Songs of Protest: Evolution of Jazz Protest Music

An overview of jazz music’s changing role in the civil rights movement.

Music is one of society’s best teachers. In Songs of Protest, writers analyze some of music’s greatest hits, using their findings to make sense of the world around them.

Written by C.S. Harper

Content Warning: This article contains graphic language on death and violence.

Jazz music has always gone hand-in-hand with civil rights protest. From its beginnings in slave folk songs and Reconstruction-era Afro-Cuban music, jazz has long given African Americans an outlet for political expression. In an era when institutional barriers silence African Americans’ voice in politics, one cannot help but wonder why jazz lost its power.

While proto-jazz songs with implicit and explicit political messages existed in the 19th century, the genre didn’t fully take form until the 1920s and 1930s. In 1939, singer Billie Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit,” a shockingly candid song about African American lynchings. Originally a poem written by schoolteacher Abel Meeropol after the infamous lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, “Strange Fruit” is a reaction to Jim Crow-era atrocities. With lines like “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,” the song uses an extended metaphor to convey the gruesome aftermath of lynchings. Paired with Billie Holiday’s haunting vocals, “Strange Fruit” crafted a powerful rhetoric that introduced many white Americans to the horrors that many African Americans faced.

To amplify the song’s message, Holiday adopted a distinctive performance style. During her Café Society performances, Holiday would sing “Strange Fruit” in a room that was dark except for a spotlight that shone on her face, and waiters would stop service so that every guest would give her their undivided attention. In this sense, “Strange Fruit” was the first true jazz protest song, so much so that producer Ahmet Ertegun once called it “the beginning of the civil rights movement.”

The decades following “Strange Fruit” saw an explosion of protest jazz. Civil rights themes began to permeate instrumental music, like Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown, Beige” and John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” and vocal music, like Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus” and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.”

Mingus wrote “Fables of Faubus” as a response to the Little Rock Crisis, in which Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to impede integration at a local high school. Although Mingus originally recorded the song instrumentally, he released a version with lyrics in 1960. Mingus channels his anger into these lyrics, giving “Fables of Faubus” an unfiltered message: he refers to Faubus as “ridiculous,” “sick,” and a proponent for the Ku Klux Klan and fascism. With its abrasive lyrics and sardonic saxophones, “Fables of Faubus” is arguably more explicit than “Strange Fruit.”

Similarly, “Mississippi Goddam” balances different tones to elevate its angst-ridden message. With the opening lines “Alabama’s gotten me so upset / Tennessee made me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam,” the song alludes to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and activist Medgar Evers’ murder. Over the course of the song, Simone’s focus turns to African Americans’ daily experiences, singing “Hound dogs on my trail / School children sitting in jail.” She goes on to mockingly echo politicians’ unwillingness to implement reform quickly enough: “But that’s just the trouble / ‘Do it slow.’” Despite the exasperation in Simone’s lyrics, “Mississippi Goddam” has a cheerful tone that emulates show tunes. During her performances, Simone would say that the show for this show tune had not yet been written, implying that her audience was to write this show and change America. In this way, Simone used the protest performance aspect that Holiday established in “Strange Fruit.”

Despite the strong rhetoric of protest jazz, these artists met significant resistance. Holiday almost didn’t record “Strange Fruit” due to rejection from the CBS radio network and her label’s fears of Southern record retailers’ reactions. Some Southern states banned “Mississippi Goddam” and many radio stations returned cracked promotional records to Simone. Even the lesser-known “Fables of Faubus” experienced obstacles as well: Mingus’ label originally refused to let him record it with lyrics. Just like the civil rights movement they advocated for, protest jazz artists battled silencing forces that undermined their societal influence.

As the civil rights movement declined after the 1960s, protest jazz faded into obscurity. Despite the release of successful songs like Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” in the 1970s, jazz’s political influence waned. In the 1950s and 1960s, jazz began to lose mainstream appeal as rock bands made catchier music and jazz artists experimented with unconventional subgenres like bebop and free jazz. In the 1980s, jazz musicians sought to reverse this change by embracing traditionalism, shifting their focus from civil rights protest to the preservation of jazz as an art form.

Image courtesy of Top Dawg Entertainment

As a result, conscious hip-hop has emerged as the premier civil rights genre over the past four decades. The success of songs like N.W.A.’s “F--- the Police” and Tupac Shakur’s “Keep Ya Head Up” helped bring modern African American issues, such as police brutality and underserved Black women’s experiences, to light.

However, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly shows the impact of protest jazz on modern music. Released in 2015, it touches on issues like the exploitation of Black entertainers, police brutality, and Black self-hatred, all the while fusing rap and jazz instrumentation. It received positive critical reception, commercial success, and six Grammys despite its seemingly irrelevant jazz influences and heavy political themes. Moreover, the album’s lead single, “Alright,” has been sung in protests against police brutality and regarded as the “modern Black National Anthem.” To Pimp a Butterfly’s success indicates that protest jazz is far from dead: it has lived on in hip-hop music.

Over the past seven decades, protest jazz has changed alongside the evolving cultural and political landscape. Protest jazz developed from its humble beginnings as slave folk music into an important vessel for the civil rights movement, and jazz artists often risked their careers as a result. Although conscious hip-hop replaced jazz as the musical platform for political advocacy after the civil rights movement ended, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly became an important record that fused those genres together. However, this revival in protest jazz’s popularity was short-lived: no conscious jazz or rap album has met TPAB's success since its release. After Donald Trump’s election, conscious hip-hop and jazz records have remained largely underground despite an increase in police brutality cases. Now more than ever, it is important to support artists who tackle these issues to educate people and generate political reform.