Protest songs in the United States are a tradition that dates back to the early 18th century and have persisted and evolved as an aspect of American culture through the present day. Many American social movements have inspired protest songs spanning a variety of musical genres including but not limited to rap, folk, rock, and pop music. Though early 18th century songs stemmed from the American colonial period as well as in response to the Revolutionary war, protest songs have and continue to cover a wide variety of subjects. Protest songs typically serve to address some social, political, or economic concern through the means of musical composition. In the 19th century, American protest songs focused heavily on topics including slavery, poverty, and the Civil War while the 20th century saw an increased popularity in songs pertaining to women's rights, economic injustice, and politics/ war. In the 21st century, popular protest songs address police brutality, racism, and more.
History
Nineteenth century
19th-century protest songs dealt, for the most part, with three key issues: war, and the Civil War in particular (such as "When Johnny Comes Marching Home"); the abolition of slavery ("Song of the Abolitionist" "No More Auction Block for Me", "Oh Freedom", and "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child", among others); and women's suffrage, both for and against in both Britain and the U.S.
Hutchinson Family Singers were one of the protest voices in America at the time. From 1839, the Hutchinson Family Singers became well known for their songs supporting abolition. They sang at the White House for President John Tyler, and befriended Abraham Lincoln. Their subject matter touched on relevant social issues such as abolition, the temperance movement, politics, war and women's suffrage. Much of their music focused on idealism, social reform, equal rights, moral improvement, community activism and patriotism.
The Hutchinsons' career spanned the major social and political events of the mid-19th century, including the Civil War. The Hutchinson Family Singers established an impressive musical legacy and are considered to be the forerunners of the great protest singer-songwriters and folk groups of the 1950s and 60s, such as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.
Many Negro spirituals have been interpreted as thinly veiled expressions of protest against slavery and oppression. For example, "Oh, Freedom" and "Go Down Moses" draw implicit comparisons between the plight of enslaved African Americans and that of enslaved Hebrews in the Bible. These spiritual songs antedated the Civil War but were collected and widely disseminated only after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. The first collection of African-American spirituals appeared in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's book Army Life in a Black Regiment, which was published in 1870, but collected in 1862–64 while Higginson was serving as a colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first regiment recruited from former slaves for the Federal service. (Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton required that black regiments be commanded by white officers.)
A fervent abolitionist, Transcendentalist critic, and poetry lover, who was a friend and enthusiastic champion of American poet Emily Dickinson, Higginson had been deeply impressed by the beauty of the devotional songs he heard the soldiers singing around the regiment's campfires. Higginson wrote down the texts, in dialect, as he heard them, but failed to provide tunes. The second influential book about African-American spirituals was the 1872 collection Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, by Thomas F. Steward, comprising songs sung by students of Fisk University on their fund-raising tours throughout the county, arranged and harmonized according to 19th-century classical music conventions.