SewYKnot Podcast interview with Will Kaufman on American Songs of Protest & Struggle

American Cultural; Critic living in England, Will Kaufman jumped the pond from New Jersey in the eighties for post-grad and liked it so much, he didn’t come back. He made fine use of that early education though, when he became a professor on American Lit and an expert on Woody Guthrie.

He’s just released his second volume in a series on American songs of protest and struggle, this running from the post-war to the current day. Kaufman’s a sharp, expansive thinker (as well as a guitarist) and the conversation wanders freely around subjects of music, literature and politics.

We discuss how Will became an expert on Woody Guthrie, Woody's aesthetic, the difference between struggle vs. protest songs, and the Mermaid Avenue/Man in the Sand sessions with Wilco, notably, Jeff Tweedy, and Billy Bragg, We talk a bit about Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Pete Seegar, as well as the emergence of bee-bop, Ella Fitzgerald and Sara Vaughn.

We also discuss hip-hop, punk and the Paul Simon/Martin Carthy row over “Scarborough Fair,” and how that illustrates many of the contradictions of the cultural appropriations argument, which at its core is just about acknowledgment in the first place.

We discuss the challenges of describing music no one has ever heard and how one collapses 80 years of modern music history into a single volume. We dig into the challenge of satire and its role as a vehicle of speech and how it dovetails with protest, the question of whether it’s legal to sing your testimony to the court, how protest and satire function to diminish the perceived power of the oppressors and the lessons this might hold for this moment in time.