‘Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of the English Protest Song’ was a two-year research project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. It is based at the University of East Anglia, and involves colleagues from the universities of Warwick and Reading. We are investigating the use of song to register protest through the ages, from 1600 to 2020.

A book of the project, Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of English Protest Songs, 1600-2020, is published by McGill-Queen's University Press. Available in the UK from here, among other outlets.

This website allows you to follow the work of the project. You will find case studies of particular songs and themes; interviews with songwriters and experts; a bibliography of scholarship and anthologies; and contributions from other writers with an interest in the history and politics of the protest song – both English and otherwise.

We are interpreting ‘English’ loosely (and contentiously) as meaning either written by an English national, or having a particular bearing or influence upon specifically English political culture.

The core of the website is its database of 750 protest songs from 1600–2020, of which 250 are showcased as the most distinctive and important. These are the ‘curated’ songs you will see by default. We have kept in basic information about the other 500 to allow you to explore further. A number of these are more debatable as ‘English’, ‘protest’ – or even ‘songs’! The 750 were chosen by the project team with help from fifty-five contributing experts.

We are not simply documenting these songs. We want to show how and why music, in the form of song, has been used as a type of political communication. For us, each protest song need to be understood as part of a specific political and musical moment, mediated by multiple processes and possibilities. This subtler story is essential to understanding why and when musicians have intervened and continue to intervene in politics, and the form taken by these interventions.

We are seeking answers to three questions:

1. What does the protest song look and sound like when considered within its long-term history?
2. What conditions are necessary for the creation, circulation and appreciation of protest songs?
3. How do protest songs communicate ideas and how can they best be analysed?

To get the most from the songs you can sort them chronologically, alphabetically, or at random. Use the ‘include’ function to switch between the 250 and 750, and to show or hide songs with sensitive content.

The filters can be combined to show songs about which more or less is known, and the tag system lets you search for songs (albeit only within the 250) based on both their genre and what we know about their writers – where they come from, how they identify, and so on.

We haven’t tagged white, male, straight, or cis – not because those are our default assumptions, but because we don’t want to assume too much about little-known writers from past centuries who may have kept aspects of themselves a secret, and because we’re more interested in cases that depart from what is, nonetheless, the probable case for the majority of our songs.

Selecting the title of any song takes you to its individual page, where you can access more information including the lyrics and, where possible, a recording. We’ve also included specific details for songs on the 250: its tags, and the following data:

• Cause – the political cause(s) the song is supporting.
• Theme – which of nine overarching historical concerns the song is addressing.
• Addressed To – the audience(s) specified by the lyrics of the song, which might not be the same thing as either its imagined or its actual audience(s).
• Target of Protest – the culprit(s) that the song is written against.
• Proposal/Solution – what, if anything, the song declares should be done.

Our Subversive Voice would like to thank the following contributors for their assistance: