It was a mostly forgotten slave song until it was updated and popularized as part of the Civil Rights movement. beginning in the 1940s. I think it counts.
Gloomy Sunday supposedly drove at least 19 people to commit suicide. To be fair, though, Hungarians don’t need much encouragement to commit suicide.
No offense, but the concept of letting 18 year-olds vote was first brought upduring World War 2, before P. F. Sloane was even born. Even Richard Nixon supported it. It was Vietnam, not a protest song, that brought about the 26th Amendment.
You may as well give credit to The Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine for bringing about Prohibition.
My understanding is that it was considered as a anthem for the labor movement in the thirties and forties. It wasn’t associated with the black civil rights movement until April 1960 when Guy Carawan performed the song at a civil rights rally (cite). This was after the Brown decision, Emmett Till’s murder, the Montgomery bus boycott, the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Little Rock Nine, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and the Greensboro sit-in - so well into the civil rights era.
I don’t think a grand total of eight killings is any comparison to the influence of most other songs mentioned here.
Nm
Maybe not world-changing, but the 1967 Grateful Dead anthem The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion) would have enticed MY ass out to Frisco for the Summer of Love, if I hadn’t been six years old at the time.
You can also see why Jerry grew a beard. DAMN, that was one ugly-looking band.
Three songs formed a bit of a soundtrack to making the indigenous land rights and reconciliation movement in Australia more politically mainstream - 'Treaty’by Yothu Yindi, 'My island home’, originally by the Warumpi Band, and ‘Beds are burning’ by Midnight Oil.
I will not nitpick your typographical errors, substituting ‘1798’ for ‘1789’ dates. But you’re right, La Marseillaise (written by a monarchist!) wasn’t composed to support the Revolution itself, but in response to the Counter-revolution launched by almost() every European Kingdom to support the Divine Right of King’s against the French insolence. ( - I guess Spain dropped out of the First Coalition and supported France against the Second Coalition.)
That the song targets foreigners as enemies is explicit in its lyrics:
Qu’un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons !
…
Quoi ! ces cohortes étrangères
Feraient la loi dans nos foyers !
Off-topic: Am I the only one who never gets tired of listening to Mireille Mathieu roll her R’s?
I think you fail to appreciate the effect those murders had on the attitude of an entire nation toward the greatest countercultural Revolution in its history.