B
ob Dylan had a term for protest songs back when he was writing them. As deeply poetic as they are, he called them finger-pointing songs. “Masters of War” was the ultimate finger-pointing song. “Blowin’ in the Wind” was one too. I think a lot of people have sung that song never even realizing it was a protest song. They didn’t think of it that way.
The first time I ever wrote anything political was probably “Christmas in Washington.” When I wrote that, I was connecting with Woody Guthrie because he was a socialist. When he was writing, a lot of poor people, especially people in the Dust Bowl area who got fucked over, became socialists. They wrote songs about things that were going on, and those songs got rewritten using the same melodies. They called that folk music.
I think the common denominator with protest songs is the singalong. That’s because before there was mass media, you had meetings, including union meetings, and everyone would sing together. You can sing ideas that you can’t say, and people will process them differently and probably more positively than if you just tell them or make them read it off a printed page. That’s what protest songs do.
We’re all post-Bob Dylan songwriters today, but Neil Young hit it out of the park when he wrote “Ohio” in response to Kent State. He uses very few words in the song. It’s largely just “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio.” That’s broadside writing. It’s like a newspaper headline or a Phil Ochs song.
The death penalty became my issue because Tim Robbins called me and asked me to write a song for his film Dead Man Walking. I ended up writing several songs about the issue, including “Ellis Unit One,” for the movie. People have come up to me and said, “A song you wrote changed my mind about the death penalty.” So you can’t tell me music doesn’t change the world, because the only way you change the world is one heart at a time. And music hits your heart as well as your head. That’s why you can sing things you can’t say.
I wrote [2002’s] “John Walker’s Blues” about John Walker Lindh, the American who joined the Taliban. I wrote it from his POV. Everybody said, “You’re crazy. You can’t do that.” There wasn’t an artist who didn’t think I was crazy for doing it. But I saw a 20-year-old, emaciated kid duct-taped to a board. My son Justin Townes Earle and John Walker Lindh were months apart in age. And that’s where the song came from. Facts are empathy. That song alienated a lot of people, but some people got it. And I think it might have helped some people overcome their fear.
What’s happening right now is mainly about Bruce Springsteen. He went to Minneapolis with Tom Morello right after the ICE killings there and played a brand-new protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis.” I was ashamed when I saw that. I went, “OK, I’m supposed to be the fucking political songwriter here. I better get off my fucking ass.”
But look, I’ve never been a lefty who believed for one second this was a left-of-center country. It’s not. It was founded by rich farmers who didn’t want to pay their fuckin’ taxes, and some of them wanted to continue to own slaves. I was taught that Texas bought Mexico because they hated our freedom, but actually Antonio López de Santa Anna attacked the Alamo because the Texans were holding slaves. We’re not taught that in school. Slavery was illegal in Mexico. So we all grew up with all the lies that we grew up with, and it’s going to take a lot of songs to change some of them.
The country leaned left out of necessity for a period in the 20th century. The New Deal had a lot to do with it, but immediately people in power were trying to undo that. They worked at it, and they worked at it, and they worked at it. Now, they’ve finally done it. But we got this reprieve from becoming what we finally fucking are now for a lot of years, mainly because of the generation that grew up on protest songs.
STEVE EARLE has written protest songs including “Rich Man’s War” and “Christmas in Washington.” He’s taking his 51 Years of Songs and Stories Tour across America this year.
