The Past and Present of Activist Music-Making in the United States
Chair(s): Eugenia Conte (Ithaca College)
U.S history is brimming with examples of the close connection between political activism and music. Activists involved in progressive political causes in the U.S. have been particularly prone to the use of music in their activities. Abolitionists, trade unionists, civil rights activists, and more have all made use of music. As shown by sociologist William G. Roy, activists largely make use of music as either a “vehicle to carry an ideological message” to a “targeted constituency” or as a means of “reinforcing solidarity and commitment” (Roy, 2010). In other words, activist music-making has most often been used to build external awareness of the movement’s goals beyond its activist ranks and to consolidate the internal unity of the activists themselves. This panel features papers that cover historical and contemporary instances of music-making within U.S.-based progressive movements that pursue one or both of these goals. Each paper also calls attention to the way that the development of a musical text, whether that be an oral tradition, musical print-literature, or musical-visual media, lies at the center of successful uses of music in politically progressive movements and organizations.
Presentations of the Symposium
Fighting AIDS with Pop Culture: The Red Hot Organization, Cover Songs, and HIV/AIDS
Matthew Jones
Oklahoma City University
By 1989, entertainment lawyer John Carlin had lost several clients and friends to AIDS-related illness. He and Leigh Blake decided to do something. Together, they founded Red Hot, a New York-based non-profit dedicated to “fighting AIDS with pop culture.” Carlin imagined a benefit fundraising album featuring opera singers, performing the witty songs of Cole Porter, which he thought, had new meaning in the context of HIV/AIDS. The opera plan was soon abandoned, and Carlin enlisted Talking Heads front man David Byrne, whose participation opened the door for a coterie of other late-1980s superstars including Annie Lennox, Jimmy Somerville, The Neville Brothers, Neneh Cherry, U2, Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, and many more to record updated cover versions of Porter’s songs. Moreover, Carlin paired each musical artist with an innovative director to create Red, Hot, + Blue (1990). The album and its accompanying television special used cover songs as a way to comment on the political, biomedical, and affective realities of HIV/AIDS at a time when shame and stigma silenced many mainstream discussions of the epidemic. In this paper, I explore the use of these cover songs and music videos as palimpsests, multi-layered media texts that offer one way to make sense of the different strata of signification that accrue—or “stick,” to borrow Sarah Ahmed’s evocative term—to cultural objects as they travel through time and context. Because the erasure of earlier meanings is imperfect and incomplete, it is possible to read the palimpsest’s layers against and through one another. Although these songs (“Don’t’ Fence Me In,” “So In Love,” and “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”) were written long before the AIDS crisis, each gains new poignancy and relevance when (re)performed on a benefit album for People with AIDS.
“Sing Out, March On”: Social Justice Choirs’ Repertoires of Resistance
Alexandria Pecoraro
University of Maryland, College Park
Following the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the political polarization that accompanied it, there was a significant increase in the popularity and establishment of singing groups that referred to themselves as social justice choirs. In the Washington DC area one such long-established choir, SongRise, found themselves performing more frequently for a diverse set of audiences and causes from opening the 2018 Women’s March, to songleading at local Black Lives Matter protests, to performing on local radio and television broadcasts. SongRise was able to perform at a wide range of events, often with little advance notice, due in part to the thematic breadth of their repertoire.
Social justice choirs are unique in that they align themselves to a wide variety of issues that they take action on, whether that be through the content of their music or the events at which they perform. This is in contrast to more widely studied ensembles that commit themselves primarily to one particular issue or population of people, like GALA choirs (MacLachlan 2020), choirs for refugees (Doherty 2022), and choirs for incarcerated peoples (Harbert 2013) to name a few.
Pulling from ethnographic fieldwork amongst social justice choirs in Washington DC, this paper examines the repertoire of SongRise, a women’s social justice acapella group, and how their repertoire is chosen, rehearsed, and performed in the service of their mission to “inspire action through song”. Using SongRise as a case study I argue that the repertoires of social justice choirs support their respective missions through their ability to be mobilized quickly in a wide variety of circumstances and that their lyrical content can effectively be used to both educate and build solidarities amongst audiences and singers alike. In this paper I discuss notable elements of SongRise’s repertoire that support this claim, including songs related to the Civil Rights Movement, original compositions by ensemble members, and songs that intimately connect SongRise to their hometown of Washington DC. As such, this paper contributes to research on contemporary musicking and activism in the Washington DC area, a relatively understudied topic.
The Bifarious Social Character of Community Singing in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
Jackson Mann
University of Maryland, College Park
In the field of labor history and in U.S.-based studies of music and politics, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is well-known as the “Singing Union.” Founded in 1905 as a revolutionary left-wing rival to the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL), the IWW’s membership quickly became known for engaging in an unusual amount of seemingly spontaneous, community singing. The Union’s Little Red Songbook, first published in 1909, has become one of the most famous pieces of musical literature ever produced by a trade union. Song books and community singing were regular, auxiliary features of U.S. trade unionism and left-wing politics following the Civil War (Foner, 1975). For the IWW, however, the Union’s song book and the practice of public, mass community singing were central to the organization in a way that went far beyond its predecessors and contemporaries. Interestingly, most historians of the union have failed to address key historical concerns raised by this fact, whether that be to uncover why and how these practices became so central to the IWW or to understand their role in the Union’s socio-cultural life. Drawing on original archival research, this paper aims to fill this gap by answering a few crucial questions: first, it will show how the IWW’s particularly vigorous culture of public, mass community singing has its origins in a series of historical accidents that pushed the Little Red Songbook to the center of all IWW organizing activity. Then, it will argue that community singing, as a result of the increasingly central role of the songbook, developed a bifarious social character within the structure of IWW, existing simultaneously as both a superstructural element of the Union’s activities inherited from previous generations of trade unionism and as an essential component of the organization at the core of its social viability.
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