Our round-up of the most famous protest songs <\/p>
At various points in the chequered history of humanity, music has gone above and beyond its normal call of duty: it has spurred fighters to action, dignified the helpless, symbolised spiritual resistance and provided catharsis in the face of some truly horrifying events.<\/p>\n
Here are just ten of the most powerful examples of protest songs.<\/p>\n
This song about the racist lynchings in the US shocked audiences when Billie Holiday<\/b><\/span><\/a> first sang it in a New York night club in 1939. All these years later it still stands out as one of the most famous, most explicit and most powerful protest songs ever written, with Holiday\u2019s version named by Time Magazine as \u2018song of the century.\u2019<\/p>\n It was written by the Jewish communist Abel Meeropol, who drew his lyrics from a poem he had penned in 1937, comparing the victims of the Black American lynchings to the fruit of trees. He cited as his inspiration a grotesque 1930 photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. Although lynchings were by then on the decline, it would take more than three more decades for them to come to an end.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n With its stark melody<\/a><\/strong> and starker lyrics (\u2018Blood on the leaves and blood at the root \/ Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze\u2019), \u2018Strange Fruit\u2019 became an anthem of the anti-lynching movement and the first important song of the nascent Civil Rights Movement. [\u2018Strange Fruit\u2019] is about the ugliest song I have ever heard,\u2019 Nina Simone<\/a><\/strong> once said. \u2018Ugly in the sense that it is violent and tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in this country.\u2019<\/p>\n