Campaign song

Song written for a political campaign

Campaign songs are songs used by candidates or political campaigns. Most modern campaign songs are upbeat popular songs or original compositions that articulate a positive message about a campaign or candidate, usually appealing to patriotism, optimism, or a good natured reference to a personal quality of the candidate such as their ethnic origin or the part of the country they are from. In some cases, the campaign song can be a veiled attack on an opposing candidate or party. Some songs originally devised as a campaign song for a specific election have become identified with the party itself in later election cycles; for example, the Likud's campaign song for the 1992 Israeli legislative election, "The Likud is Right", has become the Party's anthem starting in the late 2000s. The use of a campaign song is primarily known in the quadrennial United States presidential election, where both major party candidates usually use one or more songs to identify with their campaign.

The origin of campaign songs were partisan ditties used in American political canvasses and more especially in presidential contests. The words were commonly set to established melodies like "Yankee Doodle," "Hail, Columbia," "Rosin the Bow," "Hail to the Chief" "John Brown's Body," "Dixie" and "O Tannenbaum" ("Maryland, My Maryland"); or to tunes widely popular at the time, such as "Few Days," "Champagne Charlie," "The Wearing of the Green" or "Down in a Coal Mine," which served for "Up in the White House." Perhaps the best known of them was "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," (in which words by Alexander C. Ross were adapted to the folk tune, "Little Pigs"). First heard at Zanesville, Ohio, this spread rapidly over the country, furnishing a party slogan. It has been said: "What (La Marseillaise) was to Frenchmen, "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" was to the Whigs of 1840." In 1872 an attempt was made to revive the air for "Greeley Is the Real True Blue." The words, sometimes with music, of campaign songs were distributed in paper covered song books or "songsters." Among these were the Log Cabin Song Book of 1840 and Hutchinson's Republican Songster for the presidential campaign of 1860, compiled by J. W. Hutchinson. For many years national campaigns included itinerant stumpspeakers, live animals, fife and drum corps, red fire, floats, transparencies and rousing mass meetings in courthouses and town halls. Glee clubs were organized to introduce campaign songs and to lead audiences and matchers in singing them. The songs were real factors in holding the interest of crowds, emphasizing issues, developing enthusiasm and satirizing opponents. With changes in the methods of campaigning, the campaign song declined as a popular expression. 'Hail to the Chief', which drew from Walter Scott's epic poem The Lady of The Lake, was an early example of America's campaign song tradition. These songs typically leveraged an existing history for party political gain, referencing folklore or a "popular bard of the day" set to music. In the mid 19th century, music became more accessible to the middle class and was considered a display of respectability and cultural refinement. As such, political parties began incorporating music into their campaigns to appeal to America's burgeoning middle class. Despite their political differences, the Whig and Democratic parties repurposed many of the same popular songs, such as "Yankee Doodle". This was partially due to a lack of notated music in songsters; however, it also reflected their intention to generate mass participation by harnessing "the broad range of music in oral circulation" in the 18th century.

Familiar English tunes such as "Yankee Doodle" and "God Save the King" were appropriated with new lyrics that related to the American experience to create a "parody" in strophic form. This was part of a cultural transformation by the American peoples, following the War of Independence, breaking from previous British affiliations towards a new, distinct, independent identity. These parodies emphasised themes of unity, loyalty and liberty in the period following the Revolution where the union of states felt unnatural and fragile. Citizens often relied on this existing material, as a shortcut to learning new songs as a group, typically in a public setting such as a local tavern. These meetings provided opportunity for community engagement in collective identity construction and nation building by defining the values and issues that were important to their young republic. American use of political campaign songs also reflect European trends in the same time period where songs were frequently used by the English, French, Dutch and Germans to generate a feeling of national belonging for their citizens by joining to sing and express shared emotions.

Campaign songs were oft used as an artistic ritual to propagate the political and cultural ideologies of a hopeful candidate to the general population and attract new people to their cause. Campaign songs' reliance on groundswell support for generation of both a voter base and a soapbox for political candidates, is typified by historian James Garratt's concept of "informal promotion" as a type of propaganda that generates support for a practice or leader of the state. Fellow historian John Street writes of campaign songs' pathos, "sounds that are there to establish an emotional response to the party/product". The group performativity of most early campaign songs would often push individuals to conform and submit to popular chants, creating bonds of allegiance with other members of the crowd and the candidate they were venerating.

Campaign songs' earliest iterations through the 1800s in the US were used no end for political persuasion and celebration. While recognised and sung as such, campaign songs were also derided in social discourse as being a classifiably political affair, with accusations levelled at both the 'Whig' and 'Democratic' parties of being disingenuous in their employment of highly charged rhetoric. Whigs were criticized for their reliance upon campaign songs to enter the White House, resultant in the eventual election of "Whig" William Henry Harrison to the presidency on a platform backed heavily by campaign songs in 1840. While Democrats themselves were criticised for their lagging, reactionary use of songs to propagate their messages, almost exclusively smear based,  This is part of a plethora of early, post Declaration of Independence, formative, critical literature surrounding the establishment and function of US governance, and the importance of political representation and diversity.

Beyond "campaign songs", other forms of written rhetoric were utilised in attempts to dismantle and retaliate against political parties. Examples include newspaper articles, opinion pieces, poetry, essays, etc., all attempting to delegitimise opposing political expression. Colin Wells' "Poetry Wars" is one such book that investigates the political posturing of written rhetoric in the immediate aftermath of American independence.