Category: Music

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is a satirical poem and song by Gil Scott Heron. Scott-Heron first recorded it for his 1970 album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, on which he recited the lyrics, accompanied by congas and bongo drums. A re-recorded version, with a full band, was the B-side to Scott-Heron’s first […]

Today I have chosen a selection of songs to set you on your way to your polling station. If you are one of the many whose vote has already been cast via a postal ballot, I hope it will remind you of the choice that you have made. We begin with a song from the […]

“People Get Ready” is a 1965 single by The Impressions, and the title track from the People Get Ready album. The single is the group’s best-known hit, reaching number three on the Billboard R&B chart and number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. The gospel-influenced track was a Curtis Mayfield composition that displayed the growing […]

“The Partisan” is an anti-fascist anthem about the French Resistance in World War II. The song was composed in 1943 by Russian-born Anna Marly, with lyrics by French Resistance leader Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, and originally titled “La Complainte du partisan” (English: “The Lament of the Partisan”). Marly performed it and other songs on […]

Grace Petrie is an English folk singer-songwriter and guitarist from Leicester, England. She was hailed in The Guardian as “a powerful new songwriting voice” in 2011. She began performing in 2006 as a solo vocalist and acoustic guitarist, and self-released an eponymous album that year, followed in 2007 by second album Feeling Better. In 2010, […]

“Union Maid” is a union song, with lyrics written by Woody Guthrie in response to a request for a union song from a female point of view. The melody is the 1907 standard “Red Wing” by Kerry Mills, which was in turn adapted from Robert Schumann’s piano composition “The Happy Farmer, Returning From Work” in […]

Dame Ethel Mary Smyth was an English composer and a member of the women’s suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas. Smyth tended to be marginalised as a “woman composer” as though her work could not be accepted as mainstream. Yet when she produced more […]

Kombinat, also called Kombinatke, is a female choir that sings revolutionary tunes from all over the world in original languages. It was founded on the day of the uprising, April 27, 2008, when a group of girls gathered at the founding assembly in Ljubljana’s Rog and decided that we would sing songs of the uprising […]

“Baraye” (“For…”) is a 2022 power ballad by Iranian singer-songwriter Shervin Hajipour. Widely referred to as “the anthem” of the protests, the song was inspired by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who was arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly and whose death in police custody was alleged to have been […]