Music and Social Music and Social MovementsMovements

Andrew Jamison

Based on:

Music and Social Movements, byRon Eyerman and Andrew JamisonCambridge University Press, 1998

movements as spaces for collective creativity

where culture and politics can blend together

helping to form new ”structures of feeling”

songs provide a shared, or collective memory

A Cognitive Approach to Social Movements

The Mobilization of Tradition

”movement artists” combine musical genres

a kind of hybridization process

leading to new forms of music-making

as well as changes in cultural values

On Movements and Music

From slavery to civil rights• the movements of black music

From populism to the folk revival• the making of an alternative culture

The movements of the sixties • the making of global popular music

The Movements of Black Music

The spirituals as a source of identity

The ”New Negro” movement: Paul Robeson

The emergence of jazz and blues

The songs of the Civil Rights movement

From 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

Shout All Over God’s Heaven (1926)

Water Boy (1926)

Paul Robeson (1898-1976)Singer, actor, political activist

From the country blues...

Robert Johnson, 1911-1938

Cross Road Blues

We Will Overcome (1950)We Shall Overcome (1963)

...to the Civil Rights Movement

The Making of an Alternative Culture

Populism and the labor movement

The popular front and the second world war

The popularization of folk music in the 1950s

The ”folk revival” of the 1960s

Joe Hill, by Phil Ochs (1964)

The IWW, or the Wobblies(Industrial Workers of the World)

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 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?

from The People, Yes

The Boll Weevil (1926)

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)Poet and collector

Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly:The Makers of a Tradition

This Land is Your Land (1940)

The Almanac Singers

House of the Rising Sun (1941)

Goodnight Irene (The Weavers,1955)

The Weavers and Pete Seeger: keeping the traditions alive in the 1950s

The Folk Revival:”Woody’s Children”

Where Have All the Flowers Gone (Joan Baez, 1962)Thirsty Boots (Eric Andersen,1964)

...and the folk revival of the sixties

Only a Pawn in Their Game (Bob Dylan, 1963)

”I Have a Dream”:The Movements Meet

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the March on Washington, 1963

Movements of the Sixties

Bob Dylan: from folk to rock

Janis and Jimi: the appropriation of the blues

Phil Ochs: keeping the music political

Woodstock: the end of the beginning

Blowin’ in the Wind (1963)Like a Rolling Stone (1965)

Bob Dylan, from movement artist to cultural icon

Summertime, from Porgy and Bess, performed by Janis Joplin, 1968

The cultural appropriation of the blues

There But For Fortune (1964)

Phil Ochs, 1941-1975

We’re trying to crystallize the thoughts of young people who have stopped accepting things the way they are.

Phil Ochs, 1964

When I’m Gone, sung by Eric Andersen, 1999

The Memory Lives On...

I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill, by Earl Robinson, sung by Joan Baez at Woodstock, 1969