There is a long-established strain of political and social protest in the blues. Well-known examples include Lead Belly's Bourgeois Blues, J.B. Lenoir's Eisenhower Blues, and Big Bill Broonzy's Black Brown and White.
The blues put much of the backbone into many of the protest songs written by white artists too. Woody Guthrie was strongly influenced by his friend Lead Belly, and Guthrie's disciple, Bob Dylan, used the blues extensively as a basis for his early overtly political songs.
In 1939 Broonzy recorded a song which required at the time a spectacular leap of the imagination. In Just a Dream, he's "in the White House, sittin' in the president's chair". Ry Cooder, a scholar of American roots music, almost certainly knows that song, and Johnny Shines' 1953 development of the theme Livin' in the White House "just trying to help old Ike along and tryin' to make an amendment for things Harry left undone".
Cooder's new album, Election Special, features a new song, written from the point of view of Barack Obama, called Cold Cold Feeling, in which the present occupant of the White House imagines it re-segregated and coming back in through "the kitchen door".
Much of the rhetoric surrounding this year's US election is fairly overwrought and Cooder - who it is safe to assume is not a Republican - paints a bleak picture of the possible consequences of Obama losing. The spectre of the Jim Crow segregation law is evoked in three songs, and other targets include the Tea Party and the National Rifle Association.
The songs are leavened with a sardonic humour, particularly Going to Tampa, which is sung from the point of view of a Republican heading for a convention and promising, "I'll give all my money if Sarah Palin calls me honey/And shakes the peaches on my tree".