Moxie Magee is a singer-songwriter and activist. Photo Credit: Moxie Magee
There are pro and cons to living in the digital age. With protest music there are additional platforms for new voices to get their message out there. For example, if she didn’t follow me on Twitter and if I didn’t click on the link to her Soundcloud account, I would never of discovered Moxie Magee. I was drawn to her poignant socially conscious music.
In the case of Magee, she isn’t truly a new voice. When I reached out to Magee for more info, she revealed the following: “I’ve been a songwriter/musician most of my life. I was a Weekend Activist in the 60’s & 70’s. Started writing then. Came out of songwriting retirement in the last several years. Took online recording lessons from a remarkable Berklee School of Music student, Claire Gohst, who performs/writes now with band PaperCitizen.”
Concerning her timely tune “The Conductor (FamiliesBelongTogether)” she made the following statement “The song “Conductor” (FamiliesBelongTogether) is an answer to that thoughtless Detention Center guard’s comment included in the audio of children crying for their mommy and he says “All you need now is a Conductor” So I sampled the children crying, gave them a voice in my song as their Conductor.”
She also mentioned that she wanted the tune to have “simple melody that could easily be sung in any range and lyrics easy to enunciate and remember”. She also referenced the #FamiliesBelongTogether march taken place on June 30, 2018 in Washington, DC. It was her mission to compose a tune that can become a rallying cry at protest rallies.
Recently there has also been much debate about civility within protest movements. For example, there was the controversy when the owner of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington Virginia asked President Trump’s Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave her establishment. There has also been other notable incidents when prominent individuals within the Trump administration have been made to feel uncomfortable.
This raised questions about the extent you need to be civil when protesting those who are explicitly complicated in committing social injustices. Some even tried to argue that the protests of the ’60s involved more civility than what we are seeing today.
Magee made the following personal observations concerning those who claimed that the ’60s was a more civil time for protest: “Anyone who claims that wasn’t there or was there and overdosed. I lived thru the Vietnam, the college protests, the Nixon Years, Kennedy’s, Martin Luther King, Bay of Pigs, all of it. People Died. Others were brutally hurt, lost jobs, income, social networks, business networks, reputations in vile and violent ways. Americans gave their lives in these protest wars. There’ nothing civil about that and we who witnessed were not silent then and we will not be silenced now.”
Moxie is a strong voice with a real message. Please share her work.