Resistance and heroization in protest songs in the U.S. in the 1950s: Maintaining Communist political identity during the McCarthy era

Abstract

Since the 1940s at the latest, singer-songwriters of US-American workers songs related themselves closely to the CPUSA, the Communist Party of the United States. Not surprisingly, their political identity filtered into their songs. The lyrics reflected the social grievances typical for the living and work conditions of workers and their music became epitomes of socio-political protest. This turned out to be dangerous in the late 1940s and early 1950s when the US-American state fought the global spread of communism by prophylactically destroying the existential fundaments of those individuals in the U.S. whom they suspected to have communist ties. Being among the victims, singer-songwriters of protest songs dealt with this frightening situation by musical means. In this article, I will investigate three protest songs released on a single by the communist-leaning label Hootenanny Records in 1952: "Talking Un-American Blues", "In Contempt", and "Die Gedanken sind frei". My musical and historical analysis will reconstruct how protest songs served the musicians and their listeners – both inclined toward communist ideas – as a resource for moral uplifting and the reassurance of their political identity .

Keywords

• U.S. American folk song in the 1950s
• CPUSA
• McCarthy era
• moral and political identity
• heroism in music and politics
• Pete Seeger