Music fandom is so often thought of as an intimate experience, but for much of history, songs have served as a type of glue holding humanity together. There’s a unifying force in enjoying music with other people, whether it’s in the context of the traditional concert setting or the (even more traditional) spheres of religion and activism. Music can be the tie that binds friends and strangers to one another like nothing else, transcending boundaries of race, gender, class, space, and time itself.
This notion serves as the foundation of The Social Power of Music, a massive box set released earlier this year by Smithsonian Folkways. The collection includes familiar American protest songs like “This Land Is Your Land” and “If I Had a Hammer” alongside polkas, prayers, gospel tunes, and more from around the globe. At a moment when American culture feels splintered, these songs may remind you of the resistance and healing that music has brought to other periods of distress and uncertainty throughout history, whether at home or abroad. Each of the songs played some kind of role in unifying people, either through calls to action or restorative affirmations. Below are the stories behind five of them.
“Inno Della Resistenza” by Choir of FLN Fighters (1962)
In Algeria, “Inno Della Resistenza” has another title and another role: “Kassaman,” which translates to “the pledge” in Arabic, currently serves as the country’s national anthem. What began as a song of underground rebellion ultimately became a song that “helped crystallize the concept of a nation,” according to Nabil Boudraa, who grew up in Algeria and now teaches French and Francophone studies at Oregon State University.
This recording, sung by an anonymous chorus of fighters in the National Liberation Front (or the FLN), dates to 1962—the same year that Algeria finally won its independence after more than seven years of war, and nearly a century and a half of brutal French colonization. There are still many Algerians alive who remember the days before independence, giving the song particularly strong resonance. “Algeria is using this anthem in a much bigger sense, with much more feeling, with much more devotion. I don’t think other countries have the same intense relationship with their national anthems,” Boudraa says.
Moufdi Zakaria, an Algerian poet and activist, wrote the lyrics in 1955 while imprisoned in Algiers for his political beliefs. His bloody but prideful words were later set to music composed by Egypt’s Mohamad Fawzi. “Of course, [the lyrics] are violent in some places, but [anthems] are all like that,” Boudraa says. “You think about ‘La Marseilleise,’ the French anthem, it’s exactly the same thing. It’s about independence, liberty, freedom—you have to fight for it, die for it, and so forth. It’s the same thing in this song.”
“Woke Up This Morning” by Fannie Lou Hamer (1963)
Fannie Lou Hamer is better known for her essential work as a voting rights and civil rights activist than as a musician. But in 2015, Smithsonian Folkways released Songs My Mother Taught Me, a collection of field recordings made in 1963 of Hamer singing mostly spiritual and gospel songs used in the civil rights movement. “Woke Up This Morning” is a reworked version of a hymn, which originally began, “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus.”
“It’s easy to get people to go along with you when they know [the music],” says Mary D. Williams, a gospel singer and scholar focusing on the connections between music and the civil rights movement. “Every African-American that sung that song knew exactly where it came from, and exactly what they were singing about.”
Hamer’s version of “Woke Up This Morning” originates with Rev. Robert Wesby of Aurora, Illinois. He came up with the rendition in June 1961, while jailed in Mississippi for being a Freedom Rider. The song found local popularity and later that fall, a group of students sang it as they walked out of Burglund High School in protest of the murder of a SNCC activist. The song became enshrined in civil rights history from there.
“‘Woke Up this Morning’ is a song that reinforces this entire approach to the movement,” Williams says. “The intentionality of ‘my mind stayed on freedom’—in other words, to get up and still have a decision made that we’re going to keep going.”
“Why We Need Cry?” by Abraham Brun (1965)
Born into a family of progressive Jewish intellectuals, Folkways co-founder Moses Asch followed suit by beginning his career recording and releasing contemporary and traditional Jewish music. When Asch founded Folkways in 1948 with Marian Distler, it was important to him that the label celebrate the culture of his faith, particularly in the wake of the war. “Being a Polish Jew himself, [Asch] saw the vibrancy of the Jewish community in the early 20th century, and also witnessed the destruction of that community through World War II,” says Meredith Holmgren, who curated the fourth disc of The Social Power of Music.
That interest in preserving Jewish history inspired the release of albums like Abraham Brun’s Songs from the Ghetto, from 1965. Brun had survived the Łódź Ghetto in Poland, where Nazis forced more than 100,000 Jews into hard labor before sending many to concentration camps. Following the war, Brun settled in Long Beach, New York, where he became a well-known cantor, leading prayers and liturgical music at a local synagogue. He sings in Yiddish on Songs from the Ghetto, offering up clear-eyed declarations against Nazi oppression, like on “Why We Need Cry?” “Let us be merry and let us tell jokes/We will rejoice over the funeral of Hitler,” Brun sings, closing each stanza with a playful interjection of “biri-bam-bam.”
“What’s so great about this track is that it’s a song of resiliency,” Holmgren says. “It’s both documenting the pain and struggle of a community, but also the ability of that community to resist and overcome.”
“El Pobre Sigue Sufriendo (The Poor Keep on Suffering)” by Andrés Jiménez (1978)
Andrés Jiménez is a titanic figure in Puerto Rican folk culture, earning the title of “El Jíbaro” for his relatable connection to his homeland. “Jíbaro is a word that refers to the poor peasants who had to move to New York because of the lack of work opportunity on the Puerto Rican island,” says Ilan Stavans, the acclaimed Latinx scholar and author. “[Jiménez] became very celebrated in part because he made the same transition that so many others had to do, carrying certain motifs and images with him that became very popular.”
Chief among those motifs is the unusual relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, which has been a U.S. territory for more than a century. Puerto Ricans are American citizens, but they have no voting power in Congress or say in national elections. “[Puerto Ricans] are in an internal migration. They aren’t traditional immigrants the way other Latin Americans are,” Stavans says. “Jiménez talks a lot about the social conditions in which Puerto Ricans live in New York City, the racism of American white society, some gender tension as well.”
Calls for a change in Puerto Rico’s status—either for statehood or complete independence—have become increasingly popular in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the American government’s slow, subpar aid efforts. Jiménez was rallying for the cause back in 1978 when he released Puerto Rico: Como el Filo del Machete (Like the Edge of the Machete). “El Pobre Sigue Sufriendo,” from that album, takes the rich to task for their lives of luxury, all while the poor toil without relief. “The cycles remain—that’s why Jiménez is such a lasting figure,” Stavans adds.
“Hidup Di Bui (Life in Jail)” by Gambang Kromong Slendang Betawi featuring Kwi Ap (1991)
In the mid-’60s, as the American civil rights movement was at fever pitch, Indonesia was embroiled in its own political and social crises. Following a failed coup by what was thought to be the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965, the New Order regime jailed and killed hundreds of thousands of people they suspected to be communists. That ongoing tragedy inspired “Hidup di Bui (Life in Jail),” an account of conditions in an infamous prison, Tangerang, by an anonymous author. The lyrics paint a picture of dire conditions, in which corn is rationed for meals and cigarettes are made from discarded butts and newspaper scraps. Because the song cited Tangerang specifically, the New Order regime banned the song.
“The government thought that it would make a big difference to people if the song mentioned that location, which people knew was a place where political prisoners were held,” says Andrew Weintraub, a professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh. “It was seen as very threatening to have that one word in it.”
In the ’70s, a pop band by the name of D’Lloyd recorded their own version of “Hidup Di Bui,” but under threat of retaliation from the government, the band changed the line about Tangerang into one that implicated “jails in wartime” and “jails during the Japanese occupation,” according to the liner notes for 1991’s Music of Indonesia, Vol. 2. The version of “Hidup Di Bui” that appears there and on The Social Power of Music has a slightly more traditional arrangement, with the original lyrics intact. The genre, gambang kromon, was once widely popular in Indonesia, but is now considered more of an amalgamated folk genre that includes indigenous Betawi, Chinese, Portuguese, and Malay influences.
