Sometimes a song's words can be angry or bitter enough to be sung quietly and still get the message over. Cy Kahn's "Going to work on Monday" for example which says:
The politicians in the state are nothin' short of rotten,
They'll fill you up with empty words and sell you out for cotton,
Powerful stuff. Then there's "I'm a good old rebel" which has some of the angriest words ever written. I'll only sing this to local historical societies and only then, when I do a presentation on the life of V.P. Henry Wilson, who was involved in Reconstruction after the Civil War. It is a measure of the deeply ingrained hate that had to be overcome. The last verse, rarely seen in print, is as follows (and no offense intended to anyone):
And when the war was over I joined the Ku Klux Klan,
And for the Yankee nation I still don't give a damn,
I love to see a nigger hanging from a tree,
But if it was a Yankee it's all the same to me.
No need to sing that angrily - and no need to sing it at all, some would say.