Your music is faint in my ears.

Sixth in a Series of posts about Protest Music for the Current Crisis.

Early Ani.

I saw Ani DiFranco perform at the beginning of her career and she scared me. She sang uncompromisingly about revolution and gender politics and the curse of patriarchy. She was a taut wire with a shaved head and an off-center pigtail, and she didn't smile. She sneered. And she beat powerful rhythms out of her acoustic guitar.

And then, at an early Folk Alliance Conference, a few months after seeing her live that first time, I was in Boston, at a late-night listening session, sitting on the floor of a crowded hotel suite and this petite young woman walked up next to me and smiled and said, "Is this space taken?"

Ani DiFranco plopped down and introduced herself. And we chatted between acts about the conference, and the state of folk music and about how she was running her own label. She was charming and engaging, and I was still a little scared.

DiFranco has always sung what's on her mind and what's in her heart, and she has consistently made revolutionary songs you could dance to. She would've made Emma Goldman proud.

Up Up Up Up Up

DiFranco always brings the personal to the politics, because how can it be anything else. So whether she singing about herself, or you, or me, it's always about all of us.

'TIS OF THEE

Over the four decades of broadcasting folk and protest music, I played this song a lot. It seems to apply in altogether too many instances.

It's a song that touches the fear in what's happening in a country that professes to be a "sweet land of liberty." Of course, it's rarely been that. Just ask the aboriginals, or the immigrants in any wave, or the enslaved, or the enslaved who were freed to find a hundred thousand roadblocks, or women, or the gender diverse. Ask me today.

It's a song that says if you're white, and cisgendered and have enough money to get by, or better, then you'll be okay, as long as we are allowed to ignore everyone else who is facing challenges because of race or national origin or gender or belief.

Of course, the irony is that even the Cleavers and the Bradys were fictions that never existed. Hollywood lied to us. And now it's even worse.

The payoff chorus, "We'll never live long enough to undo everything we've done to you," is devastating, and so relevant today. As a boomer, I've had this feeling about so many things - civil rights, the environment, the world economy. We lost our footing when we got comfortable in the lives we were leading. We've left the country in a shambles. Now look at us.

They caught the last poor man on a poor man's vacation

The cuffed him and they confiscated his stuff

They dragged his black ass down to the station

And said, okay, the streets are safe now

All your pretty white children can come out and see spot run

And they came out of their houses

And they looked around but they didn't see no one

My country 'tis of thee

To take swings at each other on the talk show TV

Why don't you just go ahead and turn off the sun

'cause we'll never live long enough

To undo everything they've done to you

Undo everything they've done to you

Above 96th street

They're handin' out smallpox blankets so people don't freeze.

The old dogs have got a new trick

It's called criminalize the symptoms while you spread the disease

And I hold on hard to something

Between my teeth when I'm sleeping

I was up and my jaw aches

And the earth is full of earthquakes

My country 'tis of thee

To take shots at each other on prime time TV

Why don't you just go ahead and turn off the sun

'cause we'll never live long enough

To undo everything they've done to you

Undo everything they've done to you

And I'm trying to see through the glare

Yes, I'm struggling just to see what is there

The one person who really knows me best, says I'm like a cat

The kind of cat that you can't pick up and throw into your lap

No, the kind that doesn't mind being held only when it's her idea

Yeah, the kind that feels what she decides to feel

When she's good and ready to feel it

Now I am prowling through the backyard

And I am hiding under the car

I have gotten out of everything, I've gotten into so far

I eat when I am hungry and I travel alone

And just outside the glow of the house

Is where I feel most at home

But in the window you sometimes appear

And your music is faint in my ears