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i

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

ii
iii

WHICH SIDE ARE

YOU ON?
20th Century American History
in 100 Protest Songs

James Sullivan
Foreword by the Reverend Lennox Yearwood
and Bill McKibben

1
iv

1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Sullivan, James, 1965 November 7-​author.
Title: Which side are you on? : 20th century American history in 100 protest
songs /​James Sullivan ; foreword by Reverend Lennox Yearwood and Bill McKibben.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018012412| ISBN 9780190660307 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190660321 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Protest songs—​United States—​20th century—​History and
criticism. | Music—​Political aspects—​United States—​History—​20th century.
Classification: LCC ML3917.U6 S85 2019 | DDC 782.42/​15920973—​dc23
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2018012412

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

v

To the ReSisters
vi
vi

CONTENTS

Foreword ix
Introduction xi

1. Nonviolence 1
2. Workers Unite 23
3. Civil Rights 45
4. The Rights of Women 65
5. The Environment 89
6. Freedom of Speech 107
7. Gay Pride 125
8. Immigration and the “Other” 147
9. No Nukes 163
10. Into the Twenty-​first Century 181

Acknowledgments 201
Notes 203
Bibliography 215
Index 219
vi
ix

FOREWORD

Neither of us are musicians, but both of us have some experience with protest,
and we can say with assurance that if you’re not singing—​or dancing, or using
the tools that culture has to offer—​you’re not doing it right.
We say this for several reasons. One is internal. Movements are made up of
human beings, and human beings are braver and more unified when they are
singing. If, say, you are sitting someplace you’re not supposed to be, waiting
to get arrested, you can’t help but feel a little worried. But if you’re all singing
“We Shall Not Be Moved,” or “We Shall Overcome,” it’s easier to remind
yourself that you’re part of a tradition, that you have friends all around you,
that you are stronger than you think. And in jail? The civil rights movement
made clear that songs of freedom keep you strong, especially when you are
alone and feeling discouraged, and we’ve found that to be true.
But at least as important, music helps other people understand what
you’re up to. The point of movements is to shift the zeitgeist, to persuade
onlookers (and most people are onlookers) that change must come. Some of
this persuasion is done with statistics and arguments—​you have to win the
argument. But you can win the argument and lose the fight, because fights
are often about power. The status quo can usually count on money as its ally;
those trying to force change have to find other weapons. And some of the
strongest weapons are music and art—​an appeal to that half of the human
brain that does not respond to bar graphs and pie charts.
One of the finest things about music is the way it can bridge the gulfs
that have divided Americans and kept them from cooperating for change. We
know, for instance, that when people think about music for environmentalists,
they tend to imagine a white guy in a sweater with a guitar strapped around
his neck. John Denver, say. But the finest and most important environmental
anthem in American history is almost certainly Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy
Me (The Ecology Song).” It’s a reminder that in 1970 the environment seemed
as much a project of inner-​city America as of the wilderness. If we’d kept that
x

x • Foreword

link stronger, we might have avoided abominations like Flint’s water crisis.
That’s why it’s so powerful right now to see hip-​hop and R&B musicians
writing the next wave of environmental songs.
This volume is a powerful reminder of just how crucial music has been
over the long history of American protest. And it’s a reminder too of the way
that America has specialized in protest—​one of the great gifts we’ve given to
the rest of the world has been the long and rich history of people standing up
to power. America was born in protest against the greatest empire on earth,
and protesters have tried to fix some of its grave defects ever since. This book
emerges in a moment of great upheaval, as many Americans try to come to
terms with the radical presidency of Donald Trump. More than ever, we
need hearts and minds moved simultaneously. We have a great tradition to
draw on!
Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Hip Hop Caucus
Bill McKibben, 350.org
xi

INTRODUCTION

The Star-​Spangled Banner

Though this book is about the power of words, the American protest song
that spoke the loudest may be the one that was played without them.
When Jimi Hendrix wrung the notes of “The Star-​Spangled Banner”
from his white Fender Stratocaster from the Woodstock stage on a breaking
Sunday morning in August 1969, he bombarded the melody with eruptions
of feedback. Those amplified sound effects echoed the war that was tearing
apart the country of Vietnam, and, closer to home, the American family: the
cluster-​bombing, the machine-​g un fire, the slapping helicopter blades, the
screaming napalm victims.
Hendrix himself had been a candidate for duty in Vietnam, having en-
listed in the US Army at the age of eighteen and been assigned to the 101st
Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He never made it to the field
of battle. An indifferent soldier, he was honorably discharged following an
ankle injury on a training jump.
A few weeks after the Woodstock Music & Art Fair—​the cultural event
in Upstate New York that would define a generation—​Hendrix made a rare
appearance on a television talk show, sitting down with interviewer Dick
Cavett for his prime-​time ABC program. When Cavett asked about the “con-
troversy” the guitar’s rendition of the national anthem had evoked, Hendrix
replied, “I don’t know, man. I’m American, and so I played it. . . . They made
me sing it in school, so it was a flashback.”
Persisting gently, Cavett noted the unorthodoxy of Hendrix’s approach
to the song.
“That’s not unorthodox,” the soft-​spoken musician responded. “I thought
it was beautiful.”

Ask Johnny Cash to choose, and he’d take the side of the disadvantaged every
time. In a field of music dominated by cowboys, the country singer told tales
xi

xii • Introduction

of the Native Americans they’d vanquished. He sang of the farmhands and the
assembly line workers. He recorded his fabled live albums at Folsom Prison
and San Quentin because he felt a kinship with the inmates and the outlaws.
He sang for the forgotten, the outsiders, the ones who have no voice.
On this day in early 1970, however, Johnny Cash was going to the White
House. He’d been invited by President Nixon, who’d heard impressive things
about the singer from the Reverend Billy Graham, a mutual friend. At the
height of his career, with a weekly network television show and a long string
of hit records dating back to the mid-​1950s, Cash was an entertainment king.
Nixon had a few requests. The president wanted to hear Cash sing “A Boy
Named Sue,” his oddball hit written by Shel Silverstein; “Welfare Cadillac,” a
wry poke at federal handouts by the songwriter Guy Drake; and “Okie from
Muskogee,” Merle Haggard’s classic song about the great divide between tra-
ditional American values and the counterculture of the 1960s. Cash did play
“A Boy Named Sue,” but he politely declined to perform the others: he didn’t
know them, he claimed. During a forty-​minute appearance, Cash and his
accompanists performed songs including “Five Feet High and Rising,” “Jesus
Was a Carpenter,” and the gospel standard “Peace in the Valley.”
Cash also played a new song that, like Haggard’s, addressed the generation
gap then roiling the country. “What Is Truth” was inspired by comments Cash
heard on the set of his television show, when a fellow country music veteran
complained that he couldn’t make sense of the loud rock music the younger gen-
eration was making. Cash had written his latest single at the urging of Graham,
the evangelical minister, who’d suggested the youth of America needed some
guidance. Instead, the song attempted to explain their side to his own peers.
“Maybe I was trying to be a kid again,” he told the guests at the White House.

A little boy of three sittin’ on the floor

Looks up and says, “Daddy, what is war?”
“Son, that’s when people fight and die”
A little boy of three says, “Daddy, why?”

“What Is Truth” went on to remind those in power that the young were des-
tined to have their day: “The ones that you’re callin’ wild/​Are going to be the
leaders in a little while.” After he finished delivering the song, Cash quietly
told the president that he hoped the soldiers who were overseas could come
home as soon as possible. The two hundred guests responded with a sincere,
sustained round of applause.1
xi

Introduction • xiii

A year later, Cash released another purposeful new single, this one called
“Man in Black.” He’d written it after meeting with students at Vanderbilt
University to discuss a range of issues. Asked why he wore black clothing
onstage, he used his answer as the song’s theme. He wore black, he wrote,
as a comment on the world’s inequities. He chose to wear somber colors to
honor the poor, the hungry, the elderly, the “beaten down.” He dressed in
black for those who hadn’t heard Jesus’ message of love and charity, and for
the thousands who died in wartime, “believing that the Lord was on their
side.” Some troubles may never be solved, Cash knew, but we could surely
make some things right. “Till things are brighter,” he rumbled, “I’m the man
in black.”

The hardest song to write is a protest song, Joan Baez once said, though few of
her contemporaries seemed to think so. The 1960s—​so full of disruption that
the adjectives “turbulent” and “tumultuous” are practically synonymous with
the decade—​were consumed with a spirit of popular protest. Folk, rock, and
soul musicians wrote and performed songs that condemned segregation and
bigotry, the war in Vietnam, the second-​class status of women, the plunder of
Mother Earth. Some of those words have proven timeless.

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
There’s a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware.
War—​what is it good for?

From the American Revolution to the twenty-​first century, every social de-
bate in America—​about war, class, gender, race, the environment—​has been
set to song. “This machine kills fascists,” as Woody Guthrie inscribed on his
guitar—​but his familiar model of the guitar-​strumming dissident is only one
of many. Protest music has spanned nearly every style of American music,
from the town common to the digital commons.
The United States was born out of protest, and many of the country’s
greatest artistic contributions have come as protest in one form or another.
Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land” about freedoms not granted,
but restricted. Spirituals and blues lamented racial inequality. Rock ’n’ roll
originated as the voice of an underestimated youth movement. Hip-​hop, too,
emerged from an overlooked segment of society as an urge to be heard.
The nineteenth century saw the dawning of social movements to demand
the abolition of slavery and the end of segregation; equal rights for women,
including the right to vote; and overdue safeguards for the working class,
xvi

xiv • Introduction

from shorter workdays and compensation for injuries sustained on the job to
the curtailing of child labor practices.
“Write and sing about it,” urged Joshua McCarter Simpson, a freeborn
man who composed dozens of antislavery songs. “You can sing what would
be death to speak.”
The right to protest was ingrained in the American experiment from its very
inception. New World colonists demonstrated against the duties imposed on
them as English subjects, arguing that they had no voice in Parliament. “No
taxation without representation,” as the Congregational minister Jonathan
Mayhew put it in a sermon in Boston in 1750, coining the phrase that would
help spark the American Revolution.
Like many of his fellow Bostonians at the time, Andrew Oliver felt that
the British Parliament’s Stamp Act of 1765 would be an onerous burden on
commerce in the New World. But Oliver, scion of a merchant family, was not
one to protest.
As a public official, having served as Boston’s town auditor, Oliver duti-
fully accepted when he was appointed to administer the Stamp Act, which
levied taxes on the distribution of newspapers, legal documents, and even
playing cards in the colonies. The edict was an unpopular one, to say the least.
During the night leading into August 14, 1765, a group of Boston’s most vehe-
ment Stamp Act opponents hung Oliver in effigy from a sturdy American elm
standing at the edge of Boston’s South End, near the Boston Common. In the
morning, Thomas Hutchinson, the patriarch who would become governor of
the province of Massachusetts Bay, called for the removal of the effigy. But a
gathering mob guarded the scene around the symbolic meeting point, which
they’d named the Liberty Tree.2
As the day progressed, the demonstration led to a march through the
streets, during which the protesters destroyed a building rumored to be one of
the new stamp distribution centers. Then they set upon Oliver’s private home,
stomping through his garden and ransacking the interior. When Hutchinson
tried to intervene, they threw stones. Within days, Oliver had resigned from
his post.
That year produced one of the first musical salvos of the colonists’ resent-
ment toward the British crown. Written by a Connecticut schoolteacher
named Peter St. John, “American Taxation” (sung to the tune of the traditional
marching song “The British Grenadiers”) accused King George of enacting
laws “of the blackest kind.”3 Soon the Boston agitators were promoting a boy-
cott on imported British goods, particularly fabrics. In the popular ballad
“To the Ladies,” American women were implored to spurn British fashion
xv

Introduction • xv

in favor of “clothes of your own make and spinning.” The boycott resulted in
an estimated $3 million drop (more than $85 million in today’s dollars) in
British exports to the colonies in the year 1769.
Around the time the boycott was established, Philadelphia’s John
Dickinson celebrated the resistance in a poem. Dickinson, later known as the
“Penman of the Revolution” for his series of essays “Letters from a Farmer in
Pennsylvania,” would serve as a delegate to the First Continental Congress.
Though he would decline to sign the Declaration of Independence, favoring
mediation over open revolution, Dickinson wrote “The Liberty Song” as a ral-
lying cry against submission to England’s oppressive legislation: “For shame is
to freemen more dreadful than pain.”4 He set his verse to the tune of “Hearts
of Oak,” a beloved British military song that celebrated the British navy’s vic-
torious campaigns overseas. Dickinson’s song quickly drew a rejoinder from
the Loyalist side, “Parody upon a Well-​Known Liberty Song.” First printed
in the Boston Gazette, the satire took aim at the “numskulls” and “pumpkins”
who resorted to demonstrating in the streets against the Crown: “All ages
shall speak with contempt and amaze/​of the vilest banditti that swarmed in
these days.”5
But the protesters were to gather again. Eight years after the first mob ac-
tion against the Stamp Act, Boston’s Sons of Liberty demanded that a prom-
inent tea merchant appear under the Liberty Tree to recuse himself of his
contract with the East India Company. The Tea Act of 1773 had granted
the merchant’s troubled company a virtual monopoly on the tea trade in the
North American colonies. “Fail not upon your peril,” wrote the protesters in
their demand. When the merchant did not show up, the Boston Tea Party
began in earnest.
By then, the Liberty Tree was a symbol of the colonists’ “glorious cause,”
their fight for home rule. Occupying British soldiers ridiculed the tree. When
they detained an aspiring Minuteman who tried to arrange to buy arms from
an undercover British soldier, they tarred and feathered him and carted him
to the Liberty Tree. As they marched, a fife and drum corps playing a derisive
rendition of “Yankee Doodle.”
Finally, in August 1775, a group of British loyalists chopped down the
old elm, using the logs for firewood. For years the stump remained, a re-
minder of the revolution the Sons of Liberty helped incite. In memory
of the tree, hundreds of seedlings—​the new Liberty Trees—​were planted
on commons across the colonies. A pine tree flag, often bearing the in-
scription “An Appeal to Heaven,” became a familiar sight during the
Revolutionary War.
xvi

xvi • Introduction

Thomas Paine, the political philosopher who wrote the pro-​independence

pamphlet “Common Sense,” found the inspiration of the Liberty Tree worthy
of his own poem. He published the verse in Pennsylvania Magazine during
the summer of 1775. (Sometime after the first publication, Paine added a sub-
title: “A Song, Written Early in the American Revolution.”) Set to a pastoral
air, “Liberty Tree” helped spread early word that the revolution was immi-
nent. It eventually became a rallying cry for the American rebels.

From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms

Through the land let the sound of it flee
Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer
In defense of our Liberty Tree.6

Few songs from the time of the Revolutionary War survived much beyond
the period. Music itself played a complicated role in everyday life in colonial
America; the descendants of the original settlers were often still influenced
by the Puritans’ disavowal of entertainment in any form. And much of the
music that did become familiar to the colonists tended to be based on British
ballads. But Paine’s verse, like those of St. John and Dickinson, was an early
example of the American protest song: an exercise, set to rhyme and melody,
of the First Amendment’s guarantee “to petition the government for a redress
of grievances.”
“The duty of youth is to challenge corruption,” said the late Kurt Cobain.
And not just the young. More than two centuries after the revolutionaries
won independence, the folk singer Pete Seeger, then in his late eighties,
performed a rendition of Paine’s song at the dedication of the New York
Liberty Tree at Washington’s Headquarters, the Hudson Valley farm where
the first president once lived. New York’s Liberty Tree was one of thirteen
saplings harvested from the oldest surviving Liberty Tree, planted in each of
the original thirteen colonies by an environmental conservation group.
“In the largest sense,” Seeger once said, “every work of art is pro-
test. . . . A lullaby is a propaganda song, and any three-​year-​old knows it.”
The songs covered in this book—​one hundred of them that span a century
of petition in the name of social progress—​are more eloquent than speech.
They were written and performed by artists both popular and unpopular, fa-
mous and unknown, commercially successful and unrecorded. Published at a
time of notable unrest, just like many others in our collective history, Which
Side Are You On? will tell the story of modern American democracy, and the
music that had the audacity to speak up and take a side.
xvi

Introduction • xvii

This book is a selective survey. A hundred songs is a lot of songs, but there
were dozens more considered, and still more hundreds that might have been.
In focusing on American issues, I have chosen not to include the brilliant pro-
test music of the Clash, Bob Marley, Fela Kuti, or Victor Jara, to name a few of
the many omissions some readers may note. Neither should the book be read
as a comprehensive history of the social movements described in each chapter.
These are introductions only.
The lessons handed down from the major social movements of the twen-
tieth century—​from organized labor, civil rights, women’s liberation, op-
position to war—​have left a proliferation of causes that sometimes feels too
multifarious, too factionalized, for any kind of meaningful gain. There are
many distinct definitions of feminism, for instance; those who identify as
environmentalists range from organic consumers to ecoterrorists; various
groups call themselves libertarians, socialists, anti-​globalists, anarchists. “At
times,” writes the longtime activist and journalist L. A. Kauffman, “it can
seem like the number of recent radicalisms stands in inverse proportion to
their overall influence.”7
The 1960s were a heyday of protest against which all future dissenting
voices would be measured. Every new cause for demonstration in recent
years, be it climate change, police brutality, or a legislative assault on the
social safety net, has invited questions about the supposed scarcity of
modern protest songs. In fact, however, protest music thrives. In February
2017, two weeks after the presidential inauguration, the chameleonic pop
star Lady Gaga appeared during the NFL Super Bowl halftime show in
Houston. A year after Beyoncé’s halftime performance, which was seen in
part as a statement against racial profiling, some critics saw Lady Gaga’s
performance as refreshingly apolitical. But to those who recognize the
legacy of protest song in this country, her opening rendition of Woody
Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” paired with Irving Berlin’s “God Bless
America,” suggested otherwise.
xvi
xi

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

x

War protesters, c. 1940.

Credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing.
http://​www.loc.gov/​pictures/​resource/​hec.28132/​
1

1 NONVIOLENCE

I-​Feel-​Like-​I’m-​Fixin’-​to-​Die Rag –​ Handsome Johnny –​ With God on Our Side –​

I Ain’t Marching Anymore –​Three-​Five-​Zero-​Zero –​Kill for Peace –​The Strange
Death of John Doe –​Waist Deep in the Big Muddy –​I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a
Soldier –​God Bless America

“War is hell,” said, among many, William Tecumseh Sherman.

“I am tired and sick of war,” he once confessed. “Its glory is all
moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard
the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for
vengeance, for desolation.”
Sherman’s Union troops almost surely sang a similar sentiment.
“We are tired of war,” as one verse begins in “Tenting on the Old
Camp Ground,” one of the most popular songs to be produced
during the war meant “to preserve the Union.” Written in 1863 by
New Hampshire native Walter Kittredge, the song was conceived,
as its composer noted, while he was “soon expecting to go down
South to join the boys in blue.”1
One hundred years after Sherman, the fierce debate across the
United States over the purpose of another war—​this time the one
in Vietnam—​felt like its own kind of hell. By the late 1960s there
appeared to be no end in sight in the battle against communist
influence in Asia, which the adversary was conducting in an un-
conventional style that bewildered the American generals. Back at
home in America, the country convulsed in recrimination and mis-
trust. What were we fighting for?
One conscientious objector encouraged his peers to raise
their own voices in outrage, creating one of the enduring images
of politically charged popular music. For the generation of mili-
tary draft-​age young adults who were mobilizing the opposition,
the Woodstock Music & Art Fair was a cultural event that came to
symbolize a true political awakening. In an early afternoon solo set
on muddy farmland in Upstate New York, Country Joe McDonald
2

2 • W h i c h S i d e A r e y o u  O n ?

goaded his vast audience of bleary-​eyed listeners, who were just waking up
after the first night of the soon-​to-​be-​legendary weekend festival. “Listen,
people, I don’t know how you expect to ever stop the war if you can’t sing
it any better than that,” he chastised as the crowd half-​heartedly sang along.
“There’s about three hundred thousand of you fuckers out there. I want you
to start singing! Come on!”
Wearing an unbuttoned, olive drab Army surplus shirt and a bandanna
folded into a headband around his long, wavy hair, McDonald coaxed
his crowd—​young, shirtless men in the midday sun, young women in
peasant blouses—​to climb to their feet and join in to the bitter satire of his
“I-​Feel-​Like-​I’m-​Fixin’-​to-​Die Rag.”

Well it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?

Don’t tell me I don’t give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! We’re all gonna die!

McDonald was the second act on Saturday, the second day of the festival.
Early Sunday evening he performed again, this time with his band, and
reprised his anti-​war “rag.”
The defiant tone of the festival had been set when the folk singer Richie
Havens inaugurated the weekend’s events at five o’clock on Friday afternoon.
A familiar presence on the Greenwich Village folk scene, Havens opened
his acoustic performance with “Minstrel from Gaul,” an original song that
alluded to the war with an image of a soldier who “came down from Dien
Bien Phu with silence in his eyes.” In the last verse, Havens evoked the Ten
Commandments (“a man came down from Sinai mountain with words of
truth for us all”) before concluding that God’s lessons had gone unheeded.
“When it came to listening,” he sang, “we listened little, if at all, if at all.”
Havens, who had family roots in the Blackfoot tribe and the British
West Indies, was born and raised in Brooklyn. In 1966 he released his debut
album, Mixed Bag, which included the anti-​war song “Handsome Johnny,”
which he performed near the end of his set at Woodstock. Havens co-​wrote
the song with the actor Louis Gossett, Jr., then known for his roles on and
off Broadway. Each verse imagined an American soldier marching off to
war: there’s Handsome Johnny marching off to Concord “with a musket in
his hand.” There he is marching to Gettysburg with a flintlock in his hand.
3

Nonviolence • 3

Our man Johnny goes off to Dunkirk and Korea and Vietnam, and the result,
the lyrics imply, is always the same—​always tragic. “Hey, what’s the use of
singing this song/​Some of you are not even listening,” Havens scolded. But
the song did have an effect, as he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, when he
performed it on The Tonight Show the year before Woodstock. “The live au-
dience was mostly made up of visiting tourists from the Midwest,” Havens
remembered. “To my surprise, the audience understood perfectly what was
being said about the war.” When he finished, they stood and applauded.2
If Richie Havens took a somber approach to the absurdity of war, Country
Joe met that absurdity on its own terms. Joseph Allen McDonald was raised
by parents who were Communist Party members in their youth. They’d
named their son, who was born in Washington, DC, after Joseph Stalin.
McDonald served three years in the US Navy beginning at age seventeen.
After his discharge, he made his way from Southern California to Berkeley,
where he busked on Telegraph Avenue, amid growing student dissent over
the conflict overseas and the Free Speech Movement that was polarizing the
nearby UC–​Berkeley campus.
Formed out of the irreverent folk music revival that produced the Jim
Kweskin Jug Band and the groups that would soon become the Lovin’
Spoonful and the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish evolved in 1965
from McDonald’s earlier group, the Instant Action Jug Band, which he’d
formed with the guitarist Barry Melton. Besides making music, for a year or
two McDonald published an underground paper called Rag Baby. His pub-
lishing partner, Eugene “ED” Denson, was then a music columnist for the
Berkeley Barb; he’d cofounded the independent Takoma Records label with
guitarist John Fahey.
Denson helped McDonald record an audio version of their publication in
the form of a limited-​edition, extended-​play vinyl recording. The EP Rag Baby
Talking Issue No. 1, one hundred copies of which were sold in the autumn of
1965, featured two topical songs by a local folk musician named Peter Krug,
one of them called “Johnny’s Gone to the War.” The flip side was pressed with
two songs by the group now billed as Country Joe and the Fish. The band
name referenced both Stalin’s World War II nickname, which McDonald
adopted as his own, and a favored expression of another Communist giant,
the Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who once referred to revolutionaries as
those who “must move amongst the people as the fish swims in the sea.”3
Those two songs by Country Joe and the Fish included a jab at President
Lyndon B. Johnson called “Superbird” and the antiwar ditty—​written in a half
hour, McDonald has claimed—​that he called his “I-​Feel-​Like-​I’m-​Fixin’-​to-​Die
4

4 • W h i c h S i d e A r e y o u  O n ?

Rag.” “Be the first on your block to have your boy come home in a box!”
he sang like some sort of deranged huckster, savaging the law-​abiding citi-
zens who had yet to come around to the idea that the war in Vietnam was
unsupportable.
The band featured a new version of their anti-​ war broadside—​
sometimes called the “Fish Cheer” for its invitation to audiences to spell
out F-​I-​S-​H—​on their second album, which took the song’s name as its
title. By 1969, the war resistance that had begun in the leftist corners of
college campuses had grown into a mass movement. The Woodstock gen-
eration would be defined by its scruffy style, its mind-​altering substances
and the art forms that accompanied those trips, and, most of all, its paci-
fist, hedonistic activism.
The era produced the most sustained wave of issue-​oriented popular music
that the recording industry has ever supported. Most famously, Bob Dylan
seized the attention of his peers with topical songs that expressed the anxieties
of the Cold War and the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, among them
“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s a-​Gonna Fall,” and “Masters of War,”
all of which appeared on his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. But
it was the young balladeer’s “With God on Our Side,” the third song on his
next release, The Times They Are a-​Changin’, that seemed to speak directly to
the escalating tensions in Vietnam, though Dylan didn’t mention the conflict
by name.
Like “Handsome Johnny” and Buffy Sainte-​Marie’s “Universal Soldier,”
another song (released in 1964) that questioned the motives behind all wars,
“With God on Our Side” spans hundreds of years of conflict. Dylan’s verses
march forward from the extermination campaigns of Native Americans to
the Spanish-​American War, the Civil War, and more recent times when the
country’s young men fought “with God on our side.”
“You never ask questions when God’s on your side,” he suggested—​before
doing just that.

The words fill my head

And fall to the floor
That if God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war

The debut of Dylan’s song brought about an early instance of the sourcing
disputes that would become a familiar part of his legacy. The song borrowed
liberally from “The Patriot Game,” a contemporary Irish ballad about a deadly
5

Nonviolence • 5

Irish Republican Army raid in the 1950s. The folk singer Dominic Behan, in
turn, drew his own melody from older sources, such as the traditional tune
“The Merry Month of May.”
Whatever the provenance, Dylan’s antiwar song was a thing of beauty to
Joan Baez, who found it to be the first modern protest song she felt compelled
to sing. “It was a song that, as the Quakers say, spoke to Joan’s condition,”
as David Hajdu would write.4 The two sang it together for the first time at
the Monterey Folk Festival in May 1963, marking Dylan’s West Coast debut.
When Dylan took the stage by himself, the crowd wasn’t impressed. Unsure
what to make of him, they chatted and laughed through his short set. But
when Baez strode up to join him, she urged the audience to listen closely to
this young man, who had something to say. By the time they finished singing
“With God on Our Side” together, the newcomer was ready to join Baez as
an idol of the folk scene.
Twenty years after Dylan renounced his short-​lived role as a “protest” folk
singer, he added a new verse about the Vietnam War for his occasional live
renditions of “With God on Our Side.” Just as Country Joe McDonald would
demand, Dylan’s question is simple and direct: “Can somebody tell me what
we’re fighting for?”

So many young men died

So many mothers cried
Now I ask the question
Was God on our side?

One of Dylan’s most polemical peers, Phil Ochs, who brought a journalist’s
sensibility to the coffeehouse folk scene, released an album in 1965 named
for its title track, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” which quickly became the
singer’s signature song. “It’s always the old who lead us to war, always the young
to fall,” Ochs sang over his own acoustic guitar accompaniment, picking the
strings like a one-​man fife and drum corps. His lyrics, too, imagined a uni-
versal soldier who represented generations of casualties, from the Battle of
New Orleans during the War of 1812 and Custer’s last stand in the Battle of
Little Bighorn to the world war “that was bound to end all wars”—​and the
enlistees the US government was sending overseas two decades later. The
many songs Ochs ripped from the headlines (in fact, he named his debut
album All the News That’s Fit to Sing) featured themes such as labor struggle,
institutional racism, and political apathy. At a time when the Vietnam War
was just beginning to intensify, he recorded a song called “The War Is Over,”
6

6 • W h i c h S i d e A r e y o u  O n ?

which presented a case for the power of wishful thinking: “The gypsy fortune
teller told me that we’d been deceived/​You only are what you believe.” He
chose to believe that the war was, in fact, over.
Still, Ochs continued to agitate through his music. When he performed “I
Ain’t Marching Anymore” for the throng of protesters gathered outside the
Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, scores of young men
burned their draft cards. For the rest of his short life, Ochs would consider
that moment the highlight of his career.5
A few months before the appalling violence that gripped the Democratic
National Convention in 1968, the drama that would define the generation
gap hit the stage. In April 1968, the rock musical Hair (bearing the descrip-
tive subtitle The American Tribal Love-​Rock Musical) opened at New York
City’s Biltmore Theater after a short, celebrated run off-​Broadway. Among
the many memorable songs in the show, several—​“Aquarius,” “Easy to Be
Hard,” “Good Morning Starshine”—​became major pop hits. New York
Times critic Clive Barnes was enthusiastic about the show, though he felt
compelled to inform his readers that the book featured “frequent approving
references . . . to the expanding benefits of drugs.” The American flag, while
not exactly desecrated, “is used in a manner that not everyone would call re-
spectful,” Barnes continued. “Christian ritual also comes in for a bad time,
the authors approve enthusiastically of miscegenation, and one enterprising
lyric catalogues somewhat arcane sexual practices more familiar to the ‘Kama
Sutra’ than the New York Times. So there—​you have been warned. Oh yes,
they also hand out flowers.”6
As risque and groundbreaking as it was, Hair owed a significant debt to
an earlier, less successful show. The off-​Broadway musical Viet Rock was “the
first realized theatrical statement about the Vietnam war and a rare instance
of theater confronting issues broader than individual psychology,” wrote
Michael Smith in the Village Voice.7 Playwright Megan Terry, known as the
“mother of American feminist drama,” developed her shows through improv-
isational rehearsals with her actors, who were encouraged to help rework the
scripts, often even after the shows had opened. Among the innovations of
Viet Rock, as the theater historian Scott Miller has noted, were its emphasis
on rock music, actors who were encouraged to leave the stage for direct inter-
action with their audiences, and a heavy reliance on the “cliches” of the mass
media.8 Gerome Ragni, the future co-​creator of Hair, was one of the principal
actors on Viet Rock through its performance runs at La MaMa Experimental
Theatre Club and the Martinique Theatre. He borrowed many of Terry’s ideas
for the new show.
7

Nonviolence • 7

Hair’s opening date on Broadway was chosen by an astrologer. The good-​

luck gesture apparently worked: the original show would run for 1,742
performances. One of the many elements that impressed critics was the
show’s use of actors who were themselves conducting their lives much like
the characters in the play: “Instead of finding conventional musical-​comedy
performers to impersonate hippies,” explained a reviewer in the Saturday
Review, director Tom O’Horgan “has encouraged a bunch of mainly hippie
performers inventively to explore their own natures with songs and dance.”9
In Act II, the members of the “tribe” address their generation’s distress
over the war against the Viet Cong in the experimental song “Three-​Five-​
Zero-​Zero.” With the title borrowed from a line in Allen Ginsberg’s an-
tiwar poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” the song opens with the kind of searing
electric guitar feedback that Jimi Hendrix would play at Woodstock in his
distorted instrumental version of “The Star-​Spangled Banner.” Ginsberg’s
poem, inspired during a cross-​country bus trip by the disorienting, rapid-​
fire news reports from the front lines of the war, was an attempt to wrest the
power of words from the government’s public relations machine. Several
phrases—​“Ripped open by metal explosion/​Caught in barbed wire”—​
were transposed verbatim into the musical. The song, written by show co-​
creators Jerry Ragni and James Rado (with music by Galt MacDermot),
toggles between a funereal recitation and an incongruous kind of halle-
lujah chorus that highlights the folly of war. Ginsberg attributed the figure
“Three-​Five-​Z ero-​Z ero” to the calculations of General Maxwell D. Taylor,
one of President Johnson’s advisers:

Viet Cong losses leveling up three five zero zero per month
Front page testimony February ’66
Here in Nebraska same as Kansas same known in Saigon
in Peking, in Moscow, same known
by the youths of Liverpool three five zero zero
the latest quotation in the human meat market . . .10

Hair was nominated for a Tony Award as the year’s best musical, and
the show’s original cast recording won a Grammy for Best Score from an
Original Cast Show Album, selling three million copies in the process. The
5th Dimension’s medley version of “Aquarius/​Let the Sunshine In (The
Flesh Failures)” would become the number one song of 1969. On the sur-
face a celebration of the Aquarian generation, “Let the Sunshine In” was, on a
deeper level, a desperate plea for tolerance and compassion. The song’s sheer
8

8 • W h i c h S i d e A r e y o u  O n ?

exuberance sometimes masked its anguish. “Everyone always portrays it as

a happy song,” argues Miller, artistic director of the alternative New Line
Theatre in St. Louis. In fact, he believes, the characters are “begging the audi-
ence to let the sunshine in. They’re saying please, please, get rid of the dark-
ness. Realizing that changed the show for me.”
Allen Ginsberg was also an inspiration for the Fugs, the irreverent East
Village band that inflicted “total assault on the culture,” as the writer William
S. Burroughs once described. Formed by the poets Ed Sanders and Tuli
Kupferberg with drummer Ken Weaver, the Fugs took their name from the
euphemism coined by Norman Mailer in his debut war novel, The Naked
and the Dead. At the Sing-​In for Peace, an all-​star concert that took place at
Carnegie Hall in September 1965, the Fugs subverted the solemnity that Joan
Baez, Phil Ochs, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, and dozens of others
brought to the program, performing their song “Kill for Peace,” a wicked
satire of the human instinct to wage war. They left the stage, Sanders claimed,
to “thunderous applause.”
The Sing-​In for Peace was organized by Irwin Silber, editor of Sing Out!,
the quarterly bible of the folk scene, and the folk and jazz singer Barbara
Dane. After the two-​part program ended around 3 a.m., several hundred
participants marched from Carnegie Hall to the Village Gate nightclub,
where they continued to sing until dawn. While the concert received little
media coverage due to a New York City newspaper strike, it did achieve
the organizers’ goal, which was to raise enough money to fund newspaper
advertisements condemning the war. “American boys are dying today in
Vietnam in a brutal, senseless war,” read the open letter, which ran several
months later in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. “Their
deaths constitute a national tragedy.”11
In February 1967, Ed Sanders appeared on the cover of Life magazine,
representing the emerging “worldwide underground,” which the publication
called the “Other Culture.” He was invited to make a guest appearance on
Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, but the invitation was rescinded when Sanders
insisted the Fugs be allowed to sing “Kill for Peace” on the air.
It would take The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour to bring the antiwar
spirit of the counterculture to prime-​time television. The comic folk-​singing
duo Tom and Dick Smothers were raised by their mother in Southern
California following the death of their father, an army officer who was
captured by the Japanese during World War II. They were already familiar
faces on network TV by the time they were awarded their CBS variety series,
which debuted in February 1967. Their show, designed to attract a younger
9

Nonviolence • 9

audience, launched the careers of an impressive list of writers and comic ac-
tors, including Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, and Albert Brooks.
The Smothers Brothers also showcased a wide variety of musical guests,
among them Baez, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, and Harry Belafonte. For
their second season premiere in September 1967, the cohosts welcomed Pete
Seeger, who had not been invited on network television since the earliest days
of the medium. A target in the early 1950s of the House Committee on Un-​
American Activities, led by Senator Joe McCarthy, Seeger had spent the prime
of his career rallying grass-​roots audiences on behalf of social justice. With the
Almanac Singers, alongside cofounders Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard
Lampell, Seeger recorded a 1941 antiwar album, Songs for John Doe, that re-
portedly raised the ire of President Roosevelt. That album produced “The
Strange Death of John Doe,” an antiwar ballad about a strong, healthy young
man who dies suddenly one day, leaving just one clue—​“a bayonet sticking in
his side.” Though the Almanacs’ pacifist message had a powerful impact (“The
Strange Death of John Doe,” Hays wrote, “produced the most startling effect
on audiences I have ever seen”), it was rendered obsolete as the American public
grew to understand the inevitability of World War II. “Well, I guess we’re not
going to be singing any more of them peace songs,” Guthrie remarked.12 With
his later group the Weavers, Seeger helped popularize another lasting antiwar
song, “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.”

Last night I had the strangest dream

I’d never dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war

Written in 1950 by folk singer Ed McCurdy, the song would become a world-
wide call for peace, recorded in dozens of languages. (When the Berlin Wall
came down in 1989, East German schoolchildren were seen on American
newscasts singing the song at the demolition.)
Arriving on the set of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Seeger had
recently written a new antiwar song called “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.”
Inspired by a newspaper photograph of several soldiers wading across a river,
the song imagined an army platoon on a training mission in the swamps of
Louisiana, pushing on through the swelling water until a captain drowns.
Each verse concluded with the narrating soldier recalling the captain’s ill-​
fated admonishment: “The big fool says to push on.” Before Seeger recorded
it, he’d given the song the working title “General Fathead.”13
10

10 • W h i c h S i d e A r e y o u  O n ?

The lyrics were inspired in part by a 1956 tragedy known as the River Creek
incident, in which a Marine Corps drill sergeant stationed at Parris Island in
South Carolina instructed his men to cross a tidal creek. Six recruits were
killed. But Seeger acknowledged that his intent in writing the song was not
so much historical as it was “an allegory, and a very obvious one.”14 Just as the
soldiers in his tale were unaware of the fact that the river they were crossing
would grow more treacherous, Seeger suggested that the war in Vietnam held
more unforeseen danger to come than the “big fool”—​President Johnson—​
was willing to admit.
Never a major commercial artist, the prolific Seeger hoped this top-
ical song might find a broad audience. “Oh, don’t I wish it would sell a
million,” he wrote in Sing Out!, which he’d cofounded. But despite the
enthusiastic response of his live audiences, the song went nowhere, com-
mercially speaking. He’d been dropped by Columbia Records in 1965,
then reinstated at the strong urging of John Hammond, the legendary pro-
ducer. Briefly, he’d allowed himself high hopes for a hit record. But when
a distributor from Denver told him the single never left the shelves there,
Seeger realized that his record label had no interest in promoting the song.
Regardless of its failure to sell, by the time of his appearance on The
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in late 1967, the song had drawn plenty of
attention. Seeger, already reviled by certain Americans as “Khrushchev’s
songbird,” played it during a visit to Moscow, prompting the New York Times
to complain that he’d sung an “anti-​American” song in the USSR. When he
was criticized by some in the folk community for accepting the CBS gig, he
responded sharply: “I think all of us who love music and love America and
the world must figure out how we are going to take the next steps. Unless we
prefer to get off in a corner by ourselves and congratulate each other on our
exclusiveness.”
Relishing the opportunity to promote the song before such a big main-
stream audience—​“I probably reached seven million people all at once,” he
later enthused—​he was infuriated when his performance of “Big Muddy,” one
of two songs he’d taped, was cut from the broadcast. Afterward, the singer bit
his tongue as he thanked CBS for facilitating his return to commercial broad-
casting, but he expressed concern about the network’s fear of his politics. “I
think the public should know that their airwaves are censored for ideas as well
as for sex,” he said.
Newspapers played up the dispute. “Is the presidency so teetery that it
cannot withstand the musical barbs of a folk singer?” asked one.15 Ultimately,
the network gave in. On a return visit to the show in February 1968, Seeger
1

Nonviolence • 11

sang a medley of historic American war songs that concluded with “Waist
Deep in the Big Muddy.” Opening by whistling a bit of “Yankee Doodle
Dandy” (“a pop song of two hundred years ago”), Seeger pointed out that each
American war had its detractors, just like the present one in Vietnam. Abe
Lincoln voted against the Mexican-​American War, he noted; Mark Twain
thought President McKinley should be “boiled in oil” over the Spanish-​
American War. “1863—​well, wasn’t in agreement here, neither,” he said in
his folksy speaking style before citing the first verse of “John Brown’s Body.”
A few weeks later, LBJ’s presumed lock on a second full term as president
eroded when Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota made a strong showing
in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, drawing 42 percent of the vote.
Sensing deepening divides in the Democratic Party, Bobby Kennedy quickly
joined the race. On March 31, Johnson stunned the nation when he declared
his decision to step down from the office and forgo a potential second term.
By 1968, folk music was a familiar part of the American mainstream. To
some northern sophisticates, however, the bent notes and drawling vocals of
country and western were the sounds of unblinking patriotism and narrow
small-​town values. Yet a generation committed to critical thinking increas-
ingly saw the dominance of government and industry leading to an artificial
lifestyle. Roots music, by contrast—folk and country alike—represented a
pure, authentic American art form. Dylan, leading the way, recorded his classic
1966 album Blonde on Blonde with Nashville session musicians. In August
1968, the California rock band the Byrds, who’d had several hits with chiming
versions of Dylan songs, released their sixth album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo,
which marked a dramatic shift from psychedelic rock to songs inspired by the
folklore of Woody Guthrie and the high harmonies of the Louvin Brothers.
In Cleveland, meanwhile, four young rock ’n’ rollers were testing their own
ragged ideas about a new kind of country-​flavored rock music. “We struggled
for months searching for ways to put rock grooves under country, or country-​
blues, material, blending traditional country and western with rock ’n’ roll
roots,” as the band’s bassist, Danny Sheridan, would recall.16 “If we’d had the
sense to call it ‘country rock,’ we would be legends by now.” Instead, they gave
their unusual music the ungainly name “country acid.”
One night Sheridan received an unexpected phone call from a Capitol
Records promotions man who knew the Cleveland music scene well: Roger
Karshner had a million-​selling single in 1966 called “Time Won’t Let Me”
with a local garage band called the Outsiders. Karshner had an idea. He’d been
collecting topical sheet music from the two World Wars, and he wanted the
Eli Radish Band, as Sheridan’s group billed itself, to record some of the songs
12

12 • W h i c h S i d e A r e y o u  O n ?

in a concept album aimed at the new generation. “He said, ‘I want to put this
to country music and have you maniacs play it,’ ” Sheridan remembered.
The album was titled after “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” a
popular song from 1915. Other tracks on the release included a satirical ren-
dition of “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” a 1942 wartime tune
written by Frank Loesser, the songwriter behind the Broadway smash Guys
and Dolls, which had been recorded in several hit versions; a similarly sar-
donic take on George M. Cohan’s flag-​waving anthem “Over There”; and
a cover of “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” the maudlin 1966 hit (one of
the rare pro-​military popular songs of the 1960s) sung by an actual Green
Beret, Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. Appealing to an irreverent audience, Eli
Radish intentionally cut much of the album “off-​beat and out of tune,” ac-
cording to Sheridan. Though there’d been some precedent for music that
sounded “wrong” in the freewheeling Sixties—​bands such as the Fugs and
Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention had already tested their listeners’ resolve
with purposeful atonality—​neither the Capitol Records team nor the record-​
buying public proved especially fond of the experiment.
Still, the Eli Radish Band met with modest success on the stages of its
hometown and as an opening act on tour with the Doors, the Who, and other
big-​name groups. Along with Sheridan, guitarist Tom Foster and drummer
Skip Heil backed the singer Kenny Frak, who earned the nickname “The Rev”
for his habit of proselytizing about the war, among other topics. At one point,
the band headlined a benefit concert for one of Frak’s former schoolmates,
an all-​American boy who’d gone off to the war in Vietnam and come back
missing three limbs. In Cleveland, after their album came out, the band hosted
a benefit for the radical activist Angela Davis, who was on trial for her alleged
involvement in the supply of firearms in a notorious courtroom kidnapping
case. “I’m sure we ended up on some kind of FBI list” for their role in the
fundraiser, says Frak, who went on from his brief rock ’n’ roll life to become
a churchgoing insurance man, raising four children in his Ohio hometown.
The song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” had been recorded
first more than a half-​century earlier, in April 1915. As controversial as the
Vietnam War would be, as Pete Seeger would point out, the American
public actually “wasn’t in agreement” on most of the country’s previous
wars, either.
Decades before Vietnam, the campaign for pacifism achieved a kind of
critical mass in the late nineteenth century. In fact, various groups had long
advocated conflict resolution and the abolition of warfare. The Quakers, for
instance, had emerged in reaction to the English Civil War that began in 1642.
13

Nonviolence • 13

They refused to bear arms, declaring themselves opposed to war of all kinds. “All
bloody principles and practices we do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and
strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any preten[s]‌e
whatsoever,” declared George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends,
and his colleagues in 1660, “and this our testimony to the whole world.”
The inaugural Universal Peace Conference in Paris, which took place in
1889, was the first in what would become a long series of summit meetings
in London, Rome, Chicago, and other major cities across the globe. In
America, the First International Conference of American States took place
in Washington, DC in January 1890. Nine years later, the organization of the
Hague Convention of 1899 marked the first time in history in which multiple
nations entered a series of agreements to define the rules of war.
In 1914 the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in defense of neu-
tral Belgium. In response to England’s declaration of war, many young British
men began identifying themselves as conscientious objectors. They typically
cited either religious beliefs, such as the Quakers’ refusal to bear arms, or
their Marxist opposition to the capitalist system, which, they believed, stoked
aggression. While the British government established a mandatory draft in
1916, it also recognized the principle of conscientious objection. The govern-
ment offered to assign young men who expressed such views to non-​combat
positions. Of those who continued to resist, an estimated six thousand were
imprisoned. Those men were said to have filled the stone walls of England’s
prisons with their voices, singing Christian hymns and socialist protest songs.
America, meanwhile, heard a growing isolationist chorus of its own.
Roughly 20 percent of the country’s population at the time were descended
from German immigrants. Another 20 percent were of Irish heritage, who
were closely following the Irish campaign for independence from England
and in no mood to ally with Great Britain.17 While the United States debated
whether or not to enter the war in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson
hosted at least twenty meetings in the White House with peace activists.
The industrialist Henry Ford, recruited to the isolationist cause, chartered an
ocean liner in a scheme designed to bring American pacifists to the theater of
war in Europe. Dubbed the “Peace Ship,” Ford’s cruise was intended to con-
vince the soldiers already in the fight to throw down their arms. He planned,
he said, to “get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.” But the voyage was
disorganized and ill-​fated from the start. Ford’s invitations to Thomas Edison,
Helen Keller, William Jennings Bryan, and others were all declined.
Then, five days into Ford’s trip, President Wilson changed his tune on
the “preparedness movement”—​a call, led in part by the former President
14

14 • W h i c h S i d e A r e y o u  O n ?

Theodore Roosevelt, to train reserve officers and bolster the military in an-
ticipation of the United States’ intervention. Wilson had been an advocate
of neutrality, but now, with Ford’s ship full of pacifists churning across the
Atlantic, the president signaled his intention to prepare the US military for
the possibility of war. Upon arrival in Norway, Ford abandoned his widely
ridiculed peace project, quickly boarding another ocean liner for the return
trip to America. He did, however, continue to fund his peace advocates,
who managed to arrange a handful of insignificant meetings with European
diplomats during their stay abroad.
Back at home in America, the newly established Women’s Peace Party had
recently named Jane Addams its national chairwoman. Formed in part from
the prominent role of women in the American Union against Militarism
(AUAM), in its inaugural year the Women’s Peace Party sent a delegation by
ocean liner to the first International Congress of Women at the Hague, sev-
eral months before Ford’s “Peace Ship.” Addams, who would later become the
first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, was a social reformer
and a leading suffragist who had declared herself a pacifist after the Spanish-​
American War of 1898. In 1907 she published Newer Ideals of Peace, in which
she called for social justice and a total end to war. Addams, who died at age
seventy-​four in 1935, left behind a long shadow of influence that includes the
model for today’s social work industry and the cofounding, in 1920, of the
American Civil Liberties Union.
“America’s future will be determined by the home and the school,” Addams
once wrote. “The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must
watch what we teach, and how we live.” By some accounts, her unshakeable
belief in the power of women to use their maternal instincts for good was a
direct inspiration on the two men behind “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a
Soldier.”
With lyrics by Alfred Bryan and music by Al Piantadosi, the song
captured the country’s mood at the outset of the Great War, when a majority
of Americans agreed that the United States should remain neutral.

Ten million soldiers to the war have gone

Who may never return again.
Ten million mothers’ hearts must break
For the ones who died in vain.

The songwriter Bryan, born in Brantford, Ontario, in 1871, had already toiled
for twenty years in New York City before scoring his first big hit, “Come
15

Nonviolence • 15

Josephine in My Flying Machine.” Inspired by the first female parachute

jumper in America, Josephine Sarah Magner, it became a number one hit for
Ada Jones with Billy Murray and the American Quartet in March of 1911.
Bryan’s song, set to music by Fred Fisher (later to be a fellow inductee to the
Songwriters Hall of Fame), became a signature song for the Broadway star
Blanche Ring. It would be parodied by Spike Jones and His City Slickers in
the 1940s and revived in scenes from the blockbuster 1997 film Titanic.
Bryan and Fisher went on to write several more hits together, including
“Peg O’ My Heart,” recorded by Guy Lombardo and Glenn Miller, among
others. But Bryan’s most successful collaboration may have been with the
Tin Pan Alley composer Piantadosi. Together they wrote “I Didn’t Raise My
Boy to Be a Soldier,” which became one of the most popular songs of 1915—​
and the most controversial. For one thing, Piantadosi’s melody borrowed
indiscreetly from an earlier song called “You Will Never Know How Much
I Really Cared.” Though the credit was never changed, the authors of that
song eventually earned a notable settlement from the music publisher
Leo Feist.
But “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” was controversial for an-
other reason. The former president Theodore Roosevelt, a vocal supporter
of the Preparedness Movement and US intervention in the European con-
flict, was one of the song’s louder detractors, of which there were plenty. He
scoffed that Bryan’s antiwar lyric might inspire a companion song called “I
Didn’t Raise My Girl to Be a Mother.” (In fact, a few legitimate songwriters
did write parodies of “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” including “I
Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Coward” and “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be
a Slacker.”) Women who opposed US involvement in the war belonged “in
China,” suggested the Rough Rider, “or by preference in a harem.” The song
had few fans in England, where the British, already battling the Germans,
were angered by Washington’s reluctance to join the fray. According to a re-
port in an August 1915 issue of the Literary Digest newsmagazine, the Brits
wondered “how America can be so sunk in pacifist conviction as to elevate
such a ditty as ‘I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier!’ into a song of nationwide
popularity.”
An item in the Daily Mail of London suggested that Bryan’s song
represented “a force of American opinion such as has never yet in any country
been devoted to the cause of peace”—​peace, the writer added, “at any price,
peace regardless of justice and national dignity and rights.” While admitting
that it was a catchy tune, the London Spectator complained that if pacifism
“as enshrined in the popular verse of the moment” prevailed, “the bitter
16

16 • W h i c h S i d e A r e y o u  O n ?

awakening will be only postponed. It is bound to come some time. Perhaps

the blow will come from Germany. Perhaps it will come from Japan. Come it
will, if the United States asks for it by a policy of impotence.”
The songwriter Bryan, it seems, was a pacifist only inasmuch as he
recognized the commercial potential of an antiwar song for the American
market at a time when isolationist sentiment ran high. After Wilson won
re-​election in 1916, campaigning on the popular slogan “He Kept Us Out
of War,” the president recanted. The German torpedo that sunk the British
ocean liner Lusitania in May 1915—​the ship’s 1,100 passengers included 128
Americans—​effectively sank the nonintervention movement in the United
States. The president would have no choice but to view another such attack as
“deliberately unfriendly,” he warned the Germans. German submarine attacks
on US merchant ships in early 1917, combined with reports of the so-​called
Zimmermann telegram, in which Germany’s foreign minister attempted to
entice Mexico into the war by offering the country parts of United States
territory, completed the reversal in US public opinion about the Great War.
One month after the contents of the decrypted Zimmermann telegram were
revealed, the US Congress declared war on Germany and its Quadruple
Alliance (Austria-​Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire). “The world
must be made safe for democracy,” Wilson said as he asked Congress to de-
clare war. Bryan joined the cause, writing the lyrics to a song called “It’s Time
for Every Boy to Be a Soldier.”
By the time the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, there
was little tolerance left for explicit antiwar songs. Al Jolson, the “World’s
Greatest Entertainer,” had scored a melodramatic hit the previous year with
“War Babies” (“Little war babies, our hearts ache for you/​Where will you go
to, and what will you do?”). But that was not so much an antiwar song as an
emotional ballad.
One popular music-​hall song of 1917, though—​“Oh! It’s a Lovely War!,”
by J. P. Long and M. Scott—​became a favorite of soldiers headed to the front
lines. They embraced it as a sing-​along drenched in sarcasm:

Up to your waist in water, up to your eyes in slush

Using the kind of language that makes the sergeant blush—​
Oh, who wouldn’t join the army?

To modern ears, the song sounds like the kind of farcical marching band
music of a classic skit from the British sketch-​comedy troupe Monty
Python.
17

Nonviolence • 17

The Tin Pan Alley giant Irving Berlin wrote his own absurd antiwar song,
“Stay Down Here Where You Belong.” The song presented a clever scenario
in which the Devil himself appeals to his son not to go up to Earth during
wartime, an experience the son thinks might be “fun.” “Stay down here where
you belong,” the devil urges.

The folks who live above you don’t know right from wrong
To please their king, they’ve all gone out to war
And not one of them know what he’s fighting for

The song, not one of Berlin’s favorites, was recorded in 1915 by Henry Burr,
the prolific Canadian tenor who frequently collaborated with the Peerless
Quartet, the act that had the biggest hit with “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to
Be a Soldier.” Years after writing “Stay Down Here Where You Belong,”
Berlin would bicker with his friend Groucho Marx, the comedian, over the
tune: “Any time he sees me, when I am trying to pose as a pretty good song-
writer, he squares off and sings it,” Berlin would write. “I’ve asked him how
much money he will take not to do this but so far he will not be bribed.”18
Berlin, of course, went on to great fame as the composer of a long string
of songbook standards, including “White Christmas,” “There’s No Business
Like Show Business,” and “God Bless America.” He originally wrote the
latter in 1918 while stationed as an army recruit at Camp Upton in Yaphank,
New York. The song was intended for a revue called Yip Yip Yaphank, which
eventually featured several numbers (including a tongue-​in-​cheek soldier’s
song called “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning”). But the show did
not include “God Bless America.”
Twenty years later, with the Nazi threat looming large overseas, the com-
poser went to “the trunk,” his collection of scraps of song ideas. Digging out
his notes for “God Bless America,” he envisioned it as the patriotic song the
country needed. “I’d like to write a great peace song, but it’s hard to do,” he
told an interviewer. Peace, he said, was hard to dramatize. After false starts
with songs with working titles such as “Thanks America” and “Let’s Talk
about Liberty,” Berlin remembered his song for the army play.
He made a few changes. The line “Stand beside her, and guide her, through
the night with a light from above,” for instance, had been phrased originally
as “. . . to the right with a light from above.” Back in 1918, Berlin noted, the
idea of a political “right” had not yet been adapted widely in America. By the
1930s, however, the lyricist felt compelled to avoid any suggestion of a polit-
ical “right,” or, for that matter, a left.
18

18 • W h i c h S i d e A r e y o u  O n ?

The singer Kate Smith first sang Berlin’s “new,” twenty-​year-​old song in
a radio broadcast on Armistice Day, 1938. The commemoration marked the
twentieth anniversary of the treaty signed at the “eleventh hour of the elev-
enth day of the eleventh month” between the Allied nations and Germany,
which brought about the cessation of hostilities along the Western Front and
the beginning of the end of the Great War. (The Treaty of Versailles, which
ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied powers, was not in
fact signed until June 28, 1919.)
Smith already had been hosting her annual Armistice Day tribute for
nearly a decade. But with reports from Europe growing more ominous by the
day, in 1938 she was looking for something that would distinguish that year’s
program. She wanted to sing “a new hymn of praise and love and allegiance
to America.” The song Berlin came up with was “his masterpiece,” she told
her radio audience. “When I first tried it over, I felt, here is a song that will
be timeless—​it will never die—​others will thrill to its beauty long after we are
gone.”19
Known as the “First Lady of Radio,” the zaftig singer was already an
American sweetheart, having hosted a series of nationally syndicated radio
programs. Her rendition of Berlin’s patriotic song—​and it was her rendition;
though he’d conceived it as a love song, a ballad, she made it a march—​was an
instant sensation. Both political parties quickly adopted “God Bless America”
as a theme song. Organizers of sporting events, both professional and ama-
teur, soon began featuring the song in a tradition that endures today. A call
arose (though both Berlin and Smith were opposed to it) to replace “The
Star-​Spangled Banner” as the official national anthem. And, as part of the
country’s growing anti-​German sentiment, the Hay Fever Sufferers’ Society
of America suggested a change of another sort, dismissing the traditional wish
for good health offered to someone who sneezes—​“Gesundheit!”—​in favor
of saying “God bless.”20
But Berlin’s anthem was not without its denigrators. Woody Guthrie, for
one, was repulsed by what he felt was the song’s simplistic jingoism. The itin-
erant Oklahoman had known poverty, joblessness, and despair during the
Great Depression, and he resented the song’s blind devotion to a nation in
desperate need, he felt, of reforms.
After finding his bearings in the entertainment world as a Los Angeles
radio personality in the late 1930s, Guthrie was squeezed off the air for his
socialist leanings. In 1940 he traveled to New York City to reunite with his
friend, the actor Will Geer, who was then performing on Broadway in the
long-​running theatrical version of Erskine Caldwell’s tenant-​farming novel
19

Nonviolence • 19

Tobacco Road. While staying in a hotel at 43rd Street and Sixth Avenue,
Guthrie wrote an acerbic rejoinder to Berlin’s song. He borrowed the melody
outright from “When the World’s on Fire,” an apocalyptic tune from the
Carter Family, the first family of country music. They in turn had adapted the
song from “Rock of Ages,” a traditional hymn reworked as a folk-​blues gospel
song by the elusive recording artist Blind Willie Davis. Eventually known as
“This Land Is Your Land,” Guthrie’s song bore a working title that was in-
tended as heavy sarcasm: “God Blessed America for Me.”
Guthrie did not record his song until 1944, in an unreleased version
during a recording session with Moe Asch, the legendary proprietor of the
heritage label that would become Folkways. Guthrie’s original lyrics included
verses that have long been overlooked. Taking a contrarian’s position against
capitalism (“Was a high wall there that tried to stop me/​A sign was painted,
said ‘Private Property’ ”) and organized religion, the sullen “lost” verses re-
main unfamiliar to many listeners.

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple

By the Relief Office, I saw my people
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
This land was made for you and me

Berlin, who wrote “God Bless America” from his own personal experi-
ence as a successful American immigrant, wrote not long after the song was
popularized that “no political party has the exclusive rights” to the song.
It has been sung by workers on strike and citizens demonstrating for their
civil rights. But it also took on a conservative tone during the countercul-
ture years of the Vietnam War. At a peace rally at New York’s Town Hall in
1966, a police detective was roundly booed when he seized a microphone
and attempted to drown out the proceedings by singing the song. Richard
Nixon often quoted from the song during his presidency, and he occasion-
ally performed it in public, accompanying himself on the piano. Pro-​military
construction workers facing off against protesters flashing peace signs used
the song as a “sonic weapon” against the hippies, writes Sheryl Kaskowitz.21
“God Bless America” also played a key role in an early episode of the sitcom
All in the Family, which satirized the culture clash between a World War II–​
generation traditionalist and his radical son-​in-​law. In a flashback during the
second season of Norman Lear’s classic show, the principal characters recall
their introduction. In the Bunker family living room, the antiwar activist
Michael Stivic (played by Rob Reiner) argues with his future father-​in-​law,
Another random document with
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21. Each to give me | gifts was fain,
Gifts to give, | and goodly speech,
Comfort so | for my sorrows great
To bring they tried, | but I trusted them not.

22. A draught did Grimhild | give me to drink,

Bitter and cold; | I forgot my cares; [458]
For mingled therein | was magic earth,
Ice-cold sea, | and the blood of swine.

23. In the cup were runes | of every kind,

Written and reddened, | I could not read them;
A heather-fish | from the Haddings’ land,
An ear uncut, | and the entrails of beasts.

24. Much evil was brewed | within the beer,

Blossoms of trees, | and acorns burned,
Dew of the hearth, | and holy entrails,
The liver of swine,— | all grief to allay.

25. Then I forgot, | when the draught they gave

me,
There in the hall, | my husband’s slaying;
On their knees the kings | all three did kneel,
Ere she herself | to speak began:

[459]
26. “Guthrun, gold | to thee I give,
The wealth that once | thy father’s was,
Rings to have, | and Hlothver’s halls,
And the hangings all | that the monarch had.

27. “Hunnish women, | skilled in weaving,

Who gold make fair | to give thee joy,
And the wealth of Buthli | thine shall be,
Gold-decked one, | as Atli’s wife.”

Guthrun spake:

28. “A husband now | I will not have,

Nor wife of Brynhild’s | brother be;
It beseems me not | with Buthli’s son
Happy to be, | and heirs to bear.”

[460]

Grimhild spake:

29. “Seek not on men | to avenge thy sorrows,

Though the blame at first | with us hath been;
Happy shalt be | as if both still lived,
Sigurth and Sigmund, | if sons thou bearest.”

Guthrun spake:

30. “Grimhild, I may not | gladness find,

Nor hold forth hopes | to heroes now,
Since once the raven | and ravening wolf
Sigurth’s heart’s-blood | hungrily lapped.”

Grimhild spake:

31. “Noblest of birth | is the ruler now

I have found for thee, | and foremost of all;
Him shalt thou have | while life thou hast,
Or husbandless be | if him thou wilt choose not.”

Guthrun spake:

32. “Seek not so eagerly | me to send

To be a bride | of yon baneful race;
On Gunnar first | his wrath shall fall,
And the heart will he tear | from Hogni’s breast.”

[461]

33. Weeping Grimhild | heard the words

That fate full sore | for her sons foretold,
(And mighty woe | for them should work;)
“Lands I give thee, | with all that live there,
(Vinbjorg is thine, | and Valbjorg too,)
Have them forever, | but hear me, daughter.”

34. So must I do | as the kings besought,

And against my will | for my kinsmen wed;
Ne’er with my husband | joy I had,
And my sons by my brothers’ | fate were saved
not.

35. . . . . . . . . | . . . . . . . .
I could not rest | till of life I had robbed
The warrior bold, | the maker of battles.

36. Soon on horseback | each hero was, [462]

And the foreign women | in wagons faring;
A week through lands | so cold we went,
And a second week | the waves we smote,
(And a third through lands | that water lacked).

37. The warders now | on the lofty walls

Opened the gates, | and in we rode.

* * * * * *

38. Atli woke me, | for ever I seemed

Of bitterness full | for my brothers’ death.

Atli spake:

39. “Now from sleep | the Norns have waked me

With visions of terror,— | to thee will I tell them;
Methought thou, Guthrun, | Gjuki’s daughter,
With poisoned blade | didst pierce my body.”
[463]

Guthrun spake:

40. “Fire a dream | of steel shall follow

And willful pride | one of woman’s wrath;
A baneful sore | I shall burn from thee,
And tend and heal thee, | though hated thou art.”

Atli spake:

41. “Of plants I dreamed, | in the garden drooping,

That fain would I have | full high to grow;
Plucked by the roots, | and red with blood,
They brought them hither, | and bade me eat.

42. “I dreamed my hawks | from my hand had

flown,
Eager for food, | to an evil house;
I dreamed their hearts | with honey I ate,
Soaked in blood, | and heavy my sorrow.

43. “Hounds I dreamed | from my hand I loosed,

Loud in hunger | and pain they howled;
Their flesh methought | was eagles’ food,
And their bodies now | I needs must eat.”

Guthrun spake:
44. “Men shall soon | of sacrifice speak, [464]
And off the heads | of beasts shall hew;
Die they shall | ere day has dawned,
A few nights hence, | and the folk shall have
them.”

Atli spake:

45. “On my bed I sank, | nor slumber sought,

Weary with woe,— | full well I remember.”
. . . . . . . . | . . . . . . . .

[450]

[Contents]

NOTES
[451]

Prose. Thjothrek: the famous Theoderich, king of the Ostrogoths,

who became renowned in German story as Dietrich von Bern. The
German tradition early accepted the anachronism of bringing
together Attila (Etzel, Atli), who died in 453, and Theoderich, who
was born about 455, and adding thereto Ermanarich (Jormunrek),
king of the Goths, who died about 376. Ermanarich, in German
tradition, replaced Theoderich’s actual enemy, Odovakar, and it was
in battle with Jormunrek (i.e., Odovakar) that Thjothrek is here said
to have lost most of his men. The annotator found the material for
this note in Guthrunarkvitha III, in which Guthrun is accused of
having Thjothrek as her lover. At the time when Guthrunarkvitha II
[452]was composed (early tenth century) it is probable that the story
of Theoderich had not reached the North at all, and the annotator is
consequently wrong in giving the poem its setting.

2. Cf. Guthrunarkvitha I, 17.

4. Regarding the varying accounts of the manner of Sigurth’s death

cf. Brot, concluding prose and note. Grani: cf. Brot, 7.

6. No gap indicated in the manuscript. Some editions combine these

two lines with either stanza 5 or stanza 7. [453]

7. Gotthorm: from this it appears that in both versions of the death of

Sigurth the mortally wounded hero killed his murderer, the younger
brother of Gunnar and Hogni. The story of how Gotthorm was slain
after killing Sigurth in his bed is told in Sigurtharkvitha en skamma,
22–23, and in the Volsungasaga.

11. On lines 3–4 cf. Guthrunarkvitha I, 1. Line 5 is probably spurious.

[454]

12. Many editions make one stanza of stanzas 12 and 13,

reconstructing line 3; the manuscript shows no gap. Bugge fills out
the stanza thus: “The wolves were howling | on all the ways, / The
eagles cried | as their food they craved.”

13. Cf. note on preceding stanza. Grundtvig suggests as a first line:

“Long did I bide, | my brothers awaiting.” Many editors reject line
4.

14. The manuscript marks line 3 as beginning a stanza, and many

editions combine lines 3–4 with lines 1–2 of stanza 15. Hoalf (or
Half): Gering thinks this Danish king may be identical with Alf, son of
King Hjalprek, and second husband of Hjordis, Sigurth’s mother (cf.
Fra Dautha Sinfjotla and note), but the name was a common one.
Thora and Hokon have not been identified (cf. Guthrunarkvitha I,
concluding prose, which is clearly based on this stanza). A Thora
appears in Hyndluljoth, 18, as the wife of Dag, one of the sons of
Halfdan the Old, the most famous of Denmark’s mythical kings, and
one of her sons is Alf (Hoalf?). [455]

15. The manuscript marks line 3 as the beginning of a stanza. Some

editors combine lines 5–6 with lines 1–2 of stanza 16, while others
mark them as interpolated.

16. Some editions combine lines 3–4 with stanza 17. Sigmund:
Sigurth’s father, who here appears as a sea-rover in Guthrun’s
tapestry. Sigar: named in Fornaldar sögur II, 10, as the father of
Siggeir, the latter being the husband of Sigmund’s twin sister, Signy
(cf. Fra Dautha Sinfjotla). Fjon: this name, referring to the Danish
island of Fünen, is taken from the Volsungasaga paraphrase as
better fitting the Danish setting of the stanza than the name in
Regius, which is “Fife” (Scotland).

17. No gap is indicated in the manuscript, and most editions combine

these two lines either with lines 3–4 of stanza 16, with lines 1–2 of
stanza 18, or with the whole of stanza 18. Line 2 [456]has been filled
out in various ways. The Volsungasaga paraphrase indicates that
these two lines are the remains of a full stanza, the prose passage
running: “Now Guthrun was somewhat comforted of her sorrows.
Then Grimhild learned where Guthrun was now dwelling.” The first
two lines may be the ones missing. Gothic: the term “Goth” was used
in the North without much discrimination to apply to all south-
Germanic peoples. In Gripisspo, 35, Gunnar, Grimhild’s son,
appears as “lord of the Goths.”

18. The manuscript marks line 3 as the beginning of a stanza.

Grimhild is eager to have amends made to Guthrun for the slaying of
Sigurth and their son, Sigmund, because Atli has threatened war if
he cannot have Guthrun for his wife.
19. Lines 5–6 are almost certainly interpolations, made by a scribe
with a very vague understanding of the meaning of the stanza, which
refers simply to the journey of the Gjukungs to bring their sister
home from Denmark.

20. Lines 1–2 are probably interpolated, though the Volsungasaga

includes the names. Some one apparently attempted to [457]supply
the names of Atli’s messengers, the “long-beard men” of line 4, who
have come to ask for Guthrun’s hand. Some commentators assume,
as the Volsungasaga does, that these messengers went with the
Gjukungs to Denmark in search of Guthrun, but it seems more likely
that a transitional stanza has dropped out after stanza 19, and that
Guthrun received Atli’s emissaries in her brothers’ home. Long-
beards: the word may actually mean Langobards or Lombards, but, if
it does, it is presumably without any specific significance here.
Certainly the names in the interpolated two lines do not fit either
Lombards or Huns, for Valdar is identified as a Dane, and Jarizleif
and Jarizskar are apparently Slavic. The manuscript indicates line 5
as beginning a new stanza.

21. Each: the reference is presumably to Gunnar and Hogni, and

perhaps also Grimhild. I suspect that this stanza belongs before
stanza 20.

22. Stanzas 22–25 describe the draught of forgetfulness which

Grimhild gives Guthrun, just as she gave one to Sigurth (in one
version of the story) to make him forget Brynhild. The draught does
not seem to work despite Guthrun’s statement in stanza 25 (cf.
stanza 30), for which reason Vigfusson, not unwisely, places stanzas
22–25 after stanza 34. Blood of swine: cf. Hyndluljoth, 39 and note.
[458]

23. The Volsungasaga quotes stanzas 23–24. Heather-fish: a snake.

Haddings’ land: the world of the dead, so called because, according
to Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish king Hadingus once visited it. It is
possible that the comma should follow “heather-fish,” making the
“ear uncut” (of grain) come from the world of the dead.

24. Dew of the hearth: soot.

25. In the manuscript, and in some editions, the first line is in the
third person plural: “Then they forgot, | when the draught they had
drunk.” The second line in the original is manifestly in bad shape,
and has been variously emended. I forgot: this emendation is
doubtful, in view of stanza 30, but cf. note to stanza 22. The kings all
three: probably Atli’s emissaries, though the interpolated lines of
stanza 20 name four of them. I suspect that line 4 is wrong, and
should read: “Ere he himself (Atli) | to speak began.” Certainly
stanzas 26–27 [459]fit Atli much better than they do Grimhild, and
there is nothing unreasonable in Atli’s having come in person, along
with his tributary kings, to seek Guthrun’s hand. However, the “three
kings” may not be Atli’s followers at all, but Gunnar, Hogni, and the
unnamed third brother possibly referred to in Sigurtharkvitha en
skamma, 18.

26. Thy father’s: So the manuscript, in which case the reference is

obviously to Gjuki. But some editions omit the “thy,” and if Atli, and
not Grimhild, is speaking (cf. note on stanza 25), the reference may
be, as in line 3 of stanza 27, to the wealth of Atli’s father, Buthli.
Hlothver: the northern form of the Frankish name Chlodowech
(Ludwig), but who this Hlothver was, beyond the fact that he was
evidently a Frankish king, is uncertain. If Atli is speaking, he is
presumably a Frankish ruler whose land Atli and his Huns have
conquered.

27. Cf. note on stanza 25 as to the probable speaker.

28. In stanzas 28–32 the dialogue, in alternate stanzas, is clearly

between Guthrun and her mother, Grimhild, though the manuscript
does not indicate the speakers. [460]

29. Sigmund: son of Sigurth and Guthrun, killed at Brynhild’s behest.

30. This stanza presents a strong argument for transposing the
description of the draught of forgetfulness (stanzas 22–24 and lines
1–2 of stanza 25) to follow stanza 33. Raven, etc.: the original is
somewhat obscure, and the line may refer simply to the “corpse-
eating raven.”

32. In the manuscript this stanza is immediately followed by the two

lines which here, following Bugge’s suggestion, appear [461]as
stanza 35. In lines 3–4 Guthrun foretells what will (and actually does)
happen if she is forced to become Atli’s wife. If stanza 35 really
belongs here, it continues the prophesy to the effect that Guthrun will
have no rest till she has avenged her brothers’ death.

33. Very likely the remains of two stanzas; the manuscript marks line
4 as beginning a new stanza. On the other hand, lines 3 and 5 may
be interpolations. Vinbjorg and Valbjorg: apparently imaginary place-
names.

34. The kings: presumably Gunnar and Hogni. My sons: regarding

Guthrun’s slaying of her two sons by Atli, Erp and Eitil, cf. Drap
Niflunga, note.

35. In the manuscript this stanza follows stanza 32. The loss of two
lines, to the effect that “Ill was that marriage for my brothers, and ill
for Atli himself,” and the transposition of the remaining two lines to
this point, are indicated in a number of editions. The warrior, etc.:
Atli, whom Guthrun kills. [462]

36. The stanza describes the journey to Atli’s home, and sundry
unsuccessful efforts have been made to follow the travellers through
Germany and down the Danube. Foreign women: slaves. Line 5,
which the manuscript marks as beginning a stanza, is probably
spurious.

37. After these two lines there appears to be a considerable gap, the
lost stanzas giving Guthrun’s story of the slaying of her brothers. It is
possible that stanzas 38–45 came originally from another poem,
dealing with Atli’s dream, and were here substituted for the original
conclusion of Guthrun’s lament. Many editions combine stanzas 37
and 38, or combine stanza 38 (the manuscript marks line 1 as
beginning a stanza) with lines 1–2 of stanza 39.

39. The manuscript indicates line 3 as the beginning of a stanza. The

manuscript and most editions do not indicate the speakers in this
and the following stanzas. [463]

40. Guthrun, somewhat obscurely, interprets Atli’s first dream (stanza

39) to mean that she will cure him of an abscess by cauterizing it.
Her interpretation is, of course, intended merely to blind him to her
purpose.

41. In stanzas 41–43 Atli’s dreams forecast the death of his two
sons, whose flesh Guthrun gives him to eat (cf. Atlakvitha, 39, and
Atlamol, 78).

44. This stanza is evidently Guthrun’s intentionally cryptic

[464]interpretation of Atli’s dreams, but the meaning of the original is
more than doubtful. The word here rendered “sacrifice” may mean
“sea-catch,” and the one rendered “beasts” may mean “whales.”
None of the attempted emendations have rendered the stanza really
intelligible, but it appears to mean that Atli will soon make a sacrifice
of beasts at night, and give their bodies to the people. Guthrun of
course has in mind the slaying of his two sons.

45. With these two lines the poem abruptly ends; some editors
assign the speech to Atli (I think rightly), others to Guthrun. Ettmüller
combines the lines with stanza 38. Whether stanzas 38–45 originally
belonged to Guthrun’s lament, or were interpolated here in place of
the lost conclusion of that poem from another one dealing with Atli’s
dreams (cf. note on stanza 37), it is clear that the end has been lost.
[465]
[Contents]
GUTHRUNARKVITHA III
 The Third Lay of Guthrun
[Contents]

Introductory Note
The short Guthrunarkvitha III, entitled in the manuscript simply
Guthrunarkvitha, but so numbered in most editions to distinguish it
from the first and second Guthrun lays, appears only in the Codex
Regius. It is neither quoted nor paraphrased in the Volsungasaga,
the compilers of which appear not to have known the story with
which it deals. The poem as we have it is evidently complete and
free from serious interpolations. It can safely be dated from the first
half of the eleventh century, for the ordeal by boiling water, with
which it is chiefly concerned, was first introduced into Norway by St.
Olaf, who died in 1030, and the poem speaks of it in stanza 7 as still
of foreign origin.

The material for the poem evidently came from North Germany, but
there is little indication that the poet was working on the basis of a
narrative legend already fully formed. The story of the wife accused
of faithlessness who proves her innocence by the test of boiling
water had long been current in Germany, as elsewhere, and had
attached itself to various women of legendary fame, but not except in
this poem, so far as we can judge, to Guthrun (Kriemhild). The
introduction of Thjothrek (Theoderich, Dietrich, Thithrek) is another
indication of relative lateness, for the legends of Theoderich do not
appear to have reached the North materially before the year 1000.
On the anachronism of bringing Thjothrek to Atli’s court cf.
Guthrunarkvitha II, introductory prose, note, in which the
development of the Theoderich tradition in its relation to that of Atli is
briefly outlined.

Guthrunarkvitha III is, then, little more than a dramatic German story
made into a narrative lay by a Norse poet, with the names of
Guthrun, Atli, Thjothrek, and Herkja incorporated for the sake of
greater effectiveness. Its story probably nowhere formed a part of
the living tradition of Sigurth and Atli, but the poem has so little
distinctively Norse coloring that it may possibly have been based on
a story or even a poem which its composer heard in Germany or
from the lips of a German narrator.

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[466]

Herkja was the name of a serving-woman of Atli’s;

she had been his concubine. She told Atli that she
had seen Thjothrek and Guthrun both together. Atli
was greatly angered thereby. Then Guthrun said:

1. “What thy sorrow, Atli, | Buthli’s son?

Is thy heart heavy-laden? | Why laughest thou
never?
It would better befit | the warrior far
To speak with men, | and me to look on.”

Atli spake:
2. “It troubles me, Guthrun, | Gjuki’s daughter,
What Herkja here | in the hall hath told me,
That thou in the bed | with Thjothrek liest,
Beneath the linen | in lovers’ guise.”

Guthrun spake:

3. “This shall I | with oaths now swear,

Swear by the sacred | stone so white,
That nought was there | with Thjothmar’s son
That man or woman | may not know.

[467]

4. “Nor ever once | did my arms embrace

The hero brave, | the leader of hosts;
In another manner | our meeting was,
When our sorrows we | in secret told.

5. “With thirty warriors | Thjothrek came,

Nor of all his men | doth one remain;
Thou hast murdered my brothers | and mail-clad
men,
Thou hast murdered all | the men of my race.

6. “Gunnar comes not, | Hogni I greet not,

No longer I see | my brothers loved;
My sorrow would Hogni | avenge with the sword,
Now myself for my woes | I shall payment win.

7. “Summon Saxi, | the southrons’ king,

For he the boiling | kettle can hallow.” [468]
Seven hundred | there were in the hall,
Ere the queen her hand | in the kettle thrust.

8. To the bottom she reached | with hand so bright,

And forth she brought | the flashing stones:
“Behold, ye warriors, | well am I cleared
Of sin by the kettle’s | sacred boiling.”

9. Then Atli’s heart | in happiness laughed,

When Guthrun’s hand | unhurt he saw;
“Now Herkja shall come | the kettle to try,
She who grief | for Guthrun planned.”

10. Ne’er saw man sight | more sad than this,

How burned were the hands | of Herkja then;
In a bog so foul | the maid they flung,
And so was Guthrun’s | grief requited.

[465]

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NOTES
[466]

Prose. The annotator derived all the material for this note from the
poem itself, except for the reference to Herkja as Atli’s former
concubine. Herkja: the historical Kreka and the Helche of the
Nibelungenlied, who there appears as Etzel’s (Attila’s) first wife.
Thjothrek: cf. Introductory Note.

2. The manuscript omits the names of the speakers throughout.

3. Holy stone: just what this refers to is uncertain; it may be identical

with the “ice-cold stone of Uth” mentioned in an oath in Helgakvitha
Hundingsbana II, 29. Thjothmar’s son: the manuscript has simply
“Thjothmar.” Some editions change it as [467]here, some assume that
Thjothmar is another name or an error for Thjothrek, and Finnur
Jonsson not only retains Thjothmar here but changes Thjothrek to
Thjothmar in stanza 5 to conform to it.

5. Regarding the death of Thjothrek’s men cf. Guthrunarkvitha II,

introductory prose, note. It was on these stanzas of Guthrunarkvitha
III that the annotator based his introduction to Guthrunarkvitha II.
The manuscript repeats the “thirty” in line 2, in defiance of metrical
requirements.

6. In the manuscript this stanza follows stanza 7; many editions have

made the transposition.

7. Who Saxi may be is not clear, but the stanza clearly points to the
time when the ordeal by boiling water was still regarded as a foreign
institution, and when a southern king (i.e., a Christian from some
earlier-converted region) was necessary [468]to consecrate the kettle
used in the test. The ordeal by boiling water followed closely the
introduction of Christianity, which took place around the year 1000.
Some editions make two stanzas out of stanza 7, and Müllenhoff
contends that lines 1–2 do not constitute part of Guthrun’s speech.

10. The word “requited” in line 4 is omitted in the manuscript, but it is

clear that some such word was intended. The punishment of casting
a culprit into a bog to be drowned was particularly reserved for
women, and is not infrequently mentioned in the sagas. [469]

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