The Complicated Terrain of American Protest Music

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When James Brown went to Vietnam to perform for American troops in 1968, his concert brought white and Black soldiers together at a critical moment, said writer Ann Powers during the 2026 Dudley Memorial Lecture, delivered Wednesday at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. (The Corcoran is housed in GW's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.) Her talk, "Signals Through the Din: Music's Role in a Troubled World," was a whirlwind consideration of the slippery intersection of politics and pop music from the time of Woody Guthrie to the present.

"Brown's journey to Vietnam that summer is one of the most politically complex events in American cultural history," Powers said, noting that it did not endear him to a counterculture that opposed the war with increasing vehemence. "He did it, though, because he understood just how many of the troops losing their lives-one central reason for protest against the war-were Black."

The discrimination faced by Black soldiers in Vietnam in terms of military rank and work assignments extended into the realm of music, Powers said, with the official military radio network overwhelmingly favoring country music.

"Brown was right to say that his performances offered more to his brothers overseas than simple entertainment. It was a chance to be seen and to be acknowledged amidst the long struggle to be treated fairly. Brown's hard-edged funk also offered a moment of catharsis. Bodies moved and felt strong while he performed," she said.

Powers is an NPR music critic and has written several books, including "Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell" (2024) and "Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music" (2017). Her work, said Lauren Onkey, director of the Corcoran, during brief introductory comments, "explores the story of how artists make music, how listeners hear music and use music and the cultural and political forces that impact that relationship."

The Dudley Memorial Lecture was established in 1984 in memory of Argentina Dudley by her husband, Robert Whittier Dudley, and their children to commemorate her life and artistic interests. The family's endowment fund secures the annual lecture in perpetuity. Their son, Robert W. Dudley Jr., also made brief welcoming remarks.

Powers began her talk with a look back to 1940, when Woody Guthrie's album "Dust Bowl Ballads" was issued. It is considered a landmark in American protest music, and has been cited as an influence by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer and many others, including current TikTok star Jesse Welles.

"It wasn't the first example of recorded American protest music," Powers said of "Dust Bowl Ballads." "But for many, it's the template, with Guthrie's stark, clear style stressing the message almost more than the music, as he blends vivid, hard-luck stories with concise social commentary and humor."

Tracing the historical twists surrounding "You Are My Sunshine," now a campfire perennial, Powers touched on pulse points such as its recording by Jimmie Davis, who became Louisiana's "singing governor" in 1944. He was a moderate in his first term, but when he ran for a second, in 1960, he endorsed segregationist policies. When Ray Charles recorded the governor's signature song in 1962, he made it more palatable for a diverse fan base. In 1977, it became the state song of Louisiana.

While the tune is close in spirit to New Orleans' plucky response to disaster, Powers said, "You Are My Sunshine" isn't, at its core, a sunny song. "The melancholy-and truthfully, the dread-that runs through it, as the singer contemplates the total blackout that would engulf him if he were to lose his life-bringing lover, haunts the soothing tune."

Its anxious undertone, Powers added, may be a hidden key to the song's popularity.

"Beginning at the moment when America adopted the draft for World War II, remaining popular throughout the South as the civil rights movement began to fully expose the region's stubborn racism, 'You Are My Sunshine' was an ideal mid-century political song because it embodies the suppressed conflicts and uncertainties that motivate social change."

As an example of the way a song's impact may wax and wane over time, Powers discussed Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam," written after the traumatic events of the summer of 1963, including the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, Miss., and the subsequent bombing that killed four young girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.

Introducing the song in 1964, Simone said it was a "show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it yet." It instantly made her an important figure of the civil rights movement-yet by the early '70s, Simone had removed it from her set lists. (Eventually she began performing it again.)

"Only after Simone's death in 2003, as younger admirers emerged and began recuperating her history, did the song return to the central position it deserves," Powers said.

After touching on several other moments in the history of American pop music, Powers concluded her talk with a look at how social media has empowered people everywhere to express themselves through song. Before taking a few questions from the audience, she spoke of her longing for more precise terminology with which to discuss protest music. "Protest" seems too narrow, she said, and "political" too broad, and there's no precise way to measure a song's social impact. One of her goals for her talk, she said, was to remind herself as much as her listeners that it's complicated terrain, difficult to speak about with precision.

"Such efforts will always be inadequate, because music is a slippery art form," Powers said. "One person's dance party is another person's freedom march."