Hi! welcome to WatchMojo.com. This week we are going to be talking about Protest Songs. Now when we sat down to compile this list, we here at WatchMojo said to ourselves, "Okay, we are going to put together a great list of top ten protest songs" and we realized that quite frankly, a lot of these songs were over on Vietnam era. A lot of these songs are really kind of 60s and 70s songs and certainly, that's a whole genre in itself and it's really fantastic. But we realized that that first of all, that sort of list has been done before and in our ongoing quest to expand our horizons here at WatchMojo and your horizons by extension, we decided that we'll do a little something deeper. And we would look at the top ten themes and motivators in history that have really cause people to sit down and write some of the most fantastic protest songs of all time.
So, this segment is really where we go through and we ask ourselves, "Okay, what was going on at that period in history and what influenced people to write? Who was a figure that we can really associate? Sometimes it's figures that we can associate with that period or that movement. And then we'll give you a little bit of music to run it all.
Okay, so here is a great theme that really influence people to write The Great Depression. And why it's, I mean a big reason that it has inspired people to write is that for the first time really on record, people were destitute, people were homeless, people were hungry and it was happening right in the United States of America. And that was really troubling to a lot of people and that made people kind of stand up and go. Wo! what's going on here? Who is in charge? How do we allow ourselves to get into a position where we are now a destitute like this? And what is the government going to do to change this current situation?
Now, the most influential artist I think we are going to talk about to do with The Great Depression is Woody Guthrie. Now Woody Guthrie is someone who I really like as an artist because not only was he able to talk about his era but Woody Guthrie is someone who is fantastic protest songs writer later on look back to as sort of their glory. For example, a guy like Bob Dylan know such time about Woody Guthrie and what an influence and impact he had on him and that alone should give you an idea of the type of guy Woody Guthrie is as an artist and as a writer.
I think my favorite Woody Guthrie song is This Land Is Your Land which is basically, it was originally titled that Can God Bless America and it was actually written in response to the song God Bless America and something that we see very often today sort of like a citiripple spin on a song or like an answer song, sort of to, in answer to something that has been put up by the government or in response to something that's going on in society. But Guthrie was one of the first guys who went out and said, "No, no, no you know like you say God Bless America, well this is what I say God Bless America as you know and then eventually as a result of like issues to do with like loyalties and then the names. He changed then in the song. It's certainly one of the first wood butte songs ever which is why I think it's worth mentioning.
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