In the first of a three-part series, Jacqui and Liz outline a brief history of protest music and get into what singing together can do for a group's common effort. They also highlight some early sing-along hits of the protest genre, and the discussion ranges from druids to dandies, with stops for Pete Seeger, pirates, the Mamas and the Papas, Sardinians, He-Man, and evangelical hymns.
The books, songs and Saturday morning cartoon discussed in this episode include:
The World in Six Songs by Daniel J. Levitin, from Penguin Random House
The World in Six Songs: Dr. Daniel Levitin at TEDxUSC 2012
The Power of Grayskull by Prince Adam, aka He-Man
The "Tenore Ulianesu" singing Sardinian Pastoral Songs in an Irish Pub
33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day by Dorian Lynskey, from HarperCollins
Yankee Doodle by The Robert Shaw Chorale (note: This isn’t actually played in the episode, but we wanted to note that Jacqui slightly misrepresents the origins of this song. The original lyrics, pre-dandy talk, were mostly nonsense words in English and Dutch).
John Brown’s Body by Pete Seeger
Tubthumping by Chumbawamba
The Diggers’ Song Chumbawamba
Captain Kidd by Great Big Sea
Bonus hymn based on a song about a pirate: Precious Name performed by Dr. Terry Morris, First United Methodist, Downtown, Houston TX
Special thanks to Aaron P, Ian D and Jeffrey C for listening and giving feedback. Much appreciated!
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Jacqui Clydesdale 0:01
Welcome to Choral Fixation, a podcast all about singing together. I'm Jacqui Clydesdale.
Liz Walker 0:07
I'm Liz Walker, and welcome to our episode about protest singing.
Jacqui Clydesdale 0:11
The world has seen a wave of protests recently: Belarus, Poland, and certainly in the United States with the Black Lives Matter movement, and we started talking about what it looks like to have a protest movement that involves singing and singing together specifically in terms of protest. If it still has a role to play at all,and does it fall in line with the traditions we normally associate with protest movements? What are those traditions, exactly?
Liz Walker 0:37
You know when we first started talking about podcasting about singing, you, Jacqui, you shared something with me that Pete Seeger said.
Jacqui 0:46
Yeah, it's the, it's the framework for how I think about singing. It's all about like what's found when you sing with other people and the quote that I gave you was: "And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus, as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher then they also know there is hope for the world." It's one of my favorite quotes.
Liz Walker 1:11
We've always wanted to talk about protests singing, and we thought that we would start with the traditions popularized by Pete Seeger and his contemporaries in the 50s and 60s. So we are all familiar with the images of the civil rights movement, and we have the images in our head of Black Americans, arm in arm, singing "We Shall Overcome," but we don't really know anything about the practices of protest music from the civil rights era. We talk about that in our second episode on protest singing. And we found out that those practices are really made invisible by the way we talk about protest music of the 60s.
Jacqui 1:49
But getting back to 2020, let's be really clear. We want to explore singing together. Not, not the protest music that artists are recording and listening to because there's there's plenty of it there's some really interesting stuff...
Liz Walker 2:00
And so much of it this year.
Jacqui Clydesdale 2:01
That's right and we'll touch on, we'll touch on some of that, you know, sort of, briefly, but we're really interested in the songs that people sing together.
Liz Walker 2:09
There was an article in Forbes magazine that caught our eye, it was by Micah Hendler. He is a, he's a writer but he's also a chorister, a conductor he leads courses around the world, and he described in this article going to a Washington DC protest with Dr. Ysaye Barnwell from Sweet Honey in the Rock, which is a very famous ensemble. He described her being, maybe perplexed, [mmhmm] uh, because she didn't see traditional singing, as she was familiar with it but she said to Micah, you know you can tell that this was organized by young people. Older black activists would have organized singing.
Jacqui 2:47
And we were reading this I sent this to Liz, or, Liz sent this to me. We can't even remember anymore. [laughs] If this isn't singing, like if protest music has somehow lost some element, what is it, and how can we have a good collective experience that both reinforces the social justice movement, and also lets us sing together and express ourselves and join together and make some magic. The funny thing is is that we had to like unearth what it means to have that magic, because we really honestly thought of it as like a spontaneous natural outcropping of anyone's sense of justice and righteousness, and really it's it's a little different from that. It's not what we thought.
Liz Walker 3:36
Nope. Yeah, we had to set out to understand what protest music meant 50 years ago and what can possibly mean today.
Jacqui 3:44
That's right, and we were surprised and, honestly, kind of, thrilled and delighted to realize that it can still happen, it still does happen, and we can learn from the past, and use it to inform our future. So where are we going to start? [laughter] I was just going to say, this is a very popular... A popular way to phrase things is, what do we talk about when we talk about protest singing? [laughter] So what are we talking about what we say protest music?
Liz Walker 4:14
Let me tell you about Dr. Daniel Levitin.
Jacqui Clydesdale 4:16
Okay.
Liz Walker 4:17
So he's a neuroscientist at Montreal's McGill University.
Jacqui 4:21
Ah, yes. Very familiar with it. From the outside of course. I [laughter] never have been in.
Liz Walker 4:26
[unintelligible] He's written several important books about music in neuroscience including This is Your Brain on Music, and his 2008 book, The World in Six Songs. And he's got kind of a, like a Northrup Frye-ish way of describing sort of the body of music and it's kind of interesting because instead of having categories of genre so like country music, folk music, classical music...
Jacqui Clydesdale 4:51
Metal. [giggling]
Liz Walker 4:55
He organizes his categories, the six songs of the title, around the emotional content.
Jacqui Clydesdale 5:02
Okay. Nice.
Liz Walker 5:04
Yeah, so he says it's content over form, it's what emotions are being evoked by the kind of song. So it's not necessarily like the lyrical content it's a combination of everything.
Jacqui 5:18
Okay, so like love songs and I'm assuming at some point protest songs.
Liz Walker 5:24
Exactly.
Jacqui Clydesdale 5:24
Yeah. Gotcha.
Liz Walker 5:25
Yeah. And it doesn't matter if you're got your headphones on in your room, or you're in a huge stadium with like 100,000 other people watching The Black Eyed Peas, there is collective emotional experience. So,
Jacqui Clydesdale 5:37
That makes a lot of sense.
Liz Walker 5:38
Yeah, no, he says that these are universals which surprises me because he's really talking a lot of the time about the western canon of 20th century pop songs.
Jacqui Clydesdale 5:48
Yeah. Sure. Okay, like they like they are somehow emblematic of, the, these universals? ,
Liz Walker 5:54
Yes.
Jacqui Clydesdale 5:55
Okay.
Liz Walker 5:55
Because I think he's trying to use examples that we are familiar with.
Jacqui Clydesdale 5:58
Sure.
Liz Walker 5:58
He does talk a lot about John Lennon I'm just gonna say that [laughter]
Jacqui 6:04
Lot of drug use, a lot of...
Liz Walker 6:06
Yeah.
Jacqui Clydesdale 6:07
Okay, gotcha.
Liz Walker 6:07
Lying in bed.
Jacqui Clydesdale 6:09
With big headphones? Big, those big cans on your head. Yeah.
Liz Walker 6:12
Yeah, but again, just, he does say that this is universal that songs played on drums in groups on a savanna are appealing to a similar set of emotional colors as a song being played at a Korn, metal set, you know? [mmmhmmm] Like it's, it's, there's there's similar things happening, I would suggest that you really check out his TED Talk which you can find on YouTube. It really covers the material in the book and it's got like some modern dancers. And it's about 15 minutes and he kind of runs through all the six song forms and it's, it's, it's quite well done and you really, you really get the gist of it.
Jacqui Clydesdale 6:53
Cool. we'll put that in the show notes.
Liz Walker 6:55
Okay, so in The World in Six Songs, he has the following: there are songs of joy, songs of love, songs of knowledge, songs of religion, songs of comfort and songs of friendship.
Jacqui 7:09
Oh. Okay, so there isn't actually a protest.
Liz Walker 7:12
Yeah. [laughter]
Jacqui Clydesdale 7:12
Like I would have thought one, no, you know, I thought one of those songs, I thought one of those songs would have been songs of... righteousness or songs of cooperation or something.
Liz Walker 7:22
Absolutely.
Jacqui Clydesdale 7:22
You know what I mean? [Right] Yeah.
Liz Walker 7:24
Well, he...
Jacqui Clydesdale 7:24
Tell me a little bit about it.
Liz Walker 7:25
He does call it songs of friendship but I felt that that chapter title, maybe should have been actually called songs of social cohesion, I realized that that's doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way.
Jacqui Clydesdale 7:35
[laughter] Right. Yeah,
Liz Walker 7:36
But he does talk about goose-stepping Nazis.
Jacqui Clydesdale 7:40
Oooh. Yeah.
Liz Walker 7:40
And I don't think of them as being like, friendly.
Jacqui Clydesdale 7:43
No, no, that's true. They cohered but not in a coherent friendly way,
Liz Walker 7:49
Not in a friendly way.
Jacqui Clydesdale 7:51
Evil does know how to hang together. It's true.
Liz Walker 7:53
[laughter] Okay, so he calls them songs of friendship, because this is where we also find the seeds of protest.
Jacqui Clydesdale 8:02
Okay. Yeah, I mean it makes sense. This, this reminds me... Okay, so anytime we talk about singing in choirs, there are... like, every article I've read, every like, clip on you know like a TV nightly, like, "here's the health benefit of choirs." [yup] That... we would let's, let's summarize that for the peeps. [yup] Right. So research shows that people who sing together, they are performing synchronously they enjoy the physical benefits of coordinated movement and heartbeat, they get they get an uptick in their oxytocin, and that, which is the love hormone...
Liz Walker 8:37
The love hormone, yup.
Jacqui Clydesdale 8:38
...which makes you feel warm and connected...
Liz Walker 8:40
That's right.
Jacqui Clydesdale 8:40
...and you feel a sense of unity and well being.
Liz Walker 8:42
Right so, if you're singing a song with a group of people you get the brain fizzies and you feel warm, about the people that you are singing with.
Jacqui Clydesdale 8:51
Yeah. Exactly and also your hearts start to beat in concert, is that right?
Liz Walker 8:55
That's right.
Jacqui Clydesdale 8:56
It lowers your blood pressure, all that kind of stuff.
Liz Walker 8:59
There's a ton of physical benefits to singing together.
Jacqui Clydesdale 9:03
And so when we describe this sort of chemical magic. It makes our brains makes it like our brains have tricked us into feeling something essentially is, is the sense.
Liz Walker 9:13
Right, so I'm going to quote him right now so I don't mess it up. He says,
Jacqui Clydesdale 9:16
Okay.
Liz Walker 9:17
"What we call emotions are nothing more than complex neurochemical states in the brain that motivate us to act. Emotion and motivation are thus intrinsically linked to each other and to our motor centers, but the system works in the other direction. In addition to emotions causing us to move, movement can make us feel emotional."
Jacqui Clydesdale 9:40
Ahh. Okay, yeah. So that ends up being a kind of virtuous circle of creating emotion, acting on emotion, sharing that emotion with a group of people, and then amplifying the whole thing?
Liz Walker 9:53
So I'm going to ask you to picture it. It's a gang of like Neolithic people building Stonehenge and we're gonna try to illustrate this idea. Now, Jacqui, I cannot push a 25 ton stone.
Jacqui Clydesdale 10:06
[laughter] No. No, you can't. I can't either. I'm not mocking you in any way.
Liz Walker 10:11
We're ladies who wear glasses.
Jacqui Clydesdale 10:12
That's right, and crowd into our closets and record podcasts.
Liz Walker 10:18
Yes, [laughter] we are not the brawny types. But there's dozens of these rocks at Stonehenge and you need groups of people, and you need them all working together towards one goal, and not arguing about how to get this goal done. [laughter] Just pointing that out, people.
Jacqui Clydesdale 10:33
People are people.
Liz Walker 10:34
So, I'm not saying that the builders of Stonehenge sang together, but it would've really helped for all the reasons that we were just talking about. When you're singing together, when you're working with people... you're doing physical labor. You work better. Your, your movements are coordinated.
Jacqui Clydesdale 10:50
Yeah
Liz Walker 10:51
You can actually physically bear burdens for longer when you're singing with other people. You can achieve a lot more with a group of people than you can by yourself and you can achieve a lot more with people who are singing.
Jacqui Clydesdale 11:03
So is it the oxytocin that does that?
Liz Walker 11:06
Yeah, I think it is. It's, uh, because of the singing, and the working and you're getting the stones, and you're working with your people, and you've got this team. Your bodies are working together. You've got rhythm working for you. Because you're achieving more than we did yesterday, and we're gonna do it again tomorrow. You know, and there's a real sense of, like, identity that gets built up with this, you're the guys who got up on top of Salisbury Hill, and you're looking out over the valley, and you can feel the power of Grayskull. [laughter] And you've got your stone into place, and you are awed by the love and the power of Grayskull working on that crew. It was the greatest time of your life, and the sweat of your brow really meant something. You made something that would last a millennia.
Jacqui Clydesdale 11:48
Yeah and confound people for years, and, and give inspiration to Spinal Tap.
Liz Walker 11:56
Exactly. So, it's a silly example but like, you can see how singing would've been a part of creating a sense of identity, creating social cohesion. Research shows that synchronous coordinated songs and movements may create strong bonds, you feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself. There's actually, there's also a little something else that happens when you have a group of people singing, you have these overtones that are working together, and it actually always sounds like there's more people.
Jacqui Clydesdale 12:22
Oh, like the fifth, the fifth voice.
Liz Walker 12:24
Just like the fifth voice. The fifth voices is an excellent example. It's a Sardinian choral tradition. Four tenors would sing to-- these four male tenors would sing together and they would produce this other voice.
Jacqui Clydesdale 12:36
This is really familiar to me because I saw a documentary about the Mamas and the Papas. Apparently John Phillips, would get super high and make the four Mamas and the Papas sing songs over and over again so that they could produce a fifth voice. [right] Right, so like, so that their sub harmonics would create a fifth voice, and it wasn't until he was like really stoned, and they had sung in tight harmony for hours and hours that they could get the actual sound that he wanted which was the sound of five people, not four.
Liz Walker 13:06
Amazing.
Jacqui Clydesdale 13:07
Yeah, it's pretty cool. [laughter]
Liz Walker 13:08
Well, the voice from the Sardinian choral tradition, called La Quintina. It's supposed to be Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Jacqui Clydesdale 13:16
Oh!
Liz Walker 13:17
Yes!
Jacqui Clydesdale 13:17
Oh wow, [yes!] Okay, yeah no for John Phillips, it was just, you know, another stoner dude in the room I guess, probably.
Liz Walker 13:25
But you know that's it's it's awesome. [laughter]
Jacqui Clydesdale 13:27
Maybe it's the spirit of David Crosby joining [laughter] in from the other side of Laurel Canyon, I dunno.
Liz Walker 13:32
Okay, I mean John Phillips, Sardinian tenors believing that it's Mary, mother of Jesus singing with them. Y'know, I think there's something a little bit mystical about it. I think it points in the direction of what we're talking about here.
Jacqui Clydesdale 13:45
Yeah, like when you, when you hear a group of people singing together that closely and having that sense,
Liz Walker 13:52
Powerful.
Jacqui Clydesdale 13:53
Yeah it's really rich and sometimes it can freak [laughter] you out a little.
Liz Walker 13:57
I actually found a clip of Sardinians singing in a Dublin pub and it's kind of freaky. Have a listen. They dominate the space, and it is an amazing bar trick.
Jacqui Clydesdale 14:38
It's a little bit mystical, little bit otherworldly, so then if you have like a really disciplined group, like an army or something really single minded or, you know, a group of protesters...
Liz Walker 14:51
Totally. These are my friends. This is my family. These are my people this is my country. Now we're singing national anthems together now it's how you're cheering for your favorite sports team.
Jacqui Clydesdale 15:04
Yeah, I mean you can bring people together to work collectively to achieve something or you can cheer people on to win a soccer game.
Liz Walker 15:12
Right exactly because that sense of social cohesion is turning into like jinhoism. One of the ideas about singing is and I'm going to quote Dr. Levitin again: it's a clear indication that group members are paying attention to each other, and have a common interest.
Jacqui 15:30
That feels good. That feels good when you know you've got like a huge group who hold you in their hearts...
Liz Walker 15:36
That's right.
Jacqui Clydesdale 15:37
...Who want what's best for you.
Liz Walker 15:38
I mean we talk about it in a much more explicit way now, but the idea of being seen and heard is fundamental, and singing was away is a way of seeing and hearing other people.
Jacqui Clydesdale 15:50
Are you saying that, singing together was the social media of it's day? I mean..
Liz Walker 16:04
Hang on, I'm gonna I'm gonna run with that. Insofar as it's a way for ideas to spread really quickly, right, bypassing gatekeepers then um yeah actually, I do think, I do think it is. A catchy tune is going to spread faster than a dull one, obviously, you might be dancing before you even know what the song is about. Hey there, you're listening to Choral Fixation, a podcast where we talk about singing together, I'm Liz Walker.
Jacqui Clydesdale 16:38
I'm Jacqui Clydesdale.
Liz Walker 16:40
In the next part of our episode we're going to show how remixing a song is a shortcut to sharing subversive ideas. It's actually a really long tradition and Jacqui's gonna kick things off in the Middle Ages, Jacqui...
Jacqui 16:54
I read a book by a guy called Dorian Lynskey. I think he's an English music critic for... I'm gonna say The Guardian. And he wrote a book called 33 Revolutions Per Minute, which examines protest songs. He defines them as a song which addresses a political issue in a way which aligns itself with the underdog.
Liz Walker 17:16
Right and that's the key thing--that's what we're talking about right?
Jacqui Clydesdale 17:18
Exactly.
Liz Walker 17:19
It's the social cohesion of the underdog specifically.
Jacqui Clydesdale 17:23
I also read a really good quote from Phil Ochs, who said it was something like a protest song is a song that when you listen to it you realize there's no BS. It's so straightforward you can't deny it, which I also really enjoy so Dorian Lansky, he kind of skims over protest songs before the 20th century because his, his main focus is mostly on recording artists so it's a little bit of a different focus from what you and I want to talk about. But he sums up protest songs before the 20th century like this: So you can trace them from like medieval Catholic cleric singing Latin hymns with parody lyrics.
Liz Walker 18:00
Oh, like the weird, the Weird Al of Lombardy?
Jacqui Clydesdale 18:04
Essentially, and in the 16th century ballads in Europe, right kind of like pop songs you'd hear down the pub. Right. And a lot of times they would like tell you the news and like broadside ballads that like made fun of people and authorities or like cast aspersions on witches so it's like it's not good you know what I mean? Like people of color, or any sort of outsider too, right? Like so we have to be careful with that. And they made heroes of criminals sometimes things like that. So one example of a song that was kind of overwritten, it was kind of like played back and forth in a way that's kind of interesting, and complicated is Yankee Doodle Yankee Doodle I know. So originally it was actually just a straightforward, kind of, I think it's a reel where it was like "Yankee Doodle spin your girl, turn around" It was the twist of it's day; you know what I mean? During the American Revolutionary War, the Brits started singing it as a way to taunt their sort of colonial American lessers, and they sang the lyrics "Yankee Doodle went to London riding on a pony, Stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni" The Macaroni line is in reference to a group of sort of like English fops-- like the New Romantics, fabulous pirate puffy blouses. Looking sharp. So basically the Brits were saying to the Americans, You think you're sophisticated but you're a bunch of hicks. The Americans during the Revolutionary War took that up and they're like this, right back atcha, I know who we are, we're the fops but we're kicking your butt. I think that's a really fast way. It became kind of a protest, not so much a protest--
Liz Walker 19:46
in your face!
Jacqui Clydesdale 19:47
Exactly. You tried to tell us who we are. Now we're telling you. So I really enjoy that. Yeah, so then from the dandies. Then we get into the 18th and 19th century and protests are more like sermons with a moral message. Yeah, I mean with the, you know, talking about the, the social justice movements of the day abolition of slavery, working conditions in factories votes for women, votes for women, all that stuff,
Liz Walker 20:17
Not as much fun as macaroni.
Jacqui Clydesdale 20:19
Not as much fun as dandies, it's true. So an example of this would be John Brown's Body, which is sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. So that's "John Brown's body, lies amouldering in the grave..."
Liz Walker 20:19
That was Pete Seeger himself. So tell us about John Brown, and why he got his own song?
Jacqui Clydesdale 20:58
So John Brown was an abolitionist and quite a firebrand.
Liz Walker 21:04
He's a polarizing figure I believe, Yeah, John Brown was absolutely a polarizing figure; he advocated for violence in setting free enslaved people. John Brown died in 1859, the song 'John Brown's Body lies amouldering in his grave" is an ode to him, and it was taken up by the union side, it was very popular. And they would sing, because one of the lines is "he's gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord." If you're singing about someone whose cause was righteous who you believe in his cause you're fighting for that cause, and you're singing that he's gone on to be a soldier in the army of the Lord, being a soldier in the army of the Lord in the cause of something righteous, while you're singing it with hundreds of your compatriots, it is a very that that reinforces your moral message on a level that's... That's about your identity, it's about it's about your identity. Your like who you are what you're doing and it's about it's infusing meaning into every action that you're doing, which is kind of amazing. Yep, exactly. Part of the success of songs like that like JohnBrown's Body is taking a song that everyone knows, and changing the lyrics, because you've got a song everybody can sing right off the bat. Right. And so they don't need to learn the melody and they can pick up these new lyrics pretty quickly. You know, if you're in a coal mine, or you're working on a picket line, or you're, if you're out on the front line. That was then your, your brain power needs to be reserved for other things but you just want to get your objective done but you need that moral support of your compatriots, and to convince yourself to, I think, singing these songs helps to bolster your own your own resilience and your own drive and then you hear all of your voices together. And that can be really powerful. You're sharing your strengths, with everyone else. It's funny because when we're talking about songs, we always think about songs as being something that somebody writes.
Jacqui Clydesdale 23:16
Yeah. And this is this is a co creation kind of thing. This is gonna come up again so I want to posit an idea about protest music, there's tension in it right it comes from this origin that like the tradition of tweaking existing songs and tunes we think we think of a musical artists like you said like writing a new song like creating it right bringing it into existence but like there's this other hand in writing a protest song and it's like, wait a minute, you just change the words and make it like that, and boom, you'll have so much more impact and so much more ready effect with it with a bigger crowd.
Liz Walker 23:52
Right right and that if you got a bigger crowd, your message is getting out to more people. You've got more amplification literally,
Jacqui Clydesdale 23:59
You're retweeting it in real time. Okay.
Liz Walker 24:07
All right. I sent you a link I want you to click on it for a second. Okay, so that's Chumbawamba. e that song.
Jacqui Clydesdale 24:46
Love it.
Liz Walker 24:46
1997 huge hit. Huge hit for an anarchist syndicalists collective of musicians from England, who had been recording who..
Jacqui Clydesdale 24:59
if I'm not, if I'm not mistaken actually set fire to a million dollars.
Liz Walker 25:04
I always got it those guys, those guys and so they also recorded an album of English rebel songs in 2002. All very beautiful acapella style, and I'm going to use a song from it to illustrate this principle that we're talking about. The principle of taking music and readapting it for the purposes of protests. Okay. All right, so, like, English folk music it's like a total field of study. Like you can get a PhD in it. I don't have time for a musicology degree, but we're going to talk about The Digger song. So, what we know about The Digger Song is that it was written in 1649. When Gerard Winstanley was an English guy who was sick and tired of rich people enclosing on the public lands of his village.
Jacqui Clydesdale 25:54
Yeah. Right,
Liz Walker 25:56
So there's the thing that happened in the 17th 17th century, where all the villages of England had had common land where everybody could graze their animals and everybody could kind of use it it was it was like a big park. And then suddenly there was this Enclosures Act that was enacted by Parliament, and it said
Jacqui Clydesdale 26:15
basically theft...
Liz Walker 26:17
Exactly the rich people can actually take all that land call it theirs and then that you can you, you have the freedom to choose to pay them rent in order to use it. Right. And so, Gerard Winstanley wasn't having with this, and other people felt the same way. And so he decided Nope, you know what, we're all worth the same we're all the same kind of people. And so we are now calling ourselves the diggers. We're going to start digging up this land that we worked for our families have worked for generations. We're going to dig up the stuff that the rich people have planted, we're going to we're going to make camps, we're going to put up tents, we're going to just take over. It was,
Jacqui Clydesdale 26:58
Oh, yeah, yeah, so it's like Occupy! It's the Occupy Rich People's Property. Exactly.
Liz Walker 27:04
Okay, so he writes a song and it's called The Digger Song, so have a listen.
Jacqui 27:35
Oh my gosh
Liz Walker 27:53
You don't have to listen to the whole thing but what do you think about it?
Jacqui Clydesdale 28:09
Ooh my god that's so beautiful. I think it sounds like "I get knocked down but I get up again" It's literally saying stand up now stand up now.
Liz Walker 28:19
You know but the people of 1649 heard this, they would have been like, "oh yeah I love that capn kid song."
Jacqui Clydesdale 28:37
what?
Liz Walker 28:37
Oh yeah. Yeah, because, yeah, because in 1649 there was a really popular song called The Ballad of Captain Kidd, and it's hilarious because it's a song of like murder and theft because he's a pirates. And it was hugely popular.
Jacqui Clydesdale 29:08
Oh, so they would have heard that, I heard that. Yeah.
Liz Walker 29:13
It's all about how much fun it is to be a pirate and do awesome things like murder people and steal and stuff so anyway I sent you another link. Click on it to hear this Captain Kidd song.
Jacqui Clydesdale 29:26
Oh my gosh, it's by Great Big Sea.
Liz Walker 30:10
Yeah, it's the same. It's the same tune.
Jacqui Clydesdale 30:12
You can totally imagine 17th century drunken men and women going down to the pub and carousing to this. Pirates at that time were very much, you know, part of their world.
Liz Walker 30:24
Now it was a it was a career option.
Jacqui Clydesdale 30:26
They were the. They were the hot stories, they were the clickbait of their day. And like one.
Liz Walker 30:32
Yeah, so it's just like super popular song about being bad,
Jacqui Clydesdale 30:36
and you can listen to that song and think yeah that sounds All right, being a pirate sounds awesome.
Liz Walker 30:40
Right. How about how about coming down to your local enclosure?
Jacqui Clydesdale 30:45
But like using that tune, about Captain Kidd, for the basis of your political protest, like you're, you're already like you're layering on it's like yeah this pirate's got goodwill. Everybody loves this pirate. He's, he's great. He knows how to, he knows how to get things done so let's sing a song about eating the rich. And you know let's use that tune about the pirate. That's smart, that's really smart, it's,
Liz Walker 31:13
iIt's super smart, I mean it's The Diggers Song is is still known what 300, 350 years later because it's like it's a really is a popular tune. The Ballad of Captain Kidd, I think one of the things that all these offers is is really illustrating is that once people start jiving to the music, then they start to listen to the words, you know, they're responding with their bodies first.
Jacqui Clydesdale 31:42
Yeah of course I mean when you, when you look at those videos that go around sometimes of elderly patients with dementia or Alzheimer's and they play music for them they put their headphones on them and then they just start to dance because I just saw one recently, an older woman who had been a dancer, like a ballerina prima ballerina and Swan Lake, and they played Swan Lake, and her body certain things she started moving, and it was like you know their bodies remember better than your conscious mind does right.
Liz Walker 32:14
That's right. And I remember seeing one where a man was given headphones with a song from his youth and he started to, he started to cry and he really kind of. He kind of came into focus For the first time in the whole video. And I think he was remembering the song, which for a person with with cognitive problems to be able to remember would be such a powerful moment. I mean I wonder about how familiar songs, kind of grounded us in our bodies and bring us back into focus in our muscle memory. And I wonder if that's one of the ways that a new idea can really enter in
Jacqui Clydesdale 32:53
I mean if it if it does that to us individually How can it affect us collectively it can a protest song can bring us all together and then say, we don't have to live this way, there's hope for the world.
Liz Walker 33:04
That's right, a new way of living. Thank you for joining us today on Choral Fixation. This is a podcast about people singing together.
Jacqui Clydesdale 33:13
Our episode was written, produced and edited by Liz Walker and Jackie Clydesdale our show notes will include all the books and the authors and tunes that we watched on YouTube so you can check them out.
Liz Walker 33:26
sStay tuned for our next episode Jacqui is going to be telling me the long and winding history of the most famous protest song in English, We Shall Overcome.
Jacqui Clydesdale 33:36
It's the story of powerful collaboration, and well intentioned people mucking things up. So, you know, the story of humanity. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter at choral_fixation or email us at choralfixations@gmail.com and tell us what you like, like what you'd like to hear. And what your favorite protest song is.
Liz Walker 34:03
You can subscribe and like wherever you find your podcasts and we'll talk to you soon.
Jacqui Clydesdale 34:00
Thanks for listening. This is a little sidebar I'm not sure if I'm going to use it but I actually really cuz it's kind of going a little bit off. Okay, going a little off track. But Winstanley wasn't actually the only one to even do this. The song has been refurbished by lots and lots of singers. And it was actually apparently a childhood favorite of Joseph Smith of the Mormons fame. Okay.
Liz Walker 35:23
Right. Okay, so, because he loved this song about Caprain Kidd. As a child, the tune made its way into an American hymn.
Jacqui Clydesdale 35:36
Wow, okay.
Liz Walker 35:39
Yeah, so I actually dropped the trash is called how precious is the name. Now you can imagine how precious, precious is, you know, Brethern sing so it's got the same rhythm,
Jacqui Clydesdale 35:54
Given all that Christ he's my all. Wow. All right, that's wild.
Liz Walker 36:02
Isn't that funny to see how that song has evolved into. Okay, so then this song from the 1830s got kind of a remix in the 1870s with some new music, and it is actually now some today it's a very popular evangelical hymn called Precious Name, and you can find 1000s of choirs online doing it. But the funny thing about it is that the, the, the verses have changed. Sorry, the verses have changed but the chorus still retains a nugget of that Captain Kidd ballad. So click on this next link. And listen closely. Because the baritones come in. If you can just really imagine them singing, as I say,
Jacqui Clydesdale 37:17
yeah, it doesn't sound anything like it in the verses anymore, really.
Liz Walker 37:22
But, you get to the. Get to the chorus.
Jacqui Clydesdale 37:45
Precious name, Precious name,
Liz Walker 37:50
As I said, Yeah, so it's, there's this like shadow of this original song of about a pirate that is still there. It's the beating ghost heart of this evangelical hymn.
Jacqui Clydesdale 38:05
It's quite the journey. Yeah,
Liz Walker 38:08
yeah it's it's like I said I don't think it's part of it just it detracts from the protest song thing, but I just wanted.
Jacqui Clydesdale 38:17
I mean, if we can wind it around a bit because I mean that does speak to We Shall Overcome and kind of like the religious and the protest music, getting intertwined. Right. It's the other way around. Strangely,
Liz Walker 38:33
maybe, but like right time, right.
Jacqui Clydesdale 38:38
The Lord works in mysterious ways, It's very very true.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai