When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, I predicted a new golden age of popular protest music was upon us. As the Trump years have turned into the Trump decade, my forecast has mostly proven to be a dud. With the exception of hip-hop, which reliably names injustice and gives us songs to march by, most musical genres have largely sat this season out.
Where are all the protest songs?
In her first new single in almost a decade, Amy Grant seems to be asking the same question. On Tuesday, January 6, the CCM pioneer released “The 6th of January (Yasgur’s Farm).” The narrator in the folk-pop tune asks a man to point her to “the road to Yasgur’s farm,” a reference to the upstate New York property where the historic Woodstock music festival was held in 1969.
The reply was disappointing:
He stares at me with pity and alarm
Says, “That crowd left here long ago”
Scattered all to hell and Harpers Ferry
On the 6th of January
Although the release date and song title were clear nods to the fifth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, the message of the tune is far more subtle. On the surface, it seems to invite listeners to guess where Grant stands politically in this moment. Dig deeper, however, and it becomes an invitation into a more expansive reflection than the typical partisan jab.
With references to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and John Lennon’s “Imagine,” the song refuses to ignore the state of the world but sidesteps the overworn path of accusation. It names our current situation with a wink and a nod—not pretending it will be well received by her longtime fans, but not shaming them either.
The second scene in the song, written by Sandy Emory Lawrence and produced by Mac McAnally, observes how Lennon’s classic has been flattened into just a melody, stripped of any hints of revolution. It calls to mind our tendency to lift the most comforting lines from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches (who is mentioned later in the song), while leaving behind the words that demand something of us.
A Consistent Message
Amy Grant rose to prominence in the early 1980s by revolutionizing the Contemporary Christian Music genre with radio-friendly tunes and her warm, smoky vocals. Her early songs carried echoes of hymns and gospel classics. Yet even before she ruffled choir robes with her crossover 1991 album Heart in Motion, Grant offered hints that the gospel she embraced could be discomforting for the evangelicals singing her songs with eyes clenched and hands raised.
In the title track from 1988’s Lead Me On, Grant sang about the Exodus story in the Old Testament, drawing a direct connection between it and the Holocaust. Her anthem refuses to spiritualize the story and demands that listeners consider its “this world” implications:
Man hurts man
Time and time, time again
And we drown in the wake of our power
Somebody tell me why
With Heart in Motion and its smash crossover hit “Baby, Baby,” many of Grant’s conservative Christian fans declared “enough,” feeling she had “fallen from grace.” Her later divorce and subsequent marriage to country superstar Vince Gill sealed the deal for them.
More recently, she made headlines in 2023 when she and Gill hosted her niece’s same-sex wedding at their Nashville-area farm. She told People magazine, “I love my family. I love those brides. They’re wonderful. Our family is better, and you should be able to be who you are with your family and be loved by them.” In an earlier Washington Post interview, Grant framed the decision to host the wedding through the lens of her faith.
When It All Comes Down
Yet despite her differences with her fan base, Grant never fully departed Christian music. The final track on Heart in Motion, “Hope Set High,” declares that “if there’s anything good that happens in life, it’s from Jesus.” In many ways, “Hope Set High” can be seen as the hinge point of her entire catalog—the interpretive lens through which to view her life’s work. She sings about Jesus, and she sings about the good that happens in life, and they are one and the same.
“The 6th of January (Yasgur’s Farm)” is Grant’s statement that justice and protest are not separate categories from the good news of Jesus. They are just as much a part of the “good” she sings about as friendship, romance and worship.
When seen in the light of her long, storied career, the song is not a departure from the pews into the Resistance. Instead, it communicates a conviction that there should be no line between the two.
One of her earliest and most celebrated songs, “Sing Your Praise to the Lord,” later made its way into hymnbooks and is still sung from pews and choir lofts around the world. Its line, “sing aloud the song that someone is dying to hear down in the maddening crowds,” carries far more spiritual weight in the neighborhoods where George Floyd and Renee Good drew their last breaths at the hands of the state than it does when sung safely inside church walls.
With the release of “The 6th of January (Yasgur’s Farm),” many wondered whether Amy Grant had just joined the Resistance. On the contrary, she had been there for quite some time. The new song isn’t a shout, but a whisper, inviting others to join her there.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
