02As

Analysis of the lyrics:

Oh, it is the biggest mix-up that you have ever seen.
My father, he was Orange and me mother, she was green.

*The narrator personifies Ireland today coming from mixed heritage: protestant (orange) and catholic (green).*

My father was an Ulster man, proud Protestant was he.
My mother was a Catholic girl, from county Cork was she.
They were married in two churches, lived happily enough,
Until the day that I was born and things got rather tough.

*This is symbolic of the beginning of the war.  Protestants and Catholics “lived happily enough” when they were side by side in England and Ireland, separately.  However, when Ireland’s monarchical lines were up for grabs the bitter war began over the ‘right to rule’.*

Baptized by Father Riley, I was rushed away by car,
To be made a little Orangeman, my father's shining star.
I was christened "David Anthony," but still, in spite of that,
To me father, I was William, while my mother called me Pat.

*David Anthony is a neutral name of Greek/Hebrew origin.  ‘William’ refers to King William, the first ruler of England and Ireland after the English won the war.  ‘Patrick’ refers to Saint Patrick of Catholic origin.*

With Mother every Sunday, to Mass I'd proudly stroll.
Then after that, the Orange lodge would try to save my soul.
For both sides tried to claim me, but i was smart because
I'd play the flute or play the harp, depending where I was.

*This is poking fun a bit at how divided Ireland is currently between north and south (aka, between protestant and catholic territories.*

(Now when I'd sing those rebel songs, much to me mother's joy,
Me father would jump up and say, "Look here would you me boy.
That's quite enough of that lot", he'd then toss me a coin
And he'd have me sing the Orange Flute or the Heros of The Boyne)

*This was omitted in many versions of their song, because it talks about how London benefactors tend to funnel money into Ireland “buying” up the press and politicians to control the Irish population.*

One day me Ma's relations came round to visit me.
Just as my father's kinfolk were all sitting down to tea.
We tried to smooth things over, but they all began to fight.
And me, being strictly neutral, I bashed everyone in sight.

*Even today, there have been terrorist activities related to this issue.  On the one hand there are the Protestant Billy Boys, on the other hand there is the Catholic IRA.  He’s saying that terrorism is not the way to go about settling the dispute and Ireland needs to come together to bash “everyone in sight” and fight off terrorism.*

My parents never could agree about my type of school.
My learning was all done at home, that's why I'm such a fool.
They've both passed on, God rest 'em, but left me caught between
That awful color problem of the Orange and the Green.

*He’s arguing that the reason Ireland is in as poor fiscal shape as it is today, is because of this religious-political feud.  The war for Ireland maybe over, but Ireland still has to try to cope with the legacy of both sides.*

If you like this song, you may want to check out their site at:

http://irishroversmusic.com/page/index

Hello, MUS 300!

I was interested in taking MUS 300 because I love Political Science and music (predominantly Classical, Jazz, and Experimental Hip Hop), so when this course entitled “Music of Resistance, Revolution, & Liberation” came up I jumped for it.  I had never heard of a broadside ballad before taking this course, so I’m excited to learn about it more in depth.

                Pete Seeger has been a legendary folk singer for generations. He was schooled (before dropping out before finals) at Harvard and was drafted during World War II, before joining the Communist Party while the Cold War heated up.  At that time, he focused on major labor issues of the day and was a successful musician until he was blacklisted by rumors of his Communist ties and was tried by the House Un-American Activities Committee and sentenced for ten years.  After which, he joined the civil rights movement and Vietnam protesting.  At this point in his life, he was a mature adult and well out of the “mainstream” hippy movement which sets the tone for this song, in particular. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odNkadXgID8&feature=related

http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/seeger-bio-2.html

Seeger’s “Bring Them Home” was written as a protest song of the Vietnam War.  Unlike many of his fellow musicians, his song embodied the “moderate” American-a war weary citizen disenchanted with the system.  His song was truly an example of a broadside ballad, with an easy repetitive beat simple lines and speaking for the “average” guy in America.  He declares that even though he is not a pacifist, or a radical, but he wants the soldiers sent off to war to come back home because going to war was the wrong way of attacking the social issues.  What was needed was love and understanding, instead.  It’s a powerful message, yet a simple one to relate to as it has vibrations of relevance in even today’s times with our current “war for oil”. 

                As a current Political Science student at Westminster grappling with the issues of today, it is crucial to understand the “moderate” voice of the people in the midst of the partisan power plays and war.  I think that Seeger’s work, while originally intended to reflect the mood of America during Vietnam, still has a place in today’s anti-war protesters.