SRS480 SENIOR
SEMINAR Fall 2007
Social Movements and protest Music of the
20th Century
Instructor: Dr. Terry Bunde Room 212
Email address: terry.bunde@maryvillecollege.edu
Office phone: 865-981-8279
Web: www.maryvillecollege.edu/bunde/tabhome.htm
Textbooks: Music and Social Movements by Eyerman and Jamison (required)
Acting in Concert by Mattern
A Change is Gonna Come by Werner
Rockin' the Boat by Reebee Garofalo
Sing a Song of Social Significance by Denisoff
The Sounds of Social Change by Denisoff and Peterson
Sing for Freedom by Guy and Candie Carawan *
Great Day Coming by Denisoff *
Pistol Packin Mama by Romalis *
Excerpts from several other textbooks
* in the library
I also have collected
about 25-30 articles from the primary literature
(as
Adobe and text files); I will provide a CD for each of you.
Meetings: SSC 233
11:00-11:50 TR
Brief
Course Description:
The 20th Century saw perhaps the greatest social changes ever seen in 100 years in any country in the world. Movements for women's suffrage, labor unions, civil rights, anti-war movements, environmental movements, women's rights, and gay and lesbian rights were all accompanied by writers and song composers who kept the face of the movement before a larger population both in the United States and the world at large. The early labor organizer, Joel Haaglund Hillstrom (aka Joe Hill), once remarked, "A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over again." The power of people adding biting words to old familiar melodies and unleashing them in the cause of social change is one we often forget in our time of instant communication, but these simple melodies coupled with strong words of protest like those of "We Shall Overcome" have had a profound impact on civil rights movements all over the world.
For this senior seminar course we will look at several of the major movements for social change and examine how protest songs supported the cause and helped to effect social change. We will look at labor/union organizing movements, women's suffrage movements, the struggle for civil rights, women's rights, and gay lesbian rights, the anti-war and ban the bomb movements throughout the 20th Century to see how they were accompanied by writers and singers like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Peter, Paul and Mary, Woody Guthrie, Joe Hill, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe McDonald, Tom Paxton and many others who have helped to sustain social movements with the power of their pens and their voices. Though musical styles range from folk, to rock, to jazz, to rap, the result is, as Joe Hill so aptly put it, that the very people who were trying to bring about change were sustained and supported by the power of the music.
I will use several different video resources and my own record collection (along with my father's collection), which spans most of the 20th Century to support this course. The textbook, written by two Swedish sociologists, provides an overview of the nature of cultural change that took place during the 20th century and continues to take place today across the globe. I will be asking you to make connections between the musical styles in various movements during the century and discover the cross-over that took place into many different styles of ethnic artists from all over the world where the power of collective song has proven more dangerous than the might of the oppressors who oppose change. As a testament to this crossover, there are probably twenty artists who have been described as the Bob Dylan of this culture or that country over the last 30 years.
"The Ballad of Steven Biko" by Bernice Johnson-Reagon, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, had a powerful effect on the whole world by telling everyone about the conditions of black South Africans under apartheid. People knew of Steven Biko not from the newpapers, but from the powerful words of her song. I will also ask you to study one artist or perhaps one specific movement and gather the songs that were most closely associated with that person or movement and analyze the effect on the social history of the time. If you are interested and able, I will also ask YOU to write lyrics for a song protesting some social institution and present them to the class. If you wish to set them to some venerable folk tune and actually create your own protest song, even better.
My web page for this course has many resources to help you in this course. There are links to pages for many different artists, links to music of the various movements, and links to provide background on 20th century history. If you find web pages that you think that the class could use, please bring them to me (email them if you wish) and I will link them as soon as possible.
We will spend many class periods where, after some brief introduction to the historical context of a mass movement for social change, we will turn to the artists and their creative work that provided the musical background for the movement. Serge Denisoff classified all protest songs as magnetic (draw new people to the movement) or rhetorical (comment on the movement). Try to listen to the musical lyrics as you would poetry, for that is really the true function of the lyrics.
Course
Objectives:
The
objectives of the proposed SRS 480 course are:
1. To understand that different modes of
inquiry (social scientific, historical and fine arts) are often used to examine
the same topic.
2. To explore the historical record with the
informed understanding of 20th century social changes and the movements that
took place.
3. To explore the ways that music can sustain
and advance a movement for social change such as union organization, civil
rights, women's rights movements of the 20th century.
4. To explore the ways that musical styles
and genres in the
5. To learn firsthand how culture is changed
over time to reflect the social climate of a period of time and trace the
evolution of musical forms that follow those changes.
5. To refine oral communication skills that
enable effective comprehension, analysis, and expression.
Course
Evaluation:
1.
Discussion Participation, Attendance, Quizzes...…………… 20%
2.
Written Reflections on
3. Student
Presentation and Paper (30-45 minutes)...….……... 30%
As
a class we will be exploring the tremendous changes that took place during the
20th century. One writer has referred to
the musical changes as "Flappers to
Rappers." It was also a century
with the greatest changes in technology (Wright Brothers to the space shuttle),
in communication (telegraph to the Internet), in immigration to the
Attendance
Policy:
Because we will be listening to music in
class every day, some of which you will not have access to, and because we will
be using a seminar format where we conduct open discussions almost every day in
class, you MUST be in class every day unless you have a valid excuse (up to
four excused). I will take keep track of
absences and they will significantly affect your final grade.
Contents of the
CD:
The CD has many files taken from a variety of
sources on the subject of protest music and musicians and the historical
periods with which they are associated.
There are several articles listing someone's top 25 songs or top 100
songs of protest for the 20th century.
The website has many links to Real Audio file links or public domain MP3
file links of 20th century protest music; you can write an analysis
of the lyrics of a song and their historical social significance or you can
write a review of one the articles on the CD or one that you find in your
reading.
Course Calendar
(subject to change):
DATE (week) MATERIAL COVERED
30 Aug Overview - Introduction Chapter 1
04 Sept 20th Century History - Chapter 2
11 Sept Roots Music - Origins Chapter 3
18 Sept Social Changes and Movements Chapter
4
25 Sept Musical Genres of the 20th Century Chapter 5
02 Oct WWI and Labor Movement Romalis
09 Oct Anti/Pro-War Movement and Ban the Bomb
16 Oct Civil Rights Movement I and II Carawan
23 Oct Anti-
30 Oct Women's Rights II/Gay Rights
06 Nov
13 Nov New Musical Genre - Exports
20 Nov Student Presentations
27 Nov Student Presentations
04 Dec Student Presentations
You will be required to present the lecture to the class following the model I use in
lecture and then turn in a paper on the
topic. To receive a good grade you
must present the music and lyrics of the artist or artists and then connect
them to the social and political historical context from which the song
derives.
I will be using several videos in the class
throughout the course to help us understand the various topics covered in the
textbooks and the articles in the readings.
A partial list of videos is found below:
1.
American Roots Music directed by Jim Brown
2. History
of the 20th Century
3.
4. Strange
Fruit
5. We
Shall Overcome, History of the Civil Rights Movement
6. Wild
Women Don't Get the Blues
7. The
International, a History of a Song
Almost every class we will listen
to the song and have the lyrics for specific songs that have become synonymous
with various movements, like "We Shall Overcome" for the civil rights
movement and "Masters of War" for the anti-war movement. I will always have the lyrics available so
that you can try to grasp the social connection of the song to a specific
cultural clash that was occurring.
POINTS TO PONDER
"This is our country here as far as you
can see no matter which way you walk or no matter what spot of it you stand
on. And when you have crossed her as
many times as I have, you will see as many ugly things about her as pretty
things. You will hear whole gangs of
travelers and settlers arguing about her.
What she is, how she come to be, what you are
supposed to do here. And you will hear
some argue at you that she is so beautiful you are supposed to spend your life
just feeling her pretty parts, sucking in her sweet breezes and tasting her
fairest odors, looking at her brightest colored scenes. And I would say that gang has the wrong
nation. And there are some bunches that
tell you she is all ugly and dirty, that there is nothing good about her,
nothing free, nothing clean, that she is all slums, shacks, rot, filth, stink,
and bad odors, loud words of bitter flavors, well, this herd is big and I heard
them often and I heard them loud, but I come to think that they too was as
wrong as the first outfit. Because I seen the pretty and I seen the ugly and it
was because I knew the pretty part that I wanted to change the ugly part,
because I hated the dirty part that I knew how to feel the love for the cleaner
part." Woody Guthrie
“…social movements are not merely political activities. Perhaps even more importantly, they provide
spaces for cultural growth and experimentation, for mixing of musical and other
artistic genres, and for the infusion of new finds of meaning into music. Eyerman and Jamison,
Introduction
"American culture has been essentially syncretic, whereby ways of life and forms of expression
derived from different ethnic and national traditions have been combined into
something new - what used to be called the 'melting pot'." Eyerman and
Jamison, page 49
"Oh, I am just a student, sir, and I
only want to learn, but it's hard to read through the rising smoke from the
books that you like to burn. So I'd like
to make a promise, I'd like to make a vow: that when I've got something to say,
sir, I'm gonna say it now." Phil Ochs
"Songs (of the 60s) were filled with
symbolism, surrealism, and literary allusion.
They expressed apocalyptic visions, strong hostility to industrial
society and encroaching technology, explicit paranoia about official authority,
deep antagonism to conventional morality, and affinity with a variety of
non-Western spiritual and religious traditions." Richard Flacks, page 183 in Youth and
Social Change, 1988
"All movements have a form of cultural
expression, but the Wobblies, and especially Joe Hill,
used topical, satirical song to get out their message. And it is perhaps mostly through Joe Hill's
songs - 'Pie in the Sky,' 'The Rebel Girl,' 'Casey Jones' - and the others
included in the Little Red Songbook that the Wobblies
live on in the collective memory.
Radical songs did for white immigrant workers something similar to what
the blues did for the blacks in the Mississippi Delta: you could laugh to the
words, you could identify with the singer, you could sing along, even play
along." Eyerman
and Jamison, page 60
"Music, in particular, embodies
tradition through the ritual of performance.
It can empower, help create collective identity and a sense of movement
in an emotional and almost physical sense.
This is a force which is central to the idea and practice of social
movement, and corresponds to what we have previously discussed as the
organizational dimension of cognitive praxis.
Singing a song like 'We Shall Overcome' at political demonstrations is a
ritual event, just as singing 'Solidarity Forever' or the 'International' at
union meetings or on the first day of May has long been ritualized (not to
mention the singing of the national anthem at the start of sporting
events." Eyerman
and Jamison, page 35
"In the 1950s, McCarthyism forced folk
music 'underground' to summer camps and a few liberal college campuses, but it
could nonetheless survive and even spread to new enthusiasts so that, when
McCarthy died and the peace and civil rights movement brought politics back
into American society, folk music could be part of a new public sphere." Eyerman and Jamison, page 12
Timothy Scheuer
refers to the songs of the 1960s as seeking to “redefine the role of the
individual in the context of a new mythic vision, adding to the critical
language of radical dissent a new kind of existential pathos. The exemplary songs were of “individuals who
wandered on the borders of an absurd technocracy, which threatened them with a
loss of freedom, equality, opportunity, and individuality. This image of the outsider,” writes Scheuer, “proved to be the locus of the reexamination of
the myth of
“The civil rights movement was a singing
movement par excellence. It drew on the
heritage of the black music tradition – from sorrow songs to gospel and
rhythm-and-blues. In the context of that
social movement culture this tradition was given distinct secular and political
meaning. The movement could draw on this
rich musical heritage and, through it, reach into the collective memory of a
repressed people, finding preexisting and deeply rooted forms of communication
which for a time could bridge barriers created by class, region, gender, and
even religion. This movement culture
opened up to and brought together folk music traditions stemming from the
residual and dominant white cultures.
The civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s was an
integrative movement in the cultural as well as in the racial and political
sense.´ Eyerman
and Jamison, page 171