My father collected protest music from all over the world.
There are LPs from the Spanish Civil War. Songs of resistance from Chile, El Salvador, Peru, Uruguay, Honduras, Nicaragua, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, and Cuba. Brazil. Puerto Rico. Haiti. South Africa, Angola, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Mozambique. Vietnam, Communist China. Lebanon and Palestine. Portugal. Poland. Songs of the Black Panthers and of anti-Vietnam protests in the USA.
Charlie let the material inform his own projects, especially his Liberation Music Orchestra. Pieces from the Spanish Civil War showed up on the first LMO album, from 1970, one of the first examples of sampling that I can think of. Subsequent releases saw the orchestra record the anthem of the African National Congress and Quilapayún’s classic of Chilean resistance, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”. They recorded “We Shall Overcome” and a purposely off-key version of “America The Beautiful”.
As I move through this box I’m finding examples on cassettes.
Eritrean Revolutionary Songs N. 5 has jacket notes written in English, Tigrinya, and Arabic, but mostly Tigrinya. There’s no track listing. It’s a compilation of different artists performing songs of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. I’m guessing, from other tapes, it dates from circa 1980.
I’ll post side two next week.
Eritrean Revolutionary Songs N. 5 (Side One)