The last two weeks have been tumultuous, traumatic, and defining for the American south. The murder of nine black people by a white supremicist at the Emanuel Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., reopened age-old wounds, with the focal point of much of the discussion in the aftermath surrounding the presence of the Confederate Flag in the Southern States. Now, after considerable pressure from the American population, the stars and bars are slowly being removed from Southern skies, and the movement to do so has rekindled an element of American folk music that many thought had been close to blowing out—protest.
Peter Mulvey, prolific Wisconsin folk singer and songwriter, posted a new song on YouTube two days after the attack, while he was opening a run of shows for Ani DiFranco, called "Take Down Your Flag". This mirrored the viral popularity of the #TakeDownTheFlag hashtag on Twitter, which peaked at around 38,000 mentions on June 21st, with over 70,000 mentions since the attack itself. The song is hugely moving, with the second verse a direct elegy for 87-year-old victim Susie Jackson.
"It’s impossible to get into a painful situation in songwriting unless you do it through a small detail," Mulvey said, speaking by phone from tour. In it he channels the final line of Bob Dylan’s "The Lonesome Ballad of Hattie Carroll"—"Bury the rag most deep in your face/ Now is the time for your tears."
What happened next is most remarkable. Peter had already asked some friends of his to cover the song, but after receiving a Facebook comment asking if he was going to write eight other verses for the eight other victims, this call-to-arms was passed on. A movement began, a viral daisy chain of songwriting and protest, the title mirroring the increased mentions of each new cover including a new verse for a different victim. Ani DiFranco memorialized Tywanza Sanders; Anais Mitchell added Depayne Middleton-Doctor; and Vance Gilbert penned his verse for the killer, Dylann Roof—this version in particular, coming from an African-American veteran of folk and jazz, is among the most moving.
The rapid growth of "Take Down Your Flag" is evidence of a scene taking it upon itself to inject some of folk music’s history back into the modern day. "It’s hard to do, it’s hard to do well, but we have an obligation to do it," says Mulvey. The fact that it is coming barely a month after Hurray for the Riff Raff's Alynda Lee Segarra made an impassioned call-to-arms for folk musicians everywhere on The Bluegrass Situation is no coincidence. Talking directly about how the folk world should be responding to the increasing attacks on the African American community (she herself recently played a song dedicated to Trayvon Martin on KEXP), she echoed the words of prominent black scholar and author bell hooks, with one rallying cry turned all the way up to 11, demanding that songwriters: "FALL IN LOVE WITH JUSTICE."
Popular music has always had a thread of protest or rebellion running through it, across folk, blues, rock'n'roll, and the avant-garde. It was during the '90s when this trend began to tail off. There was a minor revival in politically engaged songwriting after 9/11, foregrounded by Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising, leading on to the Vote For Change Tour in 2004, but after that the fire of protest music had all but burned out—perhaps the perceived failure of that last wave, with George Bush being re-elected, can shoulder some of the blame for dampening the flames, or perhaps, like a language left unspoken for years, it just got rusty.
Segarra’s blog post then was in a way long overdue, and the growth of "Take Down Your Flag" is the first palpable result of her call to action. In a week when everyone is talking about Taylor Swift saving the music industry by 'taking on Apple', really, it’s this movement that could have the deeper and more powerful repercussions. "Folk music is a tool," writes Segarra, "[it] was social media long before the Internet." Here, the two are working hand in hand.