The Power of Lyrics: How Five Canadian Musicians Communicated Social Justice through Art, 1960 – 1980.

People create music to express themselves in so many different ways – from the life-shattering breakup you just experienced to moving onto a new chapter in your life – we use music as a medium to express complex feelings or topics to others who feel the same, want to listen or to educate. Artists producing music to speak on social justice issues is no different. For centuries, people have been using music to bring to light problems happening throughout the world. Music can reach a wider audience with its melody, beat, and lyrics – and artists have been doing just that since 1960 in the Canadian music scene. Through Alan Mills, Wille Dunn, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Ferron's work, they each have shown that music can be used as a medium to voice social justice issues such as political issues, discrimination, environmentalism, and women's rights, but also the ability to reach wider audiences through their work. 

Alan Mills – "The Anti-Confederation Song."

Edith Fowke took a bold step when he released "The Anti-Confederation Song," in 1869. During a time of a heated election that same year in Newfoundland regarding whether or not they should decide to join the newly formed Canada alongside others, the song highlights the pride for the land and people feeling distrust in the "proposed terms of union." The song highlights not only the tense election in 1869 and the problems people were facing or thinking about during this time but also how the song has still carried its way today. 

Alan Mills discography | discogs, accessed April 1, 2024, https://www.discogs.com/artist/910814-Alan-Mills.

The inspiration behind the song's tune is "Villikins and His Dinah," a popular folk song that appeared frequently in the second half of the 19th century. Decades later, the song also appeared in folk song collector Gerald S. Doyle's Old-Time Songs and Poetry in 1940, but folk and opera singer Alan Mills re-recorded the song, released January 1, 1960. The song is part of Mills' album, Canada's Story In Song, a compilation of folk songs sharing the country's histories through songs. 

John Baxter, “Villikins and His Dinah,” FOLK SONG AND MUSIC HALL, June 13, 2021, https://folksongandmusichall.com/index.php/vilikens-and-his-dinah/.

During this time, people in Newfoundland felt divided on whether to be in favour or oppose Confederation. Those who were against it "feared they would pay high taxes and be conscripted into Canadian wars." The worries of paying high taxes and being conscripted into wars were prevalent in the song, as the lyrics state:

"If they take off all taxes, how then will they meet, / The heavy expenses on army and fleet? 

Just give them the chance to get into the scrap, / They'll show you the trick with pen, ink and red tape." 

"Would you barter the right that your fathers have won? / Your freedom transmitted from father to son?

For a few thousand dollars Canadian gold / Don't let it be said that our birthright was sold." 

The lyrics are poking at if the government were to reduce taxes, then there would be little or no funding for the heavy expenses of the army. While there is no evidence or record of the public's reaction to this particular song, "The Anti-Confederation Song" is a clear example of how the lyrics showcase complex political issues of how people in Newfoundland felt that reached a broad audience ever since 1869. 

Joni Mitchell – "Big Yellow Taxi"

"Big Yellow Taxi" is one of the most covered songs by Canadian-American folk singer Joni Mitchell, with 582 known recordings, including Counting Crows cover in 2002, and with good reason, as she sings about an important issue: the environment.

"Big Yellow Taxi" is a clear example of how she uses music to discuss the environment. It also touches on deeper themes such as capitalism, pesticides in farming, and realizing what we have until it's too late. Her lyrics are vague, but they don't give off that message. She uses repetition in her lyrics and touches on themes everyone either has witnessed or understands. 

Born in Fort MacLeod, Alberta, Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" was released in April 1970 as part of her album, Ladies of the Canyon. Mitchell's inspiration for the song was her ride to a hotel in Hawaii during a trip, and she was devastated by the amount of pavement and businesses there.

She touches on capitalism multiple times throughout the song, such as referencing how they paved nature and replaced it with a parking lot with a "pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot" in addition to referencing putting all the trees in a museum and charging people money just to see them. Mitchell also refers to farmers putting away the dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT), a synthetic insecticide created in the 1940s, and long-term use had environmental and toxicological effects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Not many people would know this pesticide specifically but with Mitchell's lyrics saying, "Hey farmer, farmer, put away the DDT now," most people would understand that it is a harmful chemical or item being put on crops by a farmer. 

Folk music started to become popular in the early 1960s, and this only expanded in the following decade. In Larissa Brumlow's dissertation "Joni Mitchell and Buffy Sainte-Marie: Feminism, Folk, and Freedom of the 1960s," the increasing popularity of folk music was at a time when many were looking for different ways to protest various issues happening throughout society in the United States and around the globe.

Haim, “Haim on Their Lifelong Love of Joni Mitchell,” Rolling Stone, March 1, 2021, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/haim-joni-mitchell-tribute-1126320/.

This inspired many musicians to write and produce emotional songs that "broadly resonated with many people." By the mid-1960s, the student peace movement resonated more with folk music. Brumlow argues that it was often a way for artists to express songs they were passionate about without being tied to a specific political party. 

Today, the song still carries a lot of weight as it is talked about often and has been in numerous research papers over the last few decades. "Big Yellow Taxi" demonstrates significant themes throughout the song that can resonate with the general public and how her music has the power to talk about the environmental movement continuously. 

Neil Young – "Ohio"

Members of the Ohio National Guard fired gunshots into a crowd of Kent State University demonstrators protesting against the Vietnam War, on May 4, 1970. Four were killed, and nine were wounded that day.

After the shooting, Neil Young wrote "Ohio" in only 15 minutes, and released it the same year. Young's song changed his career, as he was referred to as an iconic protest singer after the release. "Ohio" demonstrates how specific lyrics regarding a national tragedy can carry significant value to the song and meaning to listeners. 

Jennifer Van Evra, “Neil Young: 70 Things You Need to Know about the Canadian Rock Icon | CBC Music Read,” CBC, March 4, 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/music/read/neil-young-70-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-canadian-rock-icon-1.5041674.

In "Music As Multimodal Discourse: Semiotics, Power and Protest" by Lyndon C. S. Way and Simon McKerrell, they reference a theory by Allan Moore that as humans, we have a desire to understand and look for meaning in work such as music, which demonstrates that we have the capability "to make sense of the world by understanding unfamiliar ideas or sounds in terms of familiar ideas." (pg 3)

They explain that some songs offer two meanings: one a narrow range and others as "under-coded" with more analysis (pg 3). With Ohio, the song showcases a narrow range as Young is singing about a particular situation, the Kent State shooting, and is not implying other meanings to the song. The repetition throughout the song also helps get the message across, saying, "Four dead in Ohio." Ohio is an excellent example of how his lyrics are effective at getting the message across about a specific national event and understanding it clearly. 

Willie Dunn – "I Pity The Country"

Folk musician William (Willie) Lawrence Dunn is another musician who used their music to share political issues in Canada and the adversities Indigenous people face.  

Dunn was from the Mi'kmaq First Nation, now known as the lands of the Atlantic provinces of Canada, and carried Scottish and Irish descent.

He was known for his powerful music style and for singing protest songs from an Indigenous perspective. "I Pity The Country," which was also Canada's first music video and was released in 1971, is one of those songs that touches on issues Indigenous peoples faced in the country during the 1960s and early 1970s, but also on the concept of pity. 

Throughout the song, Dunn discusses different issues Indigenous peoples face: how they are viewed in the media, discriminatory laws and practices, and being targeted by police. 

In the first verse, Dunn sings, "Of bigoted news press / Fascist town criers / Deception annoys me / Deception destroys me / The Bill of Rights throws me / In jails they all know me." 

In "First Nations Popular Music in Canada: Musical Meaning and the Politics of Identity," (pg 98) Christopher Scales discusses how Indigenous artists often carry heavy socio-political meaning in their work. However, Scales concludes that musical analysis (lyrics) cannot be read on the surface as it can "imply a simplified, one-way, sender-receiver model of musical communication in which mediation stops at the moment of the audience reception." (pg 101)

With analysis of lyrics, there could be room for a simplified explanation of what a song may be about that the listener interprets. However, deep themes are still clearly expressed in "I Pity The Country" as he sings about topics that most people will know about. Music has the power to address complex topics like the issues Indigenous peoples were facing at the time of Dunn's releasing this song, and can spread to a broader audience if it's written in a way that most people can understand. While it is certainly not the whole scope of issues he and other Indigenous people were facing at that time, it gives a glimpse of perhaps his personal experiences and observations of Canada as a country. 

"I was really proud of him: proud of his musical ability and how much people seemed to look up to his lyrics and his poetry. A lot of it was very poignant for people dealing with the issues they were dealing with. He was one of the only people saying these things," Lawrence Dunn told CBC Radio's All in a Day in 2013 after his death. 

Ferron – "Testimony" 

Folk Vancouver singer-songwriter Ferron challenged the music industry when she began by breaking the status quo in "women's music," according to an article by The Washington Post. Her song "Testimony" is about the challenges women faced, but she also wrote the song while she was searching for her biological father in 1980. This song carries multiple meanings and showcases how adversity can sometimes be intertwined, and to carry it out through a song can demonstrate not only sharing publicly but also showing multiple complicated topics through music. 

For example, one verse states, "And doors and doors of locks / But by my life be I spirit / And by my heart be I women / And be my eyes be I open." This could indicate that she was writing about the longing to be with her biological father, but also the challenges that come with being a woman in society. "Testimony" highlights the multiple complex feelings that can be demonstrated in a song, and that sometimes it's not always as black and white as it may be perceived to be, and being able to share that with a wider audience. 

In conclusion, music can share social justice issues such as political issues, discrimination, environmentalism, and women's rights, but also the power to reach wider audiences through their work versus academic routes. Mills, Dunn, Mitchell, Young, and Ferron all touch on different social issues while tying in their personal experiences or passion for educating others. Folk music has a strong history of expressing social justice issues between 1960 and 1980 compared to other genres, and the songs analyzed can carry complicated or simple messages for people to understand. More research should be conducted on why folk music, in particular, carried higher social justice themes compared to other genres to add to the scholarship of this topic.