A wave of American protest folk singers charged with this calling emerged from the Depression and this movement came to its apex in the 1950s and 1960s, gaining its widest exposure in the early folk persona of Bob Dylan, which he had modelled on Woody Guthrie.

Curiously, two generations later these protest songs continue to have enormous currency as we saw at the US inauguration when Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’ was sung by Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and the half a million Americans who were in attendance. In fact there is almost no public protest anywhere in the US that won’t contain an airing of ‘We Shall Overcome’.

They represent the popular songbook of the American people, and to our detriment it is hard to see the Australian equivalent. This CD brings together most of these classic songs in their original versions, the 78 masters having been beautifully restored in many cases. One can only feel somewhat nostalgic for an era when the wish to change the world seemed somehow more possible.

This is a wonderful document of a precious time where musicians took on the mantle of effecting change and engaged directly with forces infinitely greater than them. If that is not heroic music making, I don’t what it is.


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