Working class heros : counter-cultural politics and the singing hero in twentieth century America

This Is a study of heroism in the social protest singing tradition in America in the twentieth century. Focusing upon Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan as heroic representatives of three historic eras of American cultural radicalism, my thesis sees such singing heroes as "totalizing agents," responsible for sustaining protest unity over time. The role of the singing hero is viewed as that of prophet-visionary, enlightening a mass public in a consciousness-raising endeavor, a process John Lennon candidly referred to as "mind games."

Using the example of John Lennon and much of his terminology (from "Working Class Hero," "Imagine," and "Mind Games"), I first constructed a model of the singing hero as a public personage infused with Mannheim's "Utopian mentality," which is to say, infused with a sense of destiny and a desire to employ their art in the "mind guerilla' task of changing the world in the name of love, righting its wrongs, correcting its injustices, and generally attempting to remake the world into as close a likeness as possible to the imagined Brotherhood of Mankind. The example of John Lennon also offers insights into the fundamental importance of public suffering, death, and martyrdom in the canonization process which immortalizes the singing hero.

Lennon's term "working class hero" applies to the protest singing heroes only in the sense that these guerilla minstrels are closely associated with the rebellious youth culture of the American left, though not necessarily very popular among blue-collar workers. In studying the lives and works of these "working class heroes" I tried to relate the politics of social protest singing to the Utopian world view, arguing for the tendency of folk and popular protest singers to romanticize, methologize, and idealize the politics of revolution. By studying these three great minstrel mind guerillas, my purpose was to open up three windows into the culture of protest in successive stages of development in the twentieth century. In the process I attempted to summarize the growth and development of the protest song tradition through the eyes of its great folk and popular heroes, and to comment on the role of heroism and hero-worship in American cultural radicalism.