It’s hard times. The stock market climbs to a precipitous height while farmers sing, "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" Cotton prices are down, and they sing about it. Railroad strikes fail, and they sing about it. The Scopes Monkey Trial pits science against superstition, and they sing about it. The musical Show Boat breaks the Broadway color line, but Black blues singers still sing of their own invisibility in a racist culture. Arguments rage over primitivism in Black musical culture. Blind Lemon Jefferson takes on the inhumanity of capital punishment, and many more sing against the unjust execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. There is trouble sung on the Ford production line and in rural holdouts resisting the coming dominance of the automobile. But modernity has arrived with a vengeance – not least in the form of the “Flapper” and the “New Girl,” a subject of worry in the more macho sectors of song. On the Gastonia front line, the striking textile worker and balladeer Ella May Wiggins takes a fatal bullet in the chest, and in Spanish Harlem, Rafael Hernández Marín composes his “Lamento Borincano,” Puerto Rico’s own “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

The USA is born as a site of intense struggle in and out of the musical realm. Escapees from slavery sing of such heroes as the maroon leader Jean St. Malo, songs are sung over “The Rights of Woman,” and the labor movement produces its first store of agit-prop songs. As the Indigenous peoples of the east stare into the face of settler-colonial encroachment, the nascent music industry erupts with sentimental songs about the “Noble Savage” and the “Vanishing Indian.” Partisans of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson fight their battles through song, and the Louisiana Purchase doubles the size of the USA and the territory for musical conflict. The rise of the “Injun Fighter” has its own soundtrack, eliding the continued seizure of Indigenous territory. The War of 1812 gives birth to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” while the songs of conscientious objectors are pushed to the margins. Blackface minstrelsy emerges as one of the greatest cultural challenges to Black American self-definition. Meanwhile, eastern cities are bursting at the seams with the steady influx of European immigrants, and the hawks of Manifest Destiny look westward to Texas, Mexico, and beyond, buttressed by shrill musical calls to “Remember the Alamo!”

As resistance to British legislation grows in the American colonies, song intensifies as a political force. Amidst continued white perplexity over the meanings of African music, Occramer Marycoo – also known as Newport Gardner – inaugurates Black American formal composition with his “Promise Anthem” of 1764, a resounding condemnation of slavery. Meanwhile, the Stamp Act, Tea Act, and other British “Intolerable Acts” produce more than riots and organizations like the Sons of Liberty: they produce a store of protest song fronted by the likes of John Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, and the balladeers of the “Boston Massacre.” Loyalist songwriters fight their own losing battles through balladry, and the defeated British troops depart with the strains of “Yankee Doodle” ringing in their ears. The War of Independence may be over; but the songs of class war, women's rights, abolition, and Indigenous lament continue to infiltrate the soundscape of the newborn USA.

Songwork is central to the project of Elizabethan settler colonialism, with English ballads justifying the violence of conquest and reinforcing the stereotypes of Indigenous “savagery” in the Virginia colony. With the introduction of kidnapped Africans as slaves in 1619, the mysteries of African song become the preoccupation of British commentators, who can make neither head nor tail of it. Music becomes a site of colonial policing with the prohibition of African drumming and the attempted control of song. Yet the songs of the oppressed are not wholly stilled, neither in the fields and praise houses of the African bondspeople, nor in the ballads of indentured servants from the prisons and poorhouses of the British Isles. Meanwhile, on the fringes of the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, iconoclast Thomas Morton establishes his Merrymount settlement and infuriates the Puritan elders with his maypole and his bacchanalian ballads, marking perhaps the first instance of secular song as a challenge to the governing establishment. The musical soundscapes of two wars of Puritan conquest – the Pequot War and King Philip’s War – are set against the wars between hymnody and psalmody in the Puritan church. The songs of Bacon’s Rebellion and the poor dragoons of the French and Indian War conclude the chapter.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal both get mixed reviews in song. The Dust Bowl hits the middle of the country, bringing to the fore not only Woody Guthrie and “Sis” Cunningham but also a stable of lesser-known “Dust Bowl Balladeers.” The Harlan County Wars continue in Kentucky, and the balladry proliferates. Sit-down strikes rock Detroit, and their songs resound. “We Shall Not Be Moved” becomes a Spanish-language anthem, and Rafael Hernández Marín sings of Puerto Rico’s Ponce Massacre. Abel Meeropol takes on lynching with his masterpiece, “Strange Fruit,” and Lead Belly damns the racism of the nation’s capital with his “Bourgeois Blues.” The Popular Front resurrects Lincoln as a working-class hero in song, and the fighters of the Lincoln Battalion in Spain march to their own battle tunes. The arenas of musical theater, dance, classical music, and jazz also become battlegrounds with Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles, William Grant Still’s Lenox Avenue, Helen Tamiris’s How Long, Brethren?, Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to Be Free?, and John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concerts. Marian Anderson transforms “America” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Paul Robeson sings a “Ballad for Americans” from coast to coast.

The Crash of ’29 has come, and the Depression anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” is written. The Bonus Army marchers and Cox’s Army descend upon Washington, singing. Rural depression and desperation continue – in folk song, blues, Tin Pan Alley song, and corridos. In “Bloody Harlan,” Kentucky, Florence Reece demands to know “Which Side Are You On?” and Aunt Molly Jackson leads the way in singing the coal miners’ struggle into the national conscience. The nine “Scottsboro Boys” are imprisoned, one of whom – Olen Montgomery – writes his own harrowing “Jailhouse Blues” in condemnation. In New York, Aaron Copland and Charles Seeger agonize over the “correct” way to write revolutionary song, and Black composers Florence Price, William Dawson, and William Grant Still are faced with the mixed blessing of the success of the white-penned Porgy and Bess. The argument over primitivism continues in the Haitian operas of White and Matheus as well as Hall Johnson’s groundbreaking Run, Little Chillun. Down South, the spiritual is transformed into some of the world’s greatest struggle anthems, and John Handcox emerges as the “Sharecropper’s Troubadour” for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Strike songs resound across the West Coast and the industrial heartland, while the queer world swings to the defiant songs of Pansies and Bulldaggers.

Woody Guthrie attempts to compose an anthem that will speak for all Americans: “This Land Is Your Land.” Does he succeed? For some, the answer is “Yes.” For others – notably Indigenous Americans who see it as little more than an homage to settler colonialism – the answer is a resounding “No.”

Conquered peoples are turned into sideshow exhibits at the St. Louis World’s Fair, with Filipinos singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Geronimo singing and dancing for spectators. Black composers fight against the deracialization of ragtime threatened by white popularizers like Irving Berlin and Lewis Muir, while Chinese opera singers work to challenge the orientalism and exoticism of a snowballing “Chinatown” craze in popular music. The walls of the Angel Island and Ellis Island detention centers are scrawled with anonymous songs of despair and outrage, and the corrido continues to challenge US hegemony with its portrayals of legendary outlaws like Gregorio Cortéz and Pancho Villa. George M. Cohan – “the man who owns Broadway” – emerges with his own muscular celebrations of US power. The cities are swelling with immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, and Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths warn them not to “Bite the Hand that Feeds You.” Immigrant performers like Adolf Philipp and Eduardo Migliaccio work to ease the path of assimilation for their fellow countrymen, and the Yiddish musical theater sinks its roots deeper into the foundations of US culture. Puccini’s US-themed operas – Madama Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West – inspire Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick to write The Padrone, his own operatic critique of immigrant exploitation.

Woman suffragists and labor activists continue to sing together, in more than one language, while, in Chicago, the Columbian Exposition of 1893 introduces a new musical genre – ragtime – to the world. Black composers and lyricists – Scott Joplin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Will Marion Cook, Harry T. Burleigh, Bob Cole, and the brothers James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson – work to free themselves from the debasements of the “coon song.” Black operatic singers like Marie Selika Williams and Sissieretta Jones carve out their careers against the tide of popular minstrelsy. A strange new phenomenon – Filipinos in “coon songs” – reflects the latest muscle flex of US Manifest Destiny: the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and – for good measure – Hawai’i, all richly captured in popular song. Lili’uokalani’s overthrow and Hawaiian annexation lead to two remarkable musical by-products of US imperialism: the infiltration of Puerto Rican kachi kachi music in Hawai’i and the unique work-song body – the hole hole bushi – of the Japanese plantation laborers – all women. Meanwhile, Tin Pan Alley has a field day with the newly seized territory, transforming a site of misery and loss into a popular music paradise with the likes of “Hula Hula Dream Girl,” “Along the Way to Waikiki,” and “Oh! How She Could Yacki Hacki Wiki Wacki Woo.”