“Ah, but in such an ugly time, the true protest is Beauty.”
– Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs defined a protest song as “a song that is so specific it can’t be mistaken for bullshit.” I never saw him perform in concert or at a folk festival—the only time I heard him sing was at a San Francisco demonstration against the Vietnam War. He lived the life he sang about; he didn’t just write protest songs, he put his guitar where his mouth was, time and time again. Neil Young credits Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan as the inspirations behind his new antiwar album, Living With War; Bruce Springsteen credits Pete Seeger as the inspiration behind his new album, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Is something happening here? If so, what it is ain’t exactly clear—old people speaking their minds, singing songs and carrying signs. Is a new folk revival on the horizon?

If Pete Seeger’s question was where have all the flowers gone, Neil Young is asking where have all the leaders gone; if Bob Dylan’s answer was blowing in the wind, Neil Young’s answer is Let’s Impeach the President. And if Neil Young’s album of uncompromising protest songs speaks forcibly to where we are now, Bruce Springsteen’s sentimental journey through Pete Seeger’s American song bag looks back lovingly on where we came from. To understand the former, you have to start with the
latter.

“And when these fingers can strum no longer, give the old guitar to young ones stronger,” wrote Seeger in Quite  Early Morning. Now in the twilight of his long and storied career as the dean of American folk singers, Seeger, who just turned 87, has kept that long ago promise and none other than Bruce Springsteen has picked up the old guitar. It’s in good hands.

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions is the result, Springsteen’s debut album of traditional American songs. Seeger once observed that there were three kinds of songs: most help you to forget your troubles; a small number help you to understand your troubles; and the rare few help you to do something about your troubles. The man who was blacklisted for refusing “to answer questions no American should be asked” before The House Committee on Un-American Activities’ preference was clear, but he might have added a fourth that simply tell your troubles to the listener. Most of the songs on this album fall into this latter category—they were not written to make you feel better, or for self-enlightenment, or to change the world. They were written to tell a story.

And what rollicking good stories they are, with unforgettable characters like Old Dan Tucker, Jessie James and John Henry, and amazing places to visit like the Erie Canal, the wide Missouri that runs through the Shenandoah valley, and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl that Sis Cunningham grew up and wrote about in My Oklahoma Home.

But in their midst, like diamonds in a bowl of rubies, are three songs that have changed the world—one Irish anti-war song, “Mrs. McGrath,” and two civil rights anthems, “Eyes On the Prize” and the title song, “We Shall Overcome,” both of which were adapted from old spirituals.

What makes this album so irresistible, however, is not the selection of songs, but the innocent and unadulterated joy and delight in discovery of these musical riches that Springsteen brings to the performances. This is no studio album, with every nuance thought out and calculated to perfection, every stray sound erased and every track polished to a fine shimmer. On the contrary, this was all recorded in Springsteen’s home, in one or two takes, with a few mikes and a roomful of New York City’s finest acoustic musicians who were having as much fun as the Boss. It is homemade music with handmade songs—not a factory within a hundred miles.

If you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall with great music pouring forth all around you like honey from a comb, here is your chance. I thought I knew “Old Dan Tucker”—I can even frail it on my 1964 Pete Seeger-style long neck banjo, which I learned how to play from his wonderful homemade red stapled instruction manual How To Play the Five-string Banjo. But Bruce makes it sound like a new song—it comes charging out of the chute like a bull in heat. His sheer energy and joie de vivre captured me and shook me as if to say, “This isn’t just another hoary old folk song, this is as exciting as Elvis was when he first stepped onto Ed Sullivan’s stage—this is pure, exuberant coming-of-age American music, man—as thrilling as Louis Armstrong playing the trumpet on Basin Street in 1927, as Willie Mays catching that fly ball over his shoulder with his back to home plate in the 1954 World Series. Don’t let this album get away—you need to hear it like a kid needs to see his first baseball game, to go on her first date, to taste their first kiss.”

It’s been a long time since I felt that way about a folk song. I have heard them all before, but I forgot what they first sounded like. Springsteen reminds me how it felt to be young and in love for the first time. He takes this small treasury of American folk song out of the dusty old Lomax Collection and Folkways Recordings, and holds it up to the light like a brand new baby. I thought I knew “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep,” having learned Leadbelly’s 12-string guitar version of it when I was 16. But she’s grown old and gray in the intervening years and hundreds of performances.

Not to Springsteen—she’s still a teenager strutting her stuff with a seventeen-instrument Dixieland arrangement that has just a hint of Klezmer. This must be what Leadbelly meant in fact, when he spoke about “rocking Church.”

But the unexpected highlight of the album for me is Springsteen’s reworking of the Irish antiwar song Mrs. McGrath. In this song the returning soldier has lost both his legs, and his mother is portrayed as the Cindy Sheehan of her time when she cries out at the end:

All foreign wars I do proclaim
Live on blood and a mother’s pain
I’d rather have my son as he used to be
Than the King of America and his whole Navy.

Those last four lines are Springsteen’s resetting of the song with local, American referents, substituting “live on blood and a mother’s pain” for “Between Don John and the King of Spain” from the original, making this song from the 1916 Easter Uprising a powerful antiwar song in 21st century America.

Special mention should also be made of writer Dave Marsh’s excellent accompanying booklet, accurately sourcing all of the songs, right down to crediting Alice Wine for recasting the gospel song “Keep Your Hands On the Plow” into “Eyes On the Prize,” and Pete Seeger, Zilphia Horton, Guy Carawan and Frank Hamilton for adapting “We Shall Overcome.”

There are times when a rising tide lifts all boats, and if you are hustling for bookings to keep a roof over your head, Bruce has single-handedly put folk music back on the radar screen of pop culture. You don’t have to explain what it is anymore. So when he sings “Pay Me My Money Down,” I hope he makes a million, and that some of it trickles down to your local folk singer.

If Springsteen has rediscovered folk music on We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Neil Young has reinvented the protest song on his epic new album, Living With War. We’ve had folk protest songs, we’ve had folk rock protest songs, but Young turns up the heat another notch on what he calls “a metal folk protest version of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs.” Don’t let it scare you the way it first scared me—you control the volume knob after all, and you can play it as loud or soft as needed to protect your eardrums.

Speaking of drums, you’ll hear plenty of them on this record, as part of what he calls “a power trio” of bass, drums and rampaging electric guitar. If this were not enough to break through the stonewall of secrecy surrounding the current administration, Young added a trumpet, the same instrument that began to sound when Joshua fought the battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down. Still not loud enough? Young completes the arrangement with a magnificent choir of one hundred voices, which he alludes to in “The Restless Consumer” as a hundred voices in a hundred lands crying out for peace.

Think of these two albums—We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions and Living With War—as bookends on the 1960s, all dressed up for the 21st Century. In the 1960s the fountainhead of the spirit behind both of these outstanding records, the two great movements for social change that inspired the most powerful and memorable songs, were the civil rights movement (think “We Shall Overcome“) and the antiwar movement (think Seeger’s “Waist Deep In the Big Muddy“).

Bob Dylan put them both together in his folk masterpiece Blowing In the Wind. Young and Springsteen are plowing in the same field, digging in the same mine, and in each case finding something new to say and a new way of saying it.

Young’s album is one long sustained howl of protest, perhaps not coincidentally in the 50th anniversary year of Allen Ginsberg’s generation-defining poem “Howl” from 1956. But unlike Ginsberg, Young’s howl is directed against one very specific target, defined in the album’s seventh song, “Let’s Impeach the President,” which brilliantly uses the president’s own words and voice to incriminate him, with Young’s one hundred voice choir punctuating his self-contradictory rationales for going to war with “flip…flop” before and after each one. It is masterful political theatre. That is the song that turned Neil Young’s website—Neil’s Garage—into the Grand Central Station of antiwar web surfers and song browsers for two weeks before the album was released—trying to get the first glimpse of his free streaming lyrics to learn why Fox News was calling Neil Young a traitor.

Some traitor. If they listened to the end, they would have heard Young’s entire one hundred-voice chorus sing America the Beautiful—in probably the most heartfelt performance ever recorded.

Traitors should be made of sterner stuff. They shouldn’t wear their hearts on their sleeve—as Young has for thirty years—with deep and abiding affection for his adopted country. They shouldn’t spend every year doing benefit concerts for America’s forgotten and hard-hit farmers, and school benefits for disabled children, as Young does for Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid, and for the Bridge School, which his own son (who has Down’s Syndrome) attends. And they shouldn’t have voted for Ronald Reagan, which is Young’s get out of jail free card.

Traitor indeed. This album rather sings with the died-in-the-wool patriotism of another early transplanted American—who helped start the American Revolution. That would be England’s Thomas Paine. “Summer soldiers and sunshine patriots” Paine called the chicken hawks of his time. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” he wrote, and made a hard-and-fast distinction between loyalty to one’s government, and loyalty to his country. Pete Seeger offered to sing the Weaver’s song inspired by Tom Paine “Wasn’t That a Time” (by Walter Lowenfels and Lee Hays) to HUAC when he appeared before them as an unfriendly witness in 1955, but they had no interest. They wanted a canary, not a protest singer.

Like Paine, like Seeger, Neil Young is loyal to his country, even when she has been betrayed by her leaders—thus the song “Lookin’ for a Leader“; in another song, which evokes Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom,” he sees a young girl waving goodbye to her younger brother marching off to a misguided war, past “The Flags of Freedom,” wondering if she’ll ever see him again.

While he is marching, she is “listening to Bob Dylan in 1963.”
As we are listening now, to Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen, in 2006.

May 3, 2006—May 24, 2006