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.These groups vary in organization from informal singing collectives at protests to formally auditioned ensembles. Social justice choirs are unique in that they align themselves to a wide variety of issues that they take action on. 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). Repertoire plays an important role in how these ensembles serve their social justice missions. Pulling from ethnographic fieldwork amongst social justice choirs in Washington DC this paper examines the repertoire and pedagogical strategies of Justice Choir DC, a social justice choir that co-organized monthly, thematic, community singing events with a local synagogue throughout 2021 and 2022. The nature of these community singing events necessitated a highly dynamic and accessible teaching style paired with songs that could be easily mobilized amongst relatively inexperienced singers. Using Justice Choir DC as a case study, I argue that the musical accessibility and self-referential nature of social justice choir repertoires help to effectively build community amongst choir participants and encourages action outside of the purview of the ensemble itself. This paper contributes to research on contemporary musicking and activism in Washington DC, a relatively understudied topic.

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. Though largely a historical inaccuracy, the IWW’s legendary musical reputation has even led many popular accounts of music-making in U.S. trade unions to assume the IWW to be the origin of mass, community singing in the labor movement. Interestingly, most historians of the union have failed to address the question of why IWW members sang so much more than those of rival organizations. The explanations given by the few scholars who have tackled the issue rely on aspects of the Union’s cultural life that were not particular to the IWW, and were, in fact, shared by rivals like the AFL and the Socialist Party of America (SPA). Drawing on original archival research, this paper aims to fill the gap by arguing that 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.

By 1989, entertainment lawyer John Carlin had lost several clients and friends to AIDS-related illness. Together, He and Leigh Blake 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 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 accompanying television special used cover songs to comment on the political, biomedical, and affective realities of HIV/AIDS at a time when shame and stigma silenced many discussions of HIV/AIDS. This paper explores the use of cover songs and music videos as palimpsests, multi-layered texts that offer one way to make sense of the different strata of signification that accrue to cultural objects as they travel through time and context. Because the erasure of earlier meanings is imperfect and incomplete, one can 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 AIDS,each gains poignancy and relevance when (re)performed on a benefit album for People with AIDS.