We’ve ran a piece last year on singer Ronnie Gilbert, so I’ve been feeling guilty ever since that we’ve neglected other equally exceptional songstresses who (have) continued to perform, and to stun audiences, into their late 70s, 80s, and 90s. […]
Radio Days developed and delivered a programme of workshops in the chapel of Brompton Cemetery, Kensington, between April and July 2018 on the history of the protest song, 1381 (i.e. the Peasants’ Revolt) to the present. We’re following up with […]
For us folks at Radio Days who locate ourselves paradigmatically in the years 1870 to 1939, this post is bound to seem way outside of our usual sphere of interest. But having spent so many weeks preparing, then performing, the […]
Malvina Reynolds? Peggy Seeger? Rosalie Sorrels? Dory Previn? Joan Baez? Buffy Sainte-Marie? Judy Collins? Ani Difranco? Certainly some outstanding names there; but no, the most important and most influential female folk singer (and protest singer and political activist) of the […]
In pictures … A few photos from the magnificent performance on Thursday evening of our amazing suffragists and suffragettes. The history … A fuller version of the timeline narrated during the procession. How the procession went to plan Further reading […]
What a happy find today! In our recent workshop on political songs of the seventeenth century I had drawn attention to the recurrent trope in writings in this period of “the world turned upside down”, and its numerous sources in […]
A musical feast for you today! Our ‘protest song’ workshop has latterly been rehearsing a new song, Si Kahn‘s They All Sang ‘Bread and Roses’, first recorded in 1990 by American folk singer and political activist Ronnie Gilbert (1926-2015), one […]
Yesterday late afternoon, following six weeks of workshops and last Friday a banner-making workshop, we had our first rehearsal in Brompton Cemetery for our processional performance on 21st June of Rise Up, Women! commemorating the centenary of partial suffrage for […]
Still busy and semi-obsessed with the Protest Song workshops we’re running at Brompton Cemetery, I’ve been mulling over in my mind whether it makes any sense at all to look to music-hall for protest songs. The Music Hall was of […]
OK, so I found a protest song, apparently first published in 16291, a begging appeal from a crippled soldier and veteran of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that I’d rather like to write into the learning pack of our ‘Protest […]
It’s one of those songs that we’ve all known forever. Published in 1921, the lyrics by Raymond B. Egan and Gus Kahn, music by Richard A. Whiting, and recorded here by Gus Van and Joe Schenck, the song had first […]