But the Nice Ways Always Fail

mieyeed
Jul 23
4 min read

Updated: Jul 24

Fifteenth in a series about protest music for the current crisis.

When you wonder how a protest song written sixty-two years ago could be so pertinent today, you might think a songwriter was prescient, or you might deduce, instead, that humans haven’t shaken off their desire for domination, power and wealth. So the song remains meaningful. Maybe the lesson is that we never will learn our lesson.

I was listening to some old protest songs for my summer radio show (45 Revolutions Per Minute, wesufm.org, second and fourth Thursday of the month, 4pm), I happened upon the song It Isn’t Nice as performed by Malvina Reynolds, a song she wrote with Barbara Dane six decades ago.

When she sang the lines:

Now our new ways aren’t nice

When we deal with men of ice

But if that is freedom’s price

We don’t mind.

Men of ice? What? Written in 1964?

Maybe they had dinner with George Orwell. Maybe they had a crystal ball. Or maybe they just realized that standing up to cruelty is a universal task we will never get to shake.

Malvina Reynolds had a moment of fame during the folk scare. She wrote and released Little Boxes, which became a minor hit (#83 on Billboard’s Top 100) for The Womenfolk who performed it on the Ed Sullivan Show the year before the Beatles hit the stage there, and it’s been used on TV and streaming series (most notably Weeds).

And while this essay was going to be primarily about Malvina Reynolds, I got distracted when I did a bit of web research on Barbara Dane. Not only was she co-writer of the song, but her version, is, well, a revelation.

While Malvina makes her point, as she usually did, with her slightly shrill, but appealing “mom’s-singing-in-the-kitchen-again,” voice and cute, homey, folkie arrangement, Dane’s version, recorded with the pre-psychedelicized Chambers Brothers, is a soulful, doo-wopping, early rock number that struts with a nod to gospel and an anticipation of funk. When she and the Champers sing: “Our new ways aren’t nice when we deal with men of ice,” they could have been aiming for the front lines of protests in Minneapolis.

So, who was Barbara Dane? Pull up a chair.

Barbara Dane, amongst a knowing few, is a performer who is underappreciated, overlooked and an American music icon. Bob Dylan called her a hero. Pete Seeger did too. Louis Armstrong said “she’s a gasser.” Bonnie Raitt cites her as a role model. Britain’s Northern Soul fans have made the original pressing of her single “I’m On My Way,” such a rare and valuable find that Samsung made it the soundtrack for a commercial, giving her the first payday ever for that effort.

She glided between musical genres effortlessly - folk, gospel, blues, jazz, standards. She could sing them all, and sing them with a passion and soulfulness that imbued them with sincere power.

Barbara Dane was a radical thinker from her teen years. She became a communist before she was twenty, and was thrown out of the party with her husband (but not before she was thrown off Louis Armstrong’s tour for being a communist), but she never abandoned her radical approach to music, society and the need to change. As a committed leftist, she demolished race, class and gender barriers. She toured with African American musicians during the Jim Crow era when such partnerships were frowned upon. She ran blues clubs in California. She founded her own record label (Paredon) which specialized in protest music from across the globe. She toured, in 1964 with the SNCC Caravan of Music through Mississippi, and at Civil Rights rallies. She protested the war in Viet Nam. And she traveled to Cuba to sing for the newly-empowered Castro government against the warnings of the US State department.

Her memoir was released a few years ago, and it just came out in paperback. She led a fascinating life that easily fills these four hundred pages.

IT ISN’T NICE

This song seems particularly pertinent, not only because of the line about the “men of ice,” but because it poses the age-old question about what is enough when you’re opposing fascism. The song is an invitation to radicalism, revolution, action and civil disobedience. Even in Dane’s version it’s delivered as a kind of lecture from a woke auntie who’s warning you that you won’t rid the world of fascist or fascism by being polite. It’s a song we should rediscover and sing at the top of our lungs.

It isn't nice to block the doorway

It isn't nice to go to jail

There are nicer ways to do it

But the nice ways always fail

It isn't nice, it isn't nice

You told us once, you told us twice

But if that is freedom's price

We don't mind

It isn't nice to dump the groceries

Or to sit in on the floor

Or to shout our cry of freedom

At the hotel and the store