The Almanac Singers - 'Songs of Protest'

The Almanac Singers were one of the first, most influential groups of protest singers in the history of contemporary American folk music. Singing labor songs in union halls and daring to use music to speak out against oppression, the Almanacs have moved generations of topical singers to action. Their Songs of Protest is easily one of the best recordings in the history of folk music.

There was a time when political song was not considered to be folk music, and it could be said that the Almanac Singers changed that. They at least had a hand in changing that perception of American folk music, not only in the sense that this group included such seminal figures as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Sis Cunningham, Butch Hawes, and others. The Almanacs took their music to union halls and used songs to organize people, to inspire action, and to nurture communities around the notion of standing up to injustice.

Their Songs of Protest pulled as much from traditional American folk songs as it did from the original compositions of Guthrie, Hays, and Lampell. From timeless classics like "House of the Rising Sun," which was a long-standing traditional song about the woes of the working class, to songs of collective commiseration like Guthrie's "Hard, Ain't It Hard," Songs of Protest set a precedent for what would, in the following decades, become the breadth and importance of the American protest song.

The Almanac Singers' Songs of Protest also included what was, arguably, one of Woody Guthrie's greatest topical story-songs, "The Sinking of the Reuben James." The song tells the story of a U.S. Naval ship which was attacked by the Nazi military in 1941, killing 86 people. In Guthrie's quintessential empathetic songwriting style, he created a song that humanized the large number of deaths in the tragedy. It was Guthrie's gift of humanizing history that inspired so many of the political folksingers that followed, and this song was one of the Almanac Singers' greatest efforts (its chorus was actually written by Seeger and Lampell).

Other great highlights from this recording include the traditional "Blow the Man Down" and "The Dodger Song," both of which sung to a suspicion against the government and those who seek to abuse the system. Overall, Songs of Protest is not only an excellent introduction to the work of the Almanac Singers—and, in turn, that of Seeger, Guthrie, and the others—but is also an excellent primer on the history of the American protest song.