Political protest was rare in jazz before 1960

Evidence

10 Topical and even political blues have a long history but only a handful of jazz standards could be considered protest songs: “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue,” “It’s the Same Old South,” and, most famously, “Strange Fruit” (which Billie Holliday first recorded in 1939). Dizzy Gillespie’s 1947 recording of “Manteca” includes the chant, “I never go back to Georgia.” Thanks to its title, Charles Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song,” recorded live at Café Bohemia in 1955, can be construed as an expression of protest, as can Sonny Rollins’s 1958 LP Freedom Suite, which featured Roach on drums. Mingus wrote the song “Fables of Faubus,” mocking Arkansas’s segregationist governor, Orval Faubus, in 1959 but his record company Columbia would not allow the lyrics to be recorded. The full song appeared in late 1960 on a Candid release, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. After We Insist! however, there were many, beginning with Art Blakey’s remarkable seven-and-a-half-minute drum solo “The Freedom Rider,” recorded in May 1961. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1876

Categorization

• XREF: The corporate suppression of ‘Fables of Faubus’ lyrics and the post-We Insist! explosion of protest jazz maps onto the chapter’s broader claim about political and material conditions driving artistic shifts.