Atomic Tunes

The Cold War in American and British Popular Music

Tim Smolko, Joanna Smolko

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253056184
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

What is the soundtrack for a nuclear war?

During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of these world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes, Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians coping with the effect of communism on American society and the threat of a nuclear conflict of global proportions.

Atomic Tunes presents a musical history of the Cold War, analyzing the songs that capture the fear of those who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik, mushroom clouds, and missiles.

ONE

FOLK

From Paul Robeson to Bob Dylan

AT THE YALTA CONFERENCE IN early February 1945, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Joseph Stalin to discuss what Eastern Europe would look like after the war. On February 27, 1945, regarding Stalin and the Soviet Union, Churchill said, “The impression I brought back from the Crimea, and from all my other contacts, is that Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honourable friendship and equality with the Western democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond. I know of no Government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.”¹ Just over a year later on March 5, 1946, Churchill gave a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He had clearly changed his mind about the Soviets, saying, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. . . . The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to preeminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control.”²

Russia was an ally during World War II, but by the time Churchill gave his 1946 speech, Russia had become the enemy. In America, as McCarthyism began to influence public thought, any connection with Russia—no matter how ancillary—was viewed with suspicion. Musicians also found themselves among new alliances and conflicts. Bob Dylan’s grandfather emigrated from Odessa, and his uncles served in World War II, fighting on the same side as the Russians. In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, he wrote about his elementary school days in the late 1940s and early 1950s, saying, “One of the things we were trained to do was to hide and take cover under our desks when the air-raid sirens blew because the Russians could attack us with bombs. We were also told that the Russians could be parachuting from planes over our town at any time. These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us. . . . The Reds were everywhere, we were told, and out for bloodlust.”³

To understand the impact of these events on popular musicians, in particular folk musicians, we must turn back to the 1930s and 1940s. In response to the privations of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt enacted the New Deal, a wide-ranging series of federal programs, public works projects, and banking reforms. The New Deal did not just benefit farmers and blue-collar workers. As songwriter Earl Robinson wrote, “The government decided to pay artists to sculpt and paint. They paid writers to write. They paid dancers to dance, composers to compose, and musicians to make music.”⁴ Thus, unsurprisingly, many musicians placed themselves on the Left since the US government supported artistic endeavors in a way unparalleled in American history. Musicians who valued the New Deal and the ideals of the Left, such as Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Earl Robinson, and Pete Seeger, felt they got a raw deal a decade later during the McCarthy era. They saw positive features in communism and felt they had a right to voice their opinions without harassment, no matter how unpopular their opinions might have been. They were not looking to fight a cultural Cold War against communism, and they were also not part of an international conspiracy to overthrow capitalism. Instead, they saw the primary battle as one to be waged against fascism. They believed that not only were the politicians fighting the wrong war, they were using the methods of fascist regimes. By suppressing free speech and political dissent, musicians believed politicians were using enemy tools to subdue Constitutional rights.

To trace out these connections, we will focus on three musicians whose careers spanned from the time of Roosevelt’s New Deal through World War II and into the Cold War era: Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. The mounting tension between communism and capitalism became a battleground on which patriotism, civil rights, fear, betrayal, and music making were hotly contested. The dynamics of this battle can be revealed more deeply due to recently declassified governmental records and recently released documentaries, interviews, and memoirs of the musicians. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to Vern Partlow and Bob Dylan, who anticipated issues the atomic bomb would raise in later years, issues that remain with us today.

PAUL ROBESON

One of the most complex and controversial figures in twentieth-century popular music is Paul Robeson (1898–1976). Though Robeson often performed folk music from African American and other traditions, to simply call him a folk musician would hardly do him justice. He had immeasurable talent. His world-renowned bass range encompassed the classical repertoire, musical theater, spirituals, folk songs, and labor songs. He was a college football star. He earned a degree from Columbia Law School and briefly practiced as a lawyer. He was a Shakespearean actor famous for his characterization of Othello. He spoke and sang in multiple languages and traveled the world. Lastly, he was a political radical. He had an admiration for the Soviet Union and communism during the height of the McCarthy period, which was a dangerous time to have such a view. Even after Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 exposed and denounced the atrocities Joseph Stalin had carried out on his own people, Robeson continued to hold up communism as a solution to colonialism and oppression. In his illuminating book Paul Robeson: A Watched Man, Jordan Goodman summarizes his significance as an artist and a political figure: “There has never been another popular entertainer with so much political impact. Robeson was also unique in the extent to which his politics and his art were inseparable. He was at the center of the most urgent political issues of the period—racism, colonialism, and the looming threat of nuclear war. He didn’t just sing and speak his ideals; he put them into direct action.”⁵

Robeson began recording songs in the 1920s, many of them drawn from African American traditions and Anglo-American folk ballads. His left-wing political identity began to emerge while working in London during the 1920s, where many organizations introduced him to new ideas. As Goodman notes, “In the 1920s and 1930s, London, like Paris, was the center of a rich and vibrant anticolonial, radical intellectual community, drawing its membership mainly from the Caribbean and Africa but also from the Indian subcontinent.”⁶ Here we can see the seeds of his concern for civil rights for colonized peoples. This concern led to subsequent trips around the world, including several visits to Moscow. During his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1934, he received a warm welcome and became drawn to ideas about racial equality.⁷ Here Robeson drew on his fame as a stage and screen actor to garner platforms to speak out on issues of politics and justice. By the 1940s, he advocated for labor rights, spoke for world peace and against nuclear armament, and worked to bring attention to civil rights for people of color, not just in the United States but also those affected by colonization globally.

Though the FBI, CIA, and the British MI5 and MI6 had had him under surveillance for communist activity since the 1930s, his participation in the World Congress for Peace in Paris on April 20, 1949 crystalized his standing as a political radical. Robeson’s appearance at this event was portentous for at least three reasons. First, many of the participants and leaders of the conference identified themselves as communists. Second, many in the United States viewed working toward world peace as a communist activity in itself. And third, Robeson gave a speech that the US press intentionally misquoted and misinterpreted in which he highlighted the irony of expecting African Americans and others in the African diaspora to fight for freedoms abroad that they did not experience at home.⁸

There was no nuanced reaction to Robeson in 1949. A New York Times article labeled him “Black Stalin.”⁹ He was thought of as a criminal, although he had not committed any crime. Many African Americans shunned him. On August 27, he was scheduled to perform an outdoor concert in Peekskill, New York, where he had sung the previous three summers. When Robeson arrived, a white supremacist, anticommunist mob attacked the crowd of concertgoers, injuring over a dozen people. Friends whisked Robeson away.¹⁰ He still wanted to perform, so the concert was rescheduled for September 4. Various left-wing unions joined together to form a barrier around the concert grounds. Men stood around him on the stage during his performance because snipers had been found on the surrounding hillsides. Although effigies of Robeson were hanged the night before the concert, it went off peacefully.¹¹ Robeson gave no speeches; he just sang and left immediately. He was shuffled between cars and driven out of town. Others, including Pete Seeger, who also performed, were not so lucky. Local police intentionally directed those leaving the concert to a road flanked by people throwing rocks. In Seeger’s Jeep was his wife, Toshi, their...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Cold War History in Music and Lyrics
• 1. Folk: From Paul Robeson to Bob Dylan
• 2. Folk: Women’s Voices
• 3. Country: The Conservative Stance
• 4. Novelty and Comedy Songs: The Cold War as a Big Joke
• 5. Early Rock and Other Styles: Rocking the Bomb
• 6. Mainstream Rock: Bowie, U2, Sting, Billy Joel, and Springsteen
• 7. Hard Rock and Heavy Metal: The Electric Guitar as the Bomb
• 8. Punk Rock: Three Chords and the Apocalypse
• 9. Electronic and New Wave: The Cold War in a Synthesizer
• 10. Wind of Change: The Fall of the Wall and the End of the Cold War
• Conclusion
• Bibliography, Discography, Videography
• Index
• About the Authors