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Call them rebel songs, slave songs, songs of freedom, work songs, songs of dissent, songs of struggle, protest songs, liberation songs, labour songs, workers songs, environmental songs, songs of equality, peace songs. ...Whatever name we find for these songs they have in common a fierce opposition to the rule of the established powerbrokers, who as they get richer get more determined to hang on to power at all costs.
Unionsong.com


Perhaps the best known use of spirituals in the service of freedom during the slave period was the imbedding of "hidden" or coded messages in song lyrics for the purpose of clandestine (secret) communication on the Underground Railroad. Two common types of coded spirituals were signal songs and map songs. In a signal song, a singer or group of singers communicated in code that a certain event - such as a planned escape from a plantation - was imminent. In a map song, the lyrics actually contained elements of a map that directed people to significant points of escape along the routes of the Underground Railroad.
Center for Teaching and Learning - University of Denver

Every period of social upheaval gives birth to songs of discontent. Some songs are crafted specifically as rallying cries to garner support for a cause or to broadcast a grievance. Others arise spontaneously in the midst of crisis, often produced by setting new topical verse to old familiar tunes. ...The technique called parody, setting new text to pre-existing tunes, connects nearly every genre of vernacular vocal music. It was favored especially by early union organizers. Like the patriotic songsters of the Revolutionary period, union activists imposed new lyrics on revered patriotic melodies for an ironic effect.
University of Virginia Library

The other medium of freedom for the counter culture was, of course, music: rock in all its forms, and folk and protest music especially. It spoke to a receptive audience in a variety of ways: literal, cerebral, rhythmic, harmonic, and sensual, as accompaniment to the dreams of a new generation of innocents seeking nothing other than redemption, peace, an end to suffering, and a utopian vision of universal brotherhood.
University of Miami

What is interesting about the songs that end up as freedom songs is the fact that they function in the Movement as 'congregational' songs. Congregational songs are started by a songleader -- a songleader is different from a soloist. A soloist is someone who can execute the entire song. A songleader is someone who starts the song, and if that performance is successful, it is successful not only because of the prowess of the leader but because people who are located within the sound of that voice join in to raise the song into life.
Bernice Johnson pbs.org

"The next real literary 'rebels' in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal:shock disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to riskthe yawn, rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the 'Oh how banal.' To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. " DFW