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Transcript

• 00:00

  [SINGING]Some call her the voice of the Tunisian revolution.Emel Mathlouthi takes her cue from American protest singersBob Dylan and Joan Baez and transposes them

• 00:21

  to her home country.[SPEAKING FRENCH]I think and write about topics thatare close to my heart-- freedom, revolution, and dignity.And I place my voice at the service of all that.[SINGING]

• 00:45

  Emel is 30.She started off with classical music, then rock, then folk.She's from a family of left-wing intellectuals,and she says singing about politics came naturally.[SPEAKING FRENCH]I've always written songs about Tunisia and conditions there.Very early on I wanted to do something about them.

• 01:08

  There are very few Tunisian singerswho take a stand on anything, especially in my generation.When Tunisians rebelled against the regimeand sent President Ben Ali packing a year ago,Emel was the right singer in the right place,reflecting the ideas of Tunisia's youth.

• 01:30

  This song, called "My Word Is Free,"became her signature tune.[SINGING][SPEAKING FRENCH]That song touched people a lot because itwas sincere and spontaneous.The words touched people, because we're not

• 01:50

  used to lyrics like these.If I hadn't gone singing in the streets,I probably wouldn't have occupied this placein my country.Emel is happy about the Tunisian revolution,

• 02:12

  but says the path to democracy is still fraught with danger.[SPEAKING FRENCH]I think it will take longer than we'd like it to.That's obvious.But I want to help make sure that things will neverget as bad again as we've lived through.And for Emel's protest singer role models,

• 02:35

  Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, that should be music to their ears.

Music has often been used to document or commemorate important social events, and in the modern era is often explicitly political. For example, many folk singers in the early 20th century blended popular and traditional music with a focus on contemporary issues.

Mary Magdalene Garland Stewart Jackson Stamos, known as Aunt Molly Jackson (1880–1960), was a militant labor activist who combined southern grassroots music with radical political activism. In 1931, she participated in a Communist-led uprising against coal companies in Harlan County, Kentucky, the site of one of the most famous and brutal attempts in the United States to quell union organization in the coal industry. The left-wing Dreiser Committee, named for noted writer Theodore Dreiser and organized to investigate the Harlan County War (as it came to be known), discovered Aunt Molly Jackson and organized a fund-raising tour of 38 states in which, via songs such as “Poor Miner's Farewell” and “Hungry Ragged Blues,” she publicized the dire conditions that typically faced coal miners and their families in an era before widespread labor reforms and regulated working conditions. The Harlan County labor dispute lasted until 1939, also inspiring Florence Reece to write the famous protest song, “Which Side Are You On.” The Wagner Act of 1935, a key piece of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation during the Great Depression, ultimately outlawed antiunion tactics such as blacklists and discrimination against union members.

The Almanac Singers, cofounded in 1941 by Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell, and Lee Hays, continued the protest tradition in folk music, often writing topical songs that addressed major political issues of the era, particularly labor organization. The Weavers, formed late in the 1940s by Seeger, were named after an 1892 play by Gerhart Hauptmann that dramatized a workers' strike. While the Weavers initially enjoyed commercial popularity, several members were ultimately blacklisted for suspected Communist Party affiliation or sympathies during the McCarthy era in the 1950s. Seeger refused to testify about his political affiliation and his popularity waned as the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union increased.

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