James Sullivan is a Boston-based educator and author. His book Which Side Are You On? 20th-Century American History in 100 Protest Songs (Oxford University Press, 2021) is the basis for the Which Side Are You On? A Protest Music Teach-Out concert series, which has been running monthly since July 2025, first at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and more recently at The Burren, in Somerville, Massachusetts. Every evening of performances includes six acts supported by a house band (The Paid Protestors). Each act performs both one traditional or otherwise well-known protest song and an original protest song written by the performer. In the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Sullivan discusses his book and the affiliated concert series.
Impact: Can you give a general overview of the book and speak to how it fits into your career as a writer?
James Sullivan: My books are about a lot of different things. They tend to be about how the arts meet justice or social issues. My first book was about the history of blue jeans. If you think about it, blue jeans sort of tell a version of the history of America, from the working class to the booming 1980s and all the various youth movements in between and since. That’s where that book came from. Then I wrote a book about George Carlin, who obviously had a lot to say about social issues and cultural mores. I also wrote a book about James Brown, and specifically about the Boston Garden concert that you probably know about, that he did the day after Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed.
Impact: Yes, that [James Brown] book of yours was on my radar before the protest music one. It is great.
James Sullivan: That book was about the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement as much as it was about James Brown. Then I had an idea, during the first Trump administration, when I was seeing these stories that were asking, “Where is all the protest music?”
And I was like, “Well, it’s always been here, and it’s never gone away, and people are writing protest songs every day. They just might not be as obvious as ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.’”
I’ve said this a lot, but I have this theory that the 1960s is the era that we always think about when we think about protest music. We think about the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam movement, and the songs that were related to them. For a lot of us, that’s protest music. [Something to remember is that] in the 1960s, everyone who was listening to rock and roll was listening to the same stations, the local Top 40 station you had in your city. If “Ohio,” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young became a hit song, everybody heard it.
Today, there are infinitely more choices to make in terms of the music you listen to and the consumption model that you use. No matter which platform you’re on, whether you listen to your own playlists or let the algorithm pick for you, or whether you’re still a CD or vinyl person and strictly listening to that, everybody’s got their own headphones on. Everybody’s in their own music world. We’re all in our own little silos of music consumption. Even if somebody like Bruce Springsteen writes a protest song, everybody hears it for a minute, but you’re not hearing it constantly, every day, like you heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1963 every day, because we’re not all listening to the same sources.
So that was the idea behind the book: I thought, "there’s been protest music since recorded music started. And there was [even] disco protest music. Whole genres, including disco, were formed on the idea of protest. To my mind, early rock and roll was a form of protest, that whole rebellion thing about “the kids are going to have their say” in the early years of rock and roll. That was a protest against your parents’ culture, absolutely.
Impact: Obviously, punk was born out of protest.
James Sullivan: I wrote the book to point out that I thought there was a lot more protest music than people were considering. When I explain “Fly Like an Eagle” to somebody, they go, “No—why would that be a protest song?” And then I repeat lyrics like, “Feed the people who don’t have enough to eat, / Shoe the children with no shoes on their feet,” and they’re like, “Oh, right, I remember those lyrics. Sure. I guess it is.” So, it’s not hard to find protest songs. People are churning them out. Every week I look at the new releases, and some of them include brand new songs that apply to what’s going on right now, and that we’re inspired by. That’s the point of the book.
I should probably mention Joyce Linehan, because I don’t know if you know Joyce or not, but you probably heard me talk about her.
Impact: I could pick her out of a crowd, but we haven’t spoken.
James Sullivan: Just briefly: I knew Joyce in the 1990s when she was in the music world. She managed a bunch of local Boston rock bands, and then she went to work for SubPop, which is the label that Nirvana came up on in Seattle. She was always politically minded, and Joyce famously started becoming a political organizer in [the Boston neighborhood of] Dorchester, where she’s from and still lives. Pretty famously, she convinced Elizabeth Warren to run for Senate. Warren was an outspoken Harvard economics professor, and Joyce, or so the story goes, convinced her to run for Senate. And then she became friends with a young local politician, Marty Walsh, and convinced him to run for mayor. Joyce ended up being Walsh’s Chief of Policy over his two terms, and she worked in City Hall. She’s well connected, both musically and politically.
She does a lot of gatherings at her home, and one of the things she does is invite authors of books that are of interest to her—and that are about politics or culture, usually—to do a book event. Authors love Joyce’s events because there are always eighty people in her living room listening to what the author has to say. We did one for Which Side Are You On? when [the book] came out. Then, at the beginning of last year, when the second Trump administration started, she got ahold of me. “I have an idea,” she said. “We should do a series of shows of local Boston musicians doing protest songs.” I immediately said, “I’m in, let’s do it.” I started asking musicians, and the first three that I asked, I said, “Would you be willing to pick a couple protest songs and play with a house band?” They all said, “Well, I could do covers, but I also have a song of my own.” That’s where the format came about. A light bulb went on in my head: let’s have everybody do one cover of their choice, and one of their own songs that works as a protest song, to show that people are constantly writing protest songs in addition to the sort of unofficial canon of what constitutes a classic protest song.
Impact: Can you elaborate on that last point you just made a little bit? During the event on Tuesday [February 17, 2026], you said that one of the intentions of the book was to rethink what was meant by “protest song.” Can you push on that a little bit more, and talk about why that’s valuable? Maybe give an example that has worked for you for how that can play out?
James Sullivan: I think people tend to think of protest songs as complaining. We have a guy in a band, and one of his brothers is a cop. And we love good cops. But he was like, “Oh, you’re doing that? Like, you’re gonna be one of the people who complains?” He says this to his brother, who’s in the band, like, “Why don’t you just shut up and appreciate what we have here in America?” And there is an element of complaint, but I think protest songs very often show that protest and criticism of the government are not anti-America. In fact, they’re pro-America. We love and appreciate the ideals of this country, and protesters want to see the country and its government live up to those ideals as best as possible every day and get better at that every day. So, to me, it’s a positive thing, whether you’re going to the No Kings Rally or coming to our Which Side? shows. I think protesting is inherently positive, not negative. It’s not just complaining. I don’t necessarily want these events to feel like they’re anti-anything, although obviously some of the songs seem like they’re anti-Trump or anti-corruption or whatever, but really, they [are] more pro-democracy, pro-Constitution.
Impact: Pro the rule of law?
James Sullivan: I think people think protesters are lawbreakers, and in fact, right now, a lot of the protesters are saying, “Listen, we have rules of law that we all abide by, except for the guy who’s in the White House right now.”
Impact: And his cronies.
James Sullivan: Exactly. So, to me, it’s a positive.
Impact: You’re saying it’s almost a celebratory thing.
James Sullivan: Exactly, and the other part of it is that Joyce’s idea all along was that these events would create a sense of community, and I can’t tell you the extent [to which] we’ve felt that. We thought, “Oh, they’ll be pretty good, you know. We’ll have a couple shows, maybe two or three shows. We’ll see how they go. And we’re going to try to create a little sense of community.” And, I’ve said this a bunch, and I said it the other night, one of the things we’ve been asking people to do is to try to introduce themselves to two people they don’t know in the room, so that they leave thinking not only, “Oh, I saw some good music,” but “Oh, I felt like I was part of a community.”
Minneapolis has shown us that lots of folks who don’t necessarily know each other can band together and say, “Well, we didn’t know each other, but we are neighbors, and now we do know each other, and we all have each other’s backs.” At the Which Side? shows, everybody—the band, the musicians, and the people who have been coming to the shows—keep continuously saying to us, “I felt so much better after that show, and I felt part of a community.” I’ve had people say, “I’ve felt lost for the last several months, with the endless deluge of news, and I’m helpless thinking about what I—me, my little self—can do about it. What does it matter if I go to the No Kings protest? I don’t know what to do about it, and I’ve just shut off the news because I can’t handle it anymore.” And the shows energize people, and that’s what music does at protest rallies. If you’re singing a protest song in public, at a rally, it energizes people, it lifts their spirits, it raises morale, and it makes them feel part of a community that is on the same side.
I named Which Side Are You On? after the classic protest song, which came out of the labor movement, specifically, the coal mining labor movement in the 1930s. When the coal miners were striking, trying to unionize for better wages, better working conditions, and shorter workdays, the owner of one of the mines sent hired thugs to commit violence on the strikers. One of the union organizer’s houses was raided by the thugs. He wasn’t there. They were looking for any paperwork they could use in a court of law to accuse him of collusion. His wife had already been thinking about this song. She was so furious that these thugs terrorized her and her kids while her husband wasn’t home that she wrote down the lyrics that she had already, I think, conceived, which are those of “Which Side Are You On?” That song is very specifically about asking, “Are you on the side of the working man, or the ownership class that can afford to hire thugs to come beat up the working man?” In Joyce’s mind, in my mind, and in the mind of everybody in the band, and of everybody who’s been involved with these shows, to call it “Which Side?” is not specifically antagonistic, like there’s a right and a wrong or there’s Democrats and Republicans. I’m a journalist; I’m not supposed to talk about political parties. I’m a culture journalist, so it’s a little less a hard and fast rule than if I were a political reporter. To my mind, it’s not so much about any of that. It’s about “Which side do you want to be for?” The rule of law? Pro-Constitution? Pro-ordinary people? Or not? It’s kind of like Occupy Wall Street: we are the 99%. I feel like we’re talking to what should potentially be 99% of the people.
In protest movements, very often, there are relatively equally split sides: during the Vietnam movement, the anti-war movement, there were the young folks who were protesting the war, and there were lots of middle-class folks, their parents’ age, who were saying, “Well, the government says this is the right thing to do. I’m a patriot. I support my government. I believe what they say.” It took a while, but eventually the nightly news’ broadcasts of the casualties and how the war was going didn’t look good. [Many asked, “is] this really worth it? Remind us again why we must eradicate communism from this tiny country halfway around the world? We’re having tens of thousands of our own kids come back in body bags.” It took a while, but the tide slowly turned, and all those middle-class folks, a lot of them started saying, “Hey, the kids, I was scoffing at them a few years ago. Now I’m kind of coming over to their side, and I see it.” Obviously, Kent State [in which four students were killed and nine injured by Ohio National Guardsmen during a campus protest] had a lot to do with that. The trauma of what happened, sort of like the trauma of what happened in Minneapolis [in which two demonstrators were killed by federal law enforcement during an immigration enforcement operation], brought a lot of folks who thought they supported the government and the war over to the other side.
Impact: I was really struck by a quote in the conclusion of your book—you’re quoting Tom Morello—and there’s a line essentially saying, “not every protest song is part of a successful political movement, but few successful political movements lack protest songs.”
James Sullivan: That’s one of the fun things for me about this: a lot of the songs were written specifically as a response to whatever the issue is that Morello maybe was talking about there, but a lot of them were not. A fun example that I often cite is Leslie Gore’s, “You Don’t Own Me.” It was written by two guys, two songwriters for hire, who thought it would be fun to write a song from a young woman’s perspective, about how she’s telling her boyfriend, “You can’t tell me that I can’t see somebody else, or where I’m supposed to go at night. I’m independent.” It was written like an anti-love song: “Listen, maybe we’re not right for each other if you’re going to try to own me. You don’t own me.” Ten years later, that cornball song became an anthem for the women’s movement because it fit perfectly, and the women’s movement adopted it, pretty much to Leslie Gore’s surprise. Like, “Oh, gee, I had never thought of it as that kind of anthem.” It was about one girl’s experience, but you can make it universal, so a lot of the songs are not specific. They come to protest after a brief period when they were a popular song.
Impact: Now you’re talking about an example from the world of women’s rights. You talked about anti-war songs a few moments ago. When I first heard about your book, I thought there would be a little essay about each of the 100 songs, but you don’t do that. You have some thematic clusters across each chapter. Did you go into this with a sense of the categories you were going to look at? Did you have a sense of how your narrative was going to be shaped or what the relationship between the chapters was going to be? How did that structural aspect of it develop?
James Sullivan: [My] immediate thought was, I’m not just going to write about a bunch of protest songs. Instead, I’m going to consider protests songs in the context of nonviolence. That starts, maybe, with the Vietnam War song lyrics that everybody’s so familiar with, [like], “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing,” by Edwin Starr. But, there’s a lot more to it than that, so I started the book by saying, “Okay, you’re thinking of the Vietnam War, but did you know that there were very popular songs in 1915 like, ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’?”
Then I asked, “What are the major social issues that have inspired protest movements that had songs associated with them?” I went with some obvious ones: the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, the gay and lesbian / LGBTQ rights movement. But then [I included] songs about the environment and songs about immigration, which proved prophetic. At the show that you saw the other night, the song Dennis Brennan chose to sing is by Buffy Sainte-Marie and is called “Welcome, Welcome Emigranté.” That’s probably from fifty years ago. So, that’s where I came up with the idea, and I just thought it would be a little more readable than an encyclopedia of a hundred songs, with a little blurb about each one, or a few pages about the history of the song itself. Hopefully it came out that way.
Impact: Absolutely! Another thing that struck me while I was reading the book is how often parts of the songs enter the lexicon. I am thinking particularly of Joe Hill coming up with the phrase, “pie in the sky.” Do you have a sense of how these works not only enrich our catalog of song, or serve as the articulation of a point for debate, or describe a situation that needs some debate, but how they enrich our language as a whole?
James Sullivan: In the same way that songs do in general. If somebody tells me something about their day, there’s a good chance some phrase that they use might trigger a memory of a song for me. I’m probably way on the outlier side of that, to the extent that it happens for me. But I think we all think that way: somebody uses this turn of phrase, and you immediately think of a song that it’s in. The “pie in the sky,” that’s a great example, because people don’t necessarily know where that comes from. You just know that it’s a cliched phrase that we sometimes drop, but it does come from the [1911 Joe Hill] song “The Preacher and the Slave” about the working class versus the ruling class. That song is in some respects about the promise of the American Dream. There are tons of songs about that.
People chide Springsteen for writing very specific, pointed songs. There are people who claim that they’ve been fans for fifty years, but he just wrote a song about Minneapolis, and [some of these fans] support ICE, so they’re like, “I’m not going to Springsteen’s tour because of that song.” Famously, people know that the Reagan campaign got “Born in the USA” wrong. It was actually a dark-side-of-the-American-Dream song: “I went to Vietnam, I came back crippled, and the government’s not helping me.” The Reagan campaign misread that song badly, but Springsteen’s whole career has been about working-class people and the darker sides of the American dream. Many of his songs that I wouldn’t even call protest songs are just about the promise of the American Dream and the ways that it has fallen short so often for so many people.
Impact: As a reader, I felt like Springsteen was a big presence in the book, especially in the second half. You came back to him a lot.
I have a question about another genre of music. You talk about hip-hop, and I think most of that falls into the conclusion. Is there a way protest works in the world of hip-hop that’s different from the way it works in the world of folk and rock? I’m trying to imagine two or three hip-hop acts at one of these Which Side? events and thinking about how they would be received or sit alongside the other sort of stuff you’ve had. Do you have any thoughts about that?
James Sullivan: I would say, no, there’s no difference. There’s a lot of hip-hop history about the haves and the have-nots, right? There’s also a lot of positive hip-hop, that works in the way that I was describing earlier about protest music being more of a positive venture than a negative one. It’s not just about complaining. We’ve had a handful of guys—so far, all guys—come in and do hip-hop songs, with the live band.
Impact: I saw one.
James Sullivan: One guy named Caleb McCoy did a hit Nas song, which is called “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That).” [Readers can see McCoy perform one of his original pieces here.]
Impact: Yes, that’s the one I saw.
James Sullivan: It was really good. That song is about trying to envision a better world: “What would it be like if I were the king, you know, the prince, or the president?” And, at the [December] show, [Paul Willis] did a Common song. There are certain artists, and Common is definitely one of them, who are kind of known as the positivity hip-hop artists. I think people have a general sense that hip-hop was built on illicit activity and working outside the law to make a pile of money, which is true to an extent. But there are just as many country songs about living outside the law.
And there’s plenty of positive hip-hop, and there’s plenty of hip-hop that is pointedly about ways to improve this country, or ways Black folks have been mistreated in this country. So, I don’t think hip-hop works any differently in the context of protest than any other genre. A lot of hip-hop is built on mythologies and folk heroes. That’s the same. It’s just another form of folk music.
Impact: That’s a great answer; thanks for that.
I’m a big fan of the Grateful Dead, and they repeatedly claimed that they were apolitical. Yet, at the first Which Side? event I went to, one of the first songs played was “New Speedway Boogie.” That was really winning, because very much in the right zone, for me. How did that particular song make its way to the stage that night? And more generally: How are the songs picked? Do the performers come to you?
James Sullivan: When I first approach them, a lot of times I already know something about their catalog, or I will have spent a little bit of time listening to their catalog. I’ll say, “You have this one song that’s pretty obviously a protest song. Would you want to do the show? And, if so, can you think about an existing protest song that you might want to cover?” A lot of times they’ll say, “I already cover this, that, or the other thing. I often cover this older protest song that I’ve always loved,” so they’re all set.
Victoria Cardona is one artist’s name. She’s up-and-coming. She’s been around musically for a while, but I think she just recorded her debut album. She’s from Florida, her family is of Cuban heritage. Her first thought was to do “Guantanamera,” which is, you know, a traditional Cuban song. I was excited about that because everybody thinks of that song as just an island song that’s about the beauty of Cuba, but that song has been adopted by all kinds of revolutionary movements in Cuba over the nearly hundred years of its existence. It often gets played as a protest. Like, “we are the Cuban people, and we have something to say about the disparities in this country, or the fact that the regime doesn’t keep the lights on.” But then she changed her mind a few weeks before the show, and she said, I kind of want to do “New Speedway Boogie,” and I thought about it for a minute, and I was like, “Oh, interesting choice.” It’s kind of like the Steve Miller thing, because there’s the “one way or another …”—you know the words better than I do!
Impact: “One way or another, this darkness got to give.”
James Sullivan: So I said, “Oh, of course, okay, yes, for sure.” And she thought of the song, I think, mostly because she has played it before, and she can rip on guitar on it. She gets to go off like Jerry [Garcia] would on that song, and she’s really good. I was happy that she chose a Grateful Dead song for the reason that you’re saying, that the Dead always sort of stood outside of politics to the extent that they could. But if you’re doing music, you can’t completely extricate yourself from politics. There are all kinds of ways I hear protest when even the artists might not hear it.
I spent ten years in San Francisco. I’m a fair-weather Dead fan. I really like the Dead, but in certain doses. I like the Dead to the extent that I like all music. I’ve always gotten a kick out of folks for whom music means the Grateful Dead, and there isn’t any other music. Or, the people who say, “I hate the Grateful Dead.” I’m like, what do you mean you hate the Grateful Dead? You hate all American music? How can you say that? The Dead played so many different styles of music. It’s like saying, “I hate jazz.” I’ll play one jazz song and you’ll go, “Okay, I like that one.” Then, you don’t hate it! I’ve always liked that about the Dead.
I had an idea a couple months ago to write a story about the local Grateful Dead cover band community. Do you go see cover bands sometimes?
Impact: Well, it’s funny, the other night, the guy who works the door at The Burren was like, “You gotta come back for the Dead show next week!” I’ve never gone to hear a Dead cover band.
James Sullivan: Really?
Impact: I saw shows in the days of Jerry, and then I saw all the spin-off bands, The Dead, Furthur, Dead & Co. and everything, but never a cover band. Now I’m considering it, especially now that [Bob] Weir’s gone.
James Sullivan: Exactly. I did a story about how Massachusetts actually has nearly fifty Grateful Dead cover bands [Sullivan, J. (2026, January 11). Mass. is home to more than four dozen Grateful Dead cover bands and local Deadheads can’t get enough. Boston Sunday Globe, N6+].
I went to a few of the shows. There’s a really good one called Hippie Hour at the Midway Cafe in Jamaica Plain. There’s a place in Maynard called The Sanctuary that’s in an old church where another [Grateful Dead cover] band plays. These shows are always packed with Dead Heads, and they all swear by these certain bands. The guy who plays at The Burren is one of the kids that I talked to. He’s a younger guy who came out of Berklee. He’s a guitar player; he’s amazing. Dave Rubin is his name, Diamond Dave, they call him. He plays in a couple different bands, and I think one of his bands plays at The Burren regularly. I would highly recommend them. It’s just a good hang for people who like the Dead, and most of the bands are really good.
So, I wrote that story. It was fun to write, and it got a lot of nice attention. And then, that week, Bobby died, so I also wrote an appreciation about Bobby for the paper. It was my Grateful Dead month—unfortunately, partly because Bobby died.
Impact: Either in terms of protest music performance, or in terms of other interests you have, what’s next for you?
James Sullivan: This series has totally energized me, if it’s not apparent. I love the topic, but it also feels useful. It does feel like we’re doing something when lots of folks feel like they don’t know what to do. Like I said earlier, we thought we would do two or three shows, and [we thought], “if we do okay and people want us back, we’ll keep going.” That [February 17, 2026 event] was our eighth show, and we’re already talking about what to do for the one-year anniversary in a few months. The Which Side? series is actually taking up a lot of my creative energy right now.
Impact: Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you think readers need to consider?
James Sullivan: In recent months, the [question of], “where are all the protest songs?” seems to be going away. Part of it is the Springsteen song and Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. Mainstream media covered both of those extensively. A lot of people have been talking about this kid, Jesse Wells, from Nashville, who’s basically writing just like the very early Dylan did: pointed songs about ICE or wealth inequality or whatever. All he’s doing right now are protest songs, and a lot of people have been talking about him, so the idea [evident] during both the first Trump administration and the beginning of the second one, of “where are all the protest songs?” seems to be falling by the wayside. The average person and the quote-unquote media are catching on to the fact that there are a lot of protest songs out there. By extension, I’ve been asked to comment on this a lot lately. There have been multiple Wall Street Journal stories, and a Christian Science Monitor story, and a story in The Hill. All these people are contacting me out of the blue and saying, “Hey, I heard about your book.”
The funny thing is that to most of those folks, I say, “Do you know I’m also doing this protest music series in Boston?” They’ll say, “Oh, no, I had no idea, I just found your book.”
Joyce and I dream that other cities will pick up the ball and say, “We could do our own version of this. We have a lot of great local musicians. We have a person, like James, who might be interested in organizing the thing.” We had some nibbles early on from other cities, and then those folks, I think, got cold feet, because they were like, “Oh, that takes a lot of effort and energy every month.” But even if they just put on one show, [we would be thrilled].
Impact: You need a Minneapolis chapter.
James Sullivan: Exactly. It would be amazing to see this idea get—not franchised, necessarily, not like we’re trying to make money, like it’s a fast-food chain—out there, so that other cities can celebrate their own musicians, who work mostly locally.
Impact: One of the delights of the [performance series] for me as an audience member is getting introduced to some local artists that I haven’t heard of, that I haven’t seen perform, so it’s really also been an education [regarding the local music scene].
James Sullivan: It’s been great for all of us. We’re trying to present a real range of types of music, and folks from different parts of the community at every show. If you come in and somebody’s doing a punk version of “Eve of Destruction,” you think, “Well, I certainly know that song, that’s great.” Then somebody else does a Dylan song, and you’re like, “Great, okay, I love Dylan,” but then they’re playing odder choices for cover songs, and then you’re hearing beautiful or really nice, newer, original songs by somebody you’ve never heard of. Between me, Joyce, and Ed, who’s the band leader, we know a lot of these folks or were aware of them when we asked them to play the show, but we know that very few people in the [audience] know every single one of the performers before the show starts. But everybody leaves saying, “I loved this song because it was up my alley, but I really love this song by this person that I had never heard of before.”
Impact: The Flying Vipers featuring Kellee Webb at the February 2026 Which Side? event was that sort of experience for me. It was just wonderful.
James Sullivan: They’re a really good band, and they were really into it. Reggae’s another style of music that has a very long history of songs of social conscience, and they were a great addition.
Impact: Readers can learn more about the Which Side Are You On? A Protest Music Teach-Out concert series at https://www.wh. ichside.boston/.