Singing is Swinging

Abstract

This essay analyzes critical examples of socially conscious lyrics and performances in protest-oriented music created by Black people in the United States throughout the twentieth century. It emphasizes a continuum stretching between the Black folk music of the sharecropping and Jim Crow south and the rise and global expansion of Hip-Hop culture at the end of the twentieth century to demonstrate the effective connection between orality and physical acts of protests at the heart of the Black freedom struggle. In critically examining the cultural works of these Black artists and performers, especially during chaotic and oppositional periods of American history, this essay demonstrates that singing is, indeed, swinging.