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Once upon a time music and politics were mixed in a way that didn’t seem fake, it wasn’t the trendy thing to do and protest songs were written truly to create conversation and rally people to make a change. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not absent from music today - everyone from Kanye West to U2 to Coldplay are using their music and celebrity as a platform to address the issues of the day; even the Dixie Chicks famously took one for the team when they spoke out against the war in Iraq.

But when people like Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger wrote songs, they didn’t rely on metaphor or simply attaching themselves to issues, they wrote about them, they sang about them and often times they were also the activists who helped make change.
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