The protest song sub-genre came around to my awareness in my early teen years. It was just then transitioning from poignant lyrics/soft folk music as a vehicle to angrier electric guitar rock expressions. The USA battle du jour was the Vietnam War in those days, and most of us, approaching draft (or draft dodger) age saw straight through the pure bull-shite justification reasoning given by the politicians of the day…

Earth Opera – Great American Eagle Tragedy – 1968

the king’s own judge and jester leap together from the tower
lying still as fallen statues in the cultivated bower
And call out the border guard, the kingdom is crumbling
The King is in a counting house, laughing and stumbling
His armies are extended, way beyond the shore
As he sends our lovely boys to die, in a foreign jungle war

At a period in pop music history when unusual bands were commonplace, Boston-based Earth Opera stood out as exceptionally so. They flashed incandescently for a year and a half. The quality of their compositions, the lyrics, and the varied unusual instrumentation all pushed this group well into the avant garde zone. Still, for a brief period in the spring of 1969, this song especially became an emblem of youth outrage at the unethical foreign policies being conducted at the time. In my high school some kids would play it full blast on a portable turntable after the end of the school day when most had left the building, while jumping and running about wildly atop the rows or wooden desks, kicking aside a chair or two in defiance when descending back to the floor. I know this, as I, all of 15, was one of them.

The mournful, sometimes yodeling lead singer, Peter Rowan, went on to a long career in country-western stuff after leaving the ardent rock scene. The song begins with an eerie extended horn section wail — several of the group members doubled on things like saxaphone, trumpet or trombone besides their main instruments. From there, a pyramiding drum pulse leads into a frenzy of clashing guitars and horns and impassioned vocals, interspersed with quieter introspective verses bemoaning the various corruptions within US policy. It ends in a wild crescendo of agonized defiance. A 10-minute eloquent thriller which sparked east coast youth disaffections. The band’s music was also distinctive due to the liberal inclusion of vibraphone, flute, and mandolin in their poetic offerings.

Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit – 1939

Performing and recording this piece in the Americana-glazed ’50s was a courageous deed for Billie Holiday, a black female jazz chantreuse. Her usual fare was moody blues, romantic ballads, and traditional standards. And her career success depended upon keeping a largely white night club audience entertained, enchanted, and satisfied. The “strange fruit” in this tune refers to the swaying hanging corpses of lynched black men in the poplar trees of a racially charged South which was about to explode into violence over the problems segregation was amassing. The lyric was written as a standalone poem by Abel Meeropol in 1937. Holiday’s introduction of the verse in song to a wider audience received significant backlash and it became a civil rights anthem of sorts.

Robin Williamson – Cold Days Of February – 1973

As I beside some winter’s fire, sat writing words so strange and steady
Amongst my own internal choir, came voices to my mind unready
Of those who’ve died on either side
While their friends’ cries o’er their bones unburied
Go sighing through the northeast wind, These cold days of February
Some clark with paper and his pen, some banker with his poisoned pity
Some captain careless of his men, and these vandal flames that maim the city
And bigots in the name of Christ, by thorny paths obscure and muddy
Can fear to roam through years of cold
Bewailing how their hands are bloody

This song, a live version, actually appeared on the final Incredible String Band album before their breakup which saw founder Robin Williamson leave Wales for America and establish a strictly Celtic roots band in Los Angeles while trying his hand at being a novelist on the side. But I saw it performed a year earlier. It is a truly haunting tune, with Robin’s typically incisive lyricism and featuring a stark delivery around only two instruments: a meandering expressive Irish pennywhistle lamentation over a sensitive organ backing, played by Mike Heron, which swells and fades in just the right spots to enhance the imploring singing. The subject matter specifically dealt with the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, but like all excellent war dirges, it supercedes this context and becomes emotionally universal.

Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms – 1984

These mist-covered mountains/Are a home now for me
But my home is the lowlands/And it always will be
Someday you’ll return to/Your valleys and your farms
And you’ll no longer burn to be brothers in arms.
Now the sun’s gone to hell/And the moon’s riding high
Let me bid you farewell/Every man has to die
But it’s written in the starlight/And every line in your palms
We’re fools to make war on our brothers in arms.

This song is spooky good and was a breath of fresh air revelation during the mercenary-minded eighties. I shy away from saying too much about Mark Knopfler’s astonishingly minimalist singing and sparse fantastic blues electric guitar playing which gives the barest suggestion of a melody. The song interestingly chooses a dying soldier on the twilight battlefield as a POV and his final observations to his closest comrades. Devastatingly effective.

_______RS

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