Good one, but I asked myself if victims of injustice count as heroes, so if yes, I’ll add “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” and “Only A Pawn In Their Game” by Bob Dylan to the list. Though according to my last post, it’s also debatable if those are rock and roll songs.
ETA: it might be controversial, but in this context a song from an indisputable rock band came to my mind, “Sweet Black Angel” by the Rolling Stones. it’s about Angela Davis, a hero (or should I say herione?) in my book.
You know what? Nobody has mentioned Nelson Mandela (as in Free Nelson Mandela, a well meaning but somewhat ropy effort by The Special AKA; and, I would like to think, some rather better efforts).
For that matter, I suspect that reggae lionizes many black heroes. Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari) spring to mind.
j
Indeed, that one. For all I know her “hero” could be fictional - guess we’ll never know?
Paul Kelly did a song about Aboriginal civil rights protester Vincent Lingiari.
“Cold Missouri Waters” tells of the devastation of the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 through the point of view of a survivor named Wag Dodge.
Fourteen firejumpers got caught and instead of listening to Dodge, they panicked and ran for the river. He watched them burn to death, only to be reviled for being the only survivor.
Read the comments, one is by a friend of a firejumper who got to go back and “tidy up the grave markers”.
Richard Shindell’s voice is perfect for this (here, with Lucy Kaplansky and Dar Williams). I have a playlist of “Story Songs”, but this is by far the most poignant.
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, (Martin) Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Socrates, (Richard) Milhous Nixon, Plato, Rin Tin Tin.
[The Magnificent Seven – The Clash]
I know, that’s eight…maybe Nixon was a joke.
From We Didn’t Start the Fire:
John Glenn
Dwight Eisenhower
Gamal Nasser
Charles de Gaulle
JFK
Menachem Begin
Iron Maiden’s Run to the Hills doesn’t refer to any specific individual hero, but it does describe Native Americans as a group heroically resisting European settlement in the New World.
Peter Frampton’s “Thank You, Mr. Churchill” sort of qualifies, at least in the first stanza.
I want to thank you, Mr. Churchill
For making sure that I was born
Thanks for the innocence that made us feel secure
But the rest of the song isn’t about Winston at all.
To iiandyiii -
Does it have to be a human?
Not necessarily!
These aren’t rock and roll, but they are about real life heroines: “Grace Darling” (who helped save people from a shipwreck) by Felix McGlennon and “The Ballad of Kate Shelley” (who risked her life to stop a train wreck) by Nancy Stewart.
Great! Then I’ll go with the great white buffalo, a symbol of hope to many Native American tribes.
Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) is a hero in my book. Visiiting the elderly, he was a very good dog.