10 Essential Political Folk Records

Woody Guthrie is folk music’s Hank Williams—the trailblazer whose songs set the standard for generations to come. And his first album, 1940’s Dust Bowl Ballads, makes a strong case for him as folk’s John Steinbeck too. Oklahoma-born Guthrie had experienced first-hand the hardships of the ‘30s Dust Bowl’s migrant workers as a teenager. Therefore, Ballads is essentially Grapes of Wrath (released one year prior)  you can sing along to (Just try not chiming in on “Do Re Mi,” for instance). In fact, Guthrie lifted the novel’s protaganists’ name for his two part “Tom Joad.”

When a teenage Bob Dylan first hit Greenwich Village, more than 20 years after Dust Bowl Ballads, he was modeling his whole persona after his hero Woody Guthrie, and his self-titled debut album bore that out. But when he followed it up with Freewheelin’, there was no doubt that Dylan had become his own man. Like Woody, he was still using his songs as weapons against injustice, but on milestones like “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” his artillery tended toward hard-charging poetry instead of the plainspoken prose favored by his idol. And when Dylan’s response to crimes against humanity edged towards the existential on “Blowin’ in the Wind,” it irrevocably altered popular culture on an intercontinental level.

In early ‘60s Greenwich Village, Phil Ochs packed more firepower than just about any other protest singer but his fellow traveler Dylan. And just when Dylan abandoned topical songwriting, Ochs took up the mantle on his uncompromising 1964 debut album, All the News That’s Fit to Sing. But his second, I Ain’t Marching Anymore, represents the peak of Ochs’s political songwriting.

Och made his name by cranking out broadsides that spoke directly to specific hot-button topics of the day. But when he broadened his target a bit, he made a convincing case for the immortality of his artistry, whether he was rallying the resistance with the anthemic, anti-war title track or adding satire to his arsenal on the tongue-in-cheek “Draft Dodger Rag.”

Pete Seeger (son of the famed musicologist and technical adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal initiative, the Federal Music Project, Charles Seeger) was on the front lines of musical activism alongside Woody Guthrie when they started working together in The Almanac Singers in the ‘40s. Outspoken from the start, they were harassed by the powers that be. Like many folk musicians, Seeger’s subsequent group, The Weavers, were blacklisted during the McCarthy/Second Red Scare era during the Cold War.

Seeger never stopped speaking truth to power, though. And the title track of 1967’s Waist Deep in the Big Muddy is one of the period’s most expertly targeted musical shots fired in opposition to the Vietnam War. How powerful was it? Enough that CBS initially censored it when Seeger tried to perform the tune on The Smothers Brothers’ TV show.

The aforementioned Seeger tune wasn’t the only anti-Vietnam War folk masterpiece to emerge in 1967. The title song from Arlo Guthrie’s (Woody’s son) debut album has become such a homespun Thanksgiving tradition that people sometimes overlook the serious message underlying all the laughs. Over the course of 18 and a half minutes, with scarcely more than his acoustic axe for company, Arlo spins a true-life Thanksgiving tale involving a holiday feast with friends, being arrested for littering, and facing down the draft board with sarcasm as his only weapon. It’s the album’s only political song, but it occupies the entirety of the vinyl version’s first side. And it shows that, in his own way, Arlo could address injustice in song just as masterfully as his father.

By the time CSNY recorded their legendary double live album, 4-Way Street, in June 1970 they were not only the ultimate folk-rock supergroup, they were just about the biggest deal around. A couple of cuts on their previous album, Deja Vu, leaned toward topicality, but they waded mustache-deep into politics on 4-Way Street.

Among the unapologetically confrontational classics first heard during this tour and duly captured here: Graham Nash’s “Chicago,” a burst of anger fueled by the notorious events of the Chicago ‘68 Democratic convention; “Ohio,” Neil Young’s scathing response to the 1970 Kent State killings; “Find the Cost of Freedom,” a chilling, anti-war a cappella tune; and Young’s raging racism takedown “Southern Man.”

About half the songs on The Pogues’ second album, Rum Sodomy & The Lash, are either covers of traditional tunes or of songs by straight-up folkies (Ewan MacColl, Eric Bogle). The beauty of it is that you’d be hard-pressed to separate them from the Shane McGowan-penned tunes. And whether The Pogues are celebrating a mythical Irish warrior god on “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn,” chronicling the rising tide of working-class anger on “Dirty Old Town,” or lamenting the society’s habit of glorifying war on Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” the origins don’t much matter. They’re all delivered with a more feral attack than just about any other acoustic recording you can name, as Elvis Costello’s production unleashes the beast with just the right balance of mayhem and control.

Billy Bragg became a UK indie phenomenon in the ‘80s by yoking punky energy to a protest-folk focus on tracks where he was backed solely by his own edgy electric guitar strumming. Bragg’s angry axe is still at the center of his third LP, Talking with the Taxman About Poetry. But it’s offset by a bouquet of other musical colors, including Kirsty MacColl’s vocals, Johnny Marr’s guitar, The Smiths producer John Porter’s multi-instrumentality, and violin from The Fabulous Poodles’ Bobby Valentino. You’ll find more than public affairs afoot, but Bragg’s assault on British politicians on “Ideology” and his unsentimental labor anthem “There Is Power in a Union” are among his most undeniable rabble-rousers.

In 1988 it seemed like Tracy Chapman emerged out of nowhere to conquer the world. Powered by one of the era’s most goosebump-inducing voices and some straight-from-the-gut statements about societal ills, Chapman’s debut album rocketed her to the top tier of American troubadours. “Fast Car,” a heart-grabbing close-up on institutionalized poverty, is the tune that made the former busker a star. But it’s surrounded by equally impactful tunes taking on materialism (“Mountains o’ Things”) and crying out for a major wave of change (“Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution”).

Bruce Springsteen delivered a killer tribute album to Pete Seeger in 2006, but about a decade earlier he put his Woody Guthrie cap on for The Ghost of Tom Joad. The title tune explicitly addresses the Dust Bowl migrant workers first immortalized more than half a century before by Woody’s songs and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. But the plight of more contemporary working people fills the rest of the record, in intimate snapshots of those who don’t have it much easier than Steinbeck’s Joad family. Instead of hammering the message home with the epic onslaught of the full E Street Band, Springsteen sticks to stripped-down arrangements based around his acoustic guitar and understated vocals, echoing his 1982 classic Nebraska, but bringing that folky feel into fresh territory.