MUSIC: 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest SongsBy Dorian Lynskey Faber and Faber, 688pp. £17.99

MUSIC AND songs are the companions of struggle. The musical history of the 20th century abounds with memorable songs often overlooked or hidden from the view of historians. Some of these have slipped out of their time to become, in the words of Jacques Attali, "heralds of the future", visions of what is to come or what may be possible. In our own time the South African song Nkosi Sikelel i'Afrikais a perfect example: banned by the apartheid regime, it became part of the national anthem of the country that proscribed it.

Some protest songs, revolutionary songs, songs of freedom became classics. JM Coetzee defines a classic as "that which is not time bound, which retains meaning for succeeding ages, which 'Lives' ". Of the more than 1,000 songs mentioned in the text of 33 RevolutionsPer Minute some are indeed classics, some part of music history, some just footnotes.

Dorian Lynskey has been writing about music for the Guardian,the Observer, Qmagazine and other publications since 1996. He chooses 33 songs as his chapter titles here, spanning the years 1939-2005. Many of you will know – and will be able to hum – these songs. I found myself heading to the record shelf to pull down old vinyl copies of Strange Fruit, This Land Is Your Land, We Shall Overcome, Poverty Poverty Knock, Masters of War, Give Peace a Chance, Living for the City, White Riot, Free Nelson Mandela, Pride (In the Name of Love), John Walker Bluesand many, many more. More than 30 Bob Dylan songs, spanning five decades, are referenced. Protest music, Lynsky tells us, "was one thing before Bob Dylan, and quiet another afterwards".

The past 100 years or so, more than any previous age, has been characterised by the uprising of people everywhere, from the suffragists of the early decades of the 20th century to the campaigners for African-American civil rights to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. This book looks at the role of songs in the fight for civil and religious liberties and human rights and in doing so engages with some of the issues that have dominated political struggle, such as race, nationalism and war. Some of those struggles continue, some were lost, some were won and some have been superseded or abandoned.

Many of the political structures of the 20th-century society that facilitated those movements have broken down as the ideological base that supported them crumbled. Robin Denselow, the writer of When the Music Is Over: The Story of Political Pop,told me when I spoke with him for our film Freedom Highway: Songs that Shaped a Centurythat without music there to inspire, to bring cohesion, to bring a sense of community, a lot of the great political movements of the 20th century would not have turned out the way they did.

Bernice Johnson Reagon, veteran civil-rights campaigner and member of Sweet Honey in the Rock, told me, “Singing was a way of visualising a community with sound. It actually made what was and what was not the community, and so if the sheriff came into a mass meeting, singing could roll back the terror and keep you in the room so that you did not run from fear.” And the actor and singer Ruben Blades, speaking of his executed friend Victor Jara, said, “It’s a reminder, really, that music can have an extraordinary power, because here was someone who was killed for his music in the way that other people have had their songs banned or attacked.”

It is true that when people are singing they go to a different place. Tom Waits says, “We drop down from our minds to our hearts, and somehow we all unite there.”

READING DORIAN LYNSKEY’S book has reminded me of some of these things for the first time in almost 10 years – and what a time to be reminded. His book is an admirable piece of work, with a thorough index, and even a list of 100 songs not mentioned in the text.

There is very little of Ireland here. No Christy, no Moving Hearts, no rebel songs, no Orange songs, no songs of emigration. Chapter 23 does, however, reprise the U2 of October, Warand The Unforgettable Fire,and the Conspiracy of Hope tour. A young Bono is quoted as saying, "Here I am, a 22-year-old with a head full of Gothic dread, looking around at a world full of millions of unemployed and hungry people." When I finished reading this chapter I was moved to listen again to the gentle, steely, insistent Mothers of the Disappeared.

Usefully, there is in an appendix a short history of protest songs before 1900 that offers good context and background. Lynskey lets us know that, in the 16th and 17th centuries, cheap printing presses allowed the circulation of hundreds of thousands of topical ballads attached to folk melodies and named after the one-sided sheets that bore them, the broadsides. Indeed The Star-Spangled Bannerstarted life in 1814 as a broadside called Defence of Fort McHenry, set to the tune of a British drinking song – only to be playfully and viciously deconstructed by Jimi Hendrix 153 years later at Woodstock.

The first song mentioned in the book is Strange Fruit– as Nina Simone would have it, "the ugliest song I have ever heard . . . Ugly in the sense that it is violent and tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in this country".

Lynskey believes that Strange Fruitwas a significant departure. Up to this point protest songs functioned as propaganda, but Strange Fruit proved they could be art. He also believes that Barack Obama is the first protest-song president, growing up on the politicised soul of Stevie Wonder and using Curtis Mayfield's civil-rights anthem Move on Upat his election rallies. At his inauguration concert Pete Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen to sing Woody Gurthrie's This Land Is Your Land.

Lynskey's own top-10 protest songs include Florence Reece's Which Side Are You On?(1931), Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come(1964), Creedence Clearwater Revival's Fortunate Son(1969), The Specials' Ghost Town (1981), Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Two Tribes(1984) and Gil Scott-Heron' s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised(1970).

This is a great story book. Each one of these songs has a story and is a story in itself. There are songs of love, loss, longing, triumph, despair, exultation and rejection here. As Norma Waterson once said to me, “Traditional music, particularly protest music and union music, is written by the people. It’s our oral history. It’s what made us do things, it’s what made us march, it’s what made us sing, it’s what made us happy. And I feel that it does deserve as much respect and dignity as any of those history books high on the shelf. This is oral history.”

So let's leave the last word to Woody, from Bound for Glory,as quoted by Dorian Lynskey in his preface. "Remember, it's just maybe, someday, sometime, somebody will pick you up and look at your picture and read your message, and carry you in his pocket, and lay you on his shelf, and burn you in his stove. But he'll have your message in his head and he'll talk it and it'll get around.

“I’m blowing, and just as wild and whirling as you are, and lots of times I’ve been picked up, throwed down, and picked up; but my eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and in the window sills and through the dark halls.”

And who will scatter our messages now?

Philip King is a musician, writer and film director. His credits include Bringing It All Back Home, U2: The Joshua Tree, John McGahern, The Limits Of Liberty and Freedom Highway: Songs That Shaped a Century.He is the series editor of Other Voices and presents The South Wind Blowson RTÉ Radio 1 on Sundays at 9pm. He performs regularly with the band Scullion