Can A Song Make A Difference? - music as vehicle for social action

GoodLetter, June 27, 2002 by Jen Chapin

Sometimes, when we need a clearer picture of the world around us, it works best to rely on music for both information and inspiration.

Dear GoodLetter readers,

Music is one of our most powerful means of expression. From the dawn of human history, we have used music for our entertainment, but also for more practical purposes: to worship, to relate our histories and myths, to convey our values, and of course, for the more worldly goals of courtship.

My own work as a songwriter, performer, activist, and educator has brought me to the beginnings of an exciting process: that of exploring the use of music as a vehicle for social action. This process has characterized much of my own songwriting, where I have always tried to tackle the challenge of balancing the personal with the concerns of the larger community, and it has threaded through my work beyond music. As a teacher, my discovery began when I was developing curricula for a high school History of Black Music class at Brooklyn Friends School. In thinking over the impact of African-American music on our culture, I was able to have a new insight into the fascinating ways that music and history intertwine.

This past winter, I developed and taught a course called Music and Social Action to a group of about 40 Girl Scouts, as part of the New York Life Foundation Scholars Program. During the ten sessions, we listened to and discussed songs from the suffrage, labor, civil rights, and peace movements, as well as songs that focused on contemporary issues like the rights of women and police brutality. In genre, the songs included and went beyond the folk styles usually associated with protest songs to incorporate jazz, rock, soul, and hip-hop. In the class, we talked about the elements of a song's lyrics that serve to get across its message, things like description, metaphor, irony, and juxtaposition. We also examined the wordless elements of a song -- the music itself -- and how it contributes to the song's meaning.

One of my favorite lessons was organized around four musical perspectives on racism and poverty. In this class, we listened to Charles Mingus' 1964 jazz recording "Fables of Faubus." Though the song has no words, the students clearly understood Mingus' message. His cartoonishly ominous saxophone melodies vividly mock the former Arkansas governor's segregationist stance. Another song we examined that effectively uses melody and orchestration to make its impact is Stevie Wonder's 1976 song "Village Ghetto Land." Here, Wonder set his stark and poignant description of urban poverty against a luxurious and haughty classical string arrangement, performed by Wonder on synthesizer. Wonder sings about images of elderly people eating dog food and of politicians' callous laughter in a biting juxtaposition.

The classic ballad popularized by Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit," was known to many of my students, though they confessed to not understanding the lyrics in prior listenings. Here, the songwriter Abe Meeropol stretched out his horrific metaphor of the "fruit" of men's lynched bodies hanging from trees for three punishing verses. Again a contrast is laid out: pastoral scene of the gallant south / the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth -- civilization vs. the epitome of barbarism.

I wondered whether my urban black and Latina students, who listen almost exclusively to R&B, rap, salsa and meringue, would respond to a scratchy and anachronistic recording of a suffrage song from 1919 titled: "She's Good Enough to Be Your Baby's Mother, She's Good Enough to Vote with You." Sure enough, it was one of the songs brought up throughout the 10 sessions, as the main idea of the lyrics continued to resonate decades beyond the event of women getting the vote.

The famous civil rights era songs "We Shall Overcome" and "We Shall Not Be Moved" are classic examples of how songs can be adapted over time to fit a context, in this case, traditional spirituals reworked to serve the needs of the movement. These were songs that were practical in their inspirational quality. We learned how in the exhausting and life-threatening days of marches, freedom rides, demonstrations and sit-ins, these songs served to keep morale high and unity strong, most often in the face of direct danger. Another classic song, "Where Have all the Flowers Gone," was recently reinvented in a contemporary recording by cellist Vedran Smilovic of Sarajevo and Northern Irish singer Tommy Sands, whose eloquent reading of the song underlined the heartbreak of their two war-torn countries.

As a final project, the girls were asked to write their own poems of protest, which they presented to the class. Many of the students chose the destruction of the World Trade Center as their topic. Others focused on police brutality, domestic abuse, poverty, immigration, discrimination, and apathy. One talented girl presented a rap song about racism and urban life, while two others collaborated on an impressionistic audio mix cassette of music and spoken excerpts from the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. Several of the girls wrote expressively in Spanish.