In 1966, Pete Seeger put together an album called "Dangerous Songs." It included traditional songs created as protest songs in long-forgotten political disputes. Columbia reissued it 32 years later.
Writes Zero G Sound,
When the era of hootenanny of the fifties and early sixties were gone, and Pete Seeger was no longer one of the Weavers, he challenged the American conscience with these "dangerous songs." And why dangerous? We must not forget that in an age of McCarthy and his witchhunts, people like Pete Seeger were in danger of being labeled communists and being persecuted whenever they gave a wake-up call to common sense, social responsibility and budding eco-awareness. One of the songs,DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI (thoughts are free) an adaptation of a song long used among German-speaking cultures has been around since the 16th or 17thcentury (country or time of origin not entirely clear), needed only to be whistled or hummed to indicate to others that the whistler was a freedom-seeker.What a fine choice of a song to bring to the "silent majority" opposing war in general, and the Vietnam War in particular.In the spirit of the freedom that we celebrate tomorrow, we bring you one of those dangerous songs: Die Gedanken Sind Frei, with words in English.
Here's Raymond Crooke's explanation of the song's origins:
It has been claimed that this song goes back to the Bundshuh rebellion of 1525 when the peasants rebelled against their oppression by the Swabian princes. The revolt was a failure and serfdom continued for another three hundred years in Germany. There is little evidence for this bit of folklore however and it is more likely to have its origins in the 18th century, when it was published as a broadside. The concept of freedom of thought has nearly always been considered dangerous and the song was banned for many years before the 1848 revolution, especially as it was seen to be associated with the ideals of the French Revolution. It was widely sung in pre-Hitler Germany and brought to the USA by German immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany. It is also said to have been sung in German concentration camps between 1933 and 1945.
