Although it wasn’t until the folk revival and folk-rock movements of the 1960s that the protest song was a widely recognized wing of popular music in the U.S., there had been socially conscious protest songs of sorts since the dawn of the recording age. This compilation assembles 20 of them, and refreshingly, it doesn’t emphasize material from the roots of the folk revival (though there’s certainly some of that). Instead, this comes from all over the roots music map, from country-blues and old-timey folk/country artists to gospel, hillbilly, and Western swing. There are certainly a number of famous artists and classic songs here, including the Sons of the Pioneers’ “Old Man Atom,” Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” Big Bill Broonzy’s “Black, Brown and White,” Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” and Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre.” There are, too, sides by Bill Monroe (as part of the Monroe Brothers), Uncle Dave Macon, Memphis Minnie, and even Gene Autry, who shows a surprising and little-known side of his repertoire with “The Death of Mother Jones,” inspired by the labor activist Mary Harris Jones.
Many of these tracks are not “protest” songs in the angry and earnest sense that many listeners associate with the style; they often take a more lightly satirical, even a congenial approach. The enjoyable novelty tinged pieces on the then-new threat of atomic energy (“Old Man Atom,” the Golden Gate Quartet’s alternately somber and swinging gospel number “Atom and Evil,” Billy Hughes and His Rhythm Buckeroos’ “Atomic Sermon”) remind us of how ambivalently the nuclear threat was viewed when it was a new thing, and how songs commenting on it sounded rather like they were whistling in the dark. If you do want songs that were more audible ancestors of the folk revival, however, they’re here in cuts like Josh White, Millard Lampbell, and the Almanac Singers’ “Billy Boy” and Lee Hayes with the Almanac Singers’ “The Dodger Song,” the Almanac Singers being a huge influence in getting said folk revival off the ground in the middle of the 20th century. Whatever your sociopolitical perspective, this is impressive on purely musical and lyrical grounds, and can be enjoyed for those qualities alone. This isn’t the most extensive anthology constructed along this theme: Bear Family’s massive ten-CD box Songs for Political Action: Folk Music, Topical Songs, and the American Left, 1926-1953 obviously has more. But as a single-disc overview of some notable entries in the genre, this is fine, with informative historical liner notes. – Richie Unterberger