As resistance to British legislation grows in the American colonies, song intensifies as a political force. Amidst continued white perplexity over the meanings of African music, Occramer Marycoo – also known as Newport Gardner – inaugurates Black American formal composition with his “Promise Anthem” of 1764, a resounding condemnation of slavery. Meanwhile, the Stamp Act, Tea Act, and other British “Intolerable Acts” produce more than riots and organizations like the Sons of Liberty: they produce a store of protest song fronted by the likes of John Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, and the balladeers of the “Boston Massacre.” Loyalist songwriters fight their own losing battles through balladry, and the defeated British troops depart with the strains of “Yankee Doodle” ringing in their ears. The War of Independence may be over; but the songs of class war, women's rights, abolition, and Indigenous lament continue to infiltrate the soundscape of the newborn USA.

Songwork is central to the project of Elizabethan settler colonialism, with English ballads justifying the violence of conquest and reinforcing the stereotypes of Indigenous “savagery” in the Virginia colony. With the introduction of kidnapped Africans as slaves in 1619, the mysteries of African song become the preoccupation of British commentators, who can make neither head nor tail of it. Music becomes a site of colonial policing with the prohibition of African drumming and the attempted control of song. Yet the songs of the oppressed are not wholly stilled, neither in the fields and praise houses of the African bondspeople, nor in the ballads of indentured servants from the prisons and poorhouses of the British Isles. Meanwhile, on the fringes of the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, iconoclast Thomas Morton establishes his Merrymount settlement and infuriates the Puritan elders with his maypole and his bacchanalian ballads, marking perhaps the first instance of secular song as a challenge to the governing establishment. The musical soundscapes of two wars of Puritan conquest – the Pequot War and King Philip’s War – are set against the wars between hymnody and psalmody in the Puritan church. The songs of Bacon’s Rebellion and the poor dragoons of the French and Indian War conclude the chapter.