Monday, August 22, 2022
Our Subversive Voice
By Russ Slater
A new archive of English protest songs comes to Cecil Sharp House for a live performance and exhibition launch
Peggy Seeger, who helped select songs for inclusion in the Our Subversive Voice project
Earlier this year, researchers at the University of East Anglia unveiled the fruits of a two-year AHRC-funded research project called Our Subversive Voice – a 750-strong archive of English protest songs.
Including protest tunes from the 1600s all the way to 2020, the collection is the first official database of its sort. The researchers chose the initial 750 songs with the help of luminaries such as Billy Bragg and Peggy Seeger, and then selected 250 of the songs to analyse further and provide in-depth insight.
All of these songs and their accompanying texts are now available online, and they stretch from ‘Come All You Farmers Out of the Countrey’, a protest song against King James I in 1603, to ‘Wildfires’ from London collective Sault that railed against police racism in 2020. Case studies, interviews and Other Voices, a section devoted to protest songs from across the world, all add to an extensive online resource.
On September 23, Our Subversive Voice will join forces with early music group The Carnival Band at Cecil Sharp House for a free one-off set of protest songs, where the researchers will provide insight from the archives and launch a new protest song exhibition.
Our Subversive Voice hosts an evening at Cecil Sharp House on September 23
For more details visit www.oursubversivevoice.com
