Pop albums

Various Artists: That's Why We're Marching: World War II and the American Folk Song Movement Smithsonian/Folkways SF CD 40021

Compiled to mark the 150th Anniversary of the Smithsonian Institute, this extraordinary document pulls together the wartime songs of folk-blues protestors such as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Josh White, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and The Almanac Singers, a leftist troupe whose number included Pete Seeger.

Expertly annotated and sequenced, it traces the movement's reaction to the hostilities, from initial reluctance, through eager anti-fascism, to eventual demob disillusion. The unsympathetic stance of songs such as "Ballad Of October 16", criticising Roosevelt's re-introduction of the draft, and the anti-war "Billy Boy" is probably due as much to anti- capitalist fervour as simple isolationism. The latter song is particularly tough, a call-and-response singalong with stinging pay-off lines like "It wouldn't be much thrill/ To die for DuPont in Brazil" and, more pertinently, "You can come around to me/ When England's a democracy".

But one sneak air attack later, and they can't wait to sign up and stick it to the fascists, God bless 'em. Songs such as Guthrie's "Sinking of the Reuben James" reflect a dawning acknowledgement that being "the land of the free" brings responsibilities. "What Are We Waiting On", with references not only to London and Paris but "the Soviets/ And the mighty Chinese vets/ Allies the whole world round" speaks of a cosmopolitan humanist spirit largely absent from American discourse these days. It is also worth noting how the movement presented the conflict, in "Citizen CIO" and other songs, as an extension of union battles fought on home turf through the Thirties.

The black singers are less earnest and didactic, more groove-orientated, but no less effective. Josh White, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee's "Move Into Germany" clearly influenced Hank Williams' "Move it on Over", while Leadbelly's sardonic grumble "Gee But I Want To Go Home" captured the post-war disillusion with army life better than any other song. It was left to Pete Seeger, though, to bring demobilisation firmly into focus with "Now That It's All Over". Lower ranks the world over will relate to lines like "Well, there's many a man that struts around/ Is going to have to learn to be taken down/ Because when it's all over/ He'll go back to selling shoes". Typically, Seeger later decided he was being unfair to shoe salesmen.