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Drawing its inspiration from blues "poet‐philosopher" Willie Dixon, this article highlights an overlooked stream of expressive protest on U.S. war and peace in African American blues tradition from the 1940s to the 1970s. Dixon, the author of more than five hundred compositions, was also a rebel for peace and social justice. In the 1980s, Dixon wrote "It Don't Make Sense (You Can't Make Peace)." The song exemplified what Dixon argued was the deep wisdom of the blues; it is only one among many blues, by multiple artists, addressing the absurdities and contradictions of modern war from World War II to Vietnam. In the 1960s, blues crossed over to mainstream popularity. Unfortunately, African American blues songs on war went off the radar. This article argues that blues has been underappreciated as part of a global movement for peace.

"Lawrence Gellert has long been a mysterious figure in American folk and blues studies, gaining prominence in the left-wing folk revival of the 1930s for his fieldwork in the U.S. South. A 'lean, straggly-haired New Yorker,' as Time magazine called him, Gellert was an independent music collector, without formal training, credentials, or affiliation. At a time of institutionalized suppression, he worked to introduce white audiences to a tradition of black musical protest that had been denied and overlooked by prior white collectors. By the folk and blues revival of the 1960s, however, when his work would again seem apt in the context of the civil rights movement, Gellert and his collection of Negro Songs of Protest were a conspicuous absence. A few leading figures in the revival defamed Gellert as a fraud, dismissing his archive of black vernacular protest as a fabrication-an example of left-wing propaganda and white interference. A Sound History is the story of an individual life, an excavation of African American musical resistance and dominant white historiography, and a cultural history of radical possibility and reversal in the defining middle decades of the U.S. twentieth century."--