Bob Feldman : A People’s Folk Music History

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / July 27, 2010

If you’re a Rag Blog reader who’s into either urban protest folk music or anti-corporate country music, you might be interested in listening for free to “A People’s Folk Music History of the United States” by clicking on the music links for the following public domain folk songs:

1. “Living On Stolen Goods” is a protest folk song from the early 1970s that summarizes the history of U.S. settler-colonialism and U.S. imperialism.
2. “Big Bill Haywood” tells the story of the IWW (“Wobbly”) leader.
3. “Remember Sacco and Vanzetti” recalls the Sacco and Vanzetti Case of the 1920s.
4. “Upton Sinclair” is a folk song about the muckraking author of the novel, The Jungle. novel.



Wobbly Big Bill Haywood. Image from Salt Lake City Weekly.
5. “They Drove Woody Guthrie,” “The Hollywood Ten,”Source,” “They Killed The Rosenbergs,” and “Ben Davis” are folk songs about political repression during the late 1940s and 1950s McCarthy Era.
6. “Kerouac and Cassady” is a folk song about the Beat Generation.
7. “The People’s Folksinger” is about 1960s protest folk singer Phil Ochs.
8. “Richard Farina Is Gone” is a eulogistic folk song about the author of the 1960s book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.
9. “Bloody Minds” is a folk song that protested against Columbia University’s Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] institutional affiliation and Columbia’s collaboration with the Pentagon during the 1960s.
10. “Ted Gold’s Wisdom” is a folk song about former Columbia SDS Vice-Chairman Ted Gold.
11. “Enemy Number One” is a folk song about the Weather fugitives from the 1970s.
12. “Dhoruba” is about the case of a former Panther 21 political prisoner.
13. “At Age 42” is a folk song about the negative effects of the celebrity star system in the corporate music industry.
14. “Ballad of Harvey Milk” is a folk song about the San Francisco activist and elected official who was slain in the 1970s.
15. “Their Armored Brink’s Truck” is an outlaw folk song about the 1981 incident in Nyack, New York.
16. “Prisoner In Auburn” is a folk song from the 1980s about U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert.
17. “The Marines Have Captured Grenada” is about the Pentagon’s 1983 invasion of that island.
18. “Free Leonard Peltier!” is a 1990s folk song about the Leonard Peltier Case.
19. “Marilyn Buck” is a 21st-century folk song from a few years ago about a recently released U.S. political prisoner.
20. “Die To Defend Exxon” is an anti-war and anti-recruitment folk song from the early 1980s.
21. “Let Me Tell You About 9-11” raises some questions about the Big Media’s official version of what happened on September 11, 2001



San Francisco’s Harvey Milk. Image from collider.com.
22. “Destroyed By A Rising Flood” is about the 2005 Katrina disaster in New Orleans.
23. “Let the Big Banks Fail” is a folk song that protests against the use of public funds to bail out the Wall Street big banks in 2008
24. “High Technology Homeless” is a folk song from the 1980s that looks at how high technology has affected the quality of life of some folks in the USA.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

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