So sometime not long before they went underground and started working in earnest to overthrow the United States government, Weatherman—the radical revolutionary fringe faction of Students for a Democratic Society—put together a songbook. Yes, a songbook.
And it wasn’t a collection of old activist songs, either. There were no union hymns or indigenous folk songs. It was a book of song parodies.
As best as I can figure out the Weatherman Songbook was written for the group’s December 1969 “War Council,” the six-day meeting at which the group formally endorsed a strategy of armed struggle against the government. It consisted of a dozen parodies of pop songs and show tunes, each given revolutionary lyrics.
“White Christmas” became “White Riot.” “Stop in the Name of Love” became “Stop Your Imperialist Plunder.” And in honor of North Korea’s dictator, “Maria” from West Side Story turned into this:
Kim Il Sung
I just met a Marxist-Leninist named Kim Il Sung
And suddenly his line
Seems so correct and fine
To me.
The Weatherman Songbook has always been a weird touchstone to me—an indelible artifact of an astonishing moment in American activist history when violent domestic rebellion and dorky rewrites of old Supremes songs could