A 1795 feminist anthem borrowed the tune of God Save the King
A protest song is tied to a movement for social change, making it one branch of the wider family of topical songs. Abolitionists, suffragists, trade unionists and civil rights campaigners all built repertoires, often by pinning new words to familiar tunes so the message could ride on shared memory.
The genre can be folk, classical or commercial, and the list of causes with their own songbooks is long: prohibition, disability rights, anti-war activism and the 1960s counterculture, opposition to blood diamonds, animal rights, environmentalism, gun rights and marijuana legalisation among them. One requirement holds firm: songs defending the status quo do not count. An early feminist example is Rights of Woman, set to God Save the King and printed anonymously by A Lady in the Philadelphia Minerva on 17 October 1795, though nothing shows it was ever sung by a movement.
Context can turn almost any song into protest. Goodnight Irene reads as a love song, yet it took on a rebellious aura because its writer, Lead Belly, was a Black convict and outcast. Other songs stay general, opposing injustice or praising peace, while listeners understand the target. Beethoven's Ode to Joy, which sets Schiller's poem about all feeling creatures and adds Beethoven's own line that all men are brothers, is a song of that abstract type. Definitions differ in strictness. Phil Ochs said a real protest song is too specific to be mistaken for nonsense; some researchers demand opposition or proposed alternatives, not just attention to a problem; and the loosest view counts anything protesters perform.
The sociologist R. Serge Denisoff treated protest songs as persuasion or propaganda and traced them to the hymns of grassroots Protestant revivals. He split them into magnetic songs, which pull people into a movement and bind them together, like We Shall Overcome and Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, and rhetorical songs, driven by individual outrage and aimed at changing minds, such as Bob Dylan's Masters of War and Marvin Gaye's What's Going On.
Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, in their 1998 book Music and Social Movements, called that view too narrow. Denisoff treated melodies as mere carriers for words, yet many of the strongest protest songs draw their force from borrowing tunes loaded with cultural tradition. They also argued that music can keep a movement alive after its leaders and marches fade, and can prepare the ground for the next one.
Source: Protest song
