On the Ground at the Power to the People Festival, a Day of Protest Music and Solidarity

It was the version Springsteen sang with Seeger at Barack Obama’s inaugural concert in January 2009, and one he resurrected last spring at Music America: The Songs That Shape Us, his concert at Monmouth University celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary, where he recruited the kind of star-level talent the President had been unable to marshal to Washington for the occasion.

For Morello, the song also evoked his mother, Mary Morello, who recently died at 102. A child of the Great Depression, she possessed an activist spirit, he said, feeding the homeless, helping recovering addicts earn their GEDs, and supporting her son’s early punk bands. “Her fingerprints were all over this,” Morello told me. “Her DNA was in every bit of this. I don’t think it was any accident that this concert happened in a place called Mary Land.”

It was also there, of course, because of its proximity to the White House, and so they closed with John Lennon’s “Power to the People.” Morello, Springsteen, and company wanted Trump to hear them, at a precarious moment for the President and the MAGA movement, with the midterms weeks away and his poll numbers at their lowest point of his second term. But the festival’s message was ultimately a call to agency, a reminder that in a democracy it is the voters who get to determine their destiny.