Liz and Jacqui do a song spotlight on the best-known protest song of the 20th century, We Shall Overcome. On this epic journey, they cover Catholic hymns, Protestant theology, army bands, Stand By Me, fashion-forward bangs, the proper pronunciation of the name "Guy," union organizing, Chuck D, and the value of using the right tactics at the right time.
The books and songs discussed in this episode include:
O Sanctissima performed by the Daughters of Saint Paul, 2010
The Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Ward Howe, performed by the Canadian Brass
The History of We Shall Overcome uploaded to YouTube by creator Genie Deez, June 15, 2020
I’ll be Alright performed by The Angelic Gospel Singers
I’ll Be Alright Someday performed by Rev. Gary Davis, reissued 1972
Pete Seeger Talks about the History of We Shall Overcome, uploaded to YouTube by folkarchivist, Dec 29, 2010
We Shall Overcome (Live) performed by Pete Seeger, 1963
We Shall Overcome performed by the Freedom Singers, Sing For Freedom Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (1990)
We Shall Overcome (Live) performed by Mahalia Jackson
The Nashville Sit-In Story from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (1960) We Shall Overcome, Jail Sequence
We Shall Overcome performed by Peter Yarrow, Mary Travers, Paul Stookey, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Bernice Reagon, Cordell Reagon, Charles Neblett, Rutha Harris, Pete Seeger, and Theodore Bikel, Newport Folk Festival, July 1963
Blowin’ in the Wind by Bob Dylan, performed by Cliff Richards (1966)
Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet, from Say It Plain, Say It Loud: A Century of Great African American Speeches (original recording King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan - April 12, 1964)
We Gonna Be Alright Crowd Chanting, Black Lives Matter, Downtown Los Angeles July 7, 2016 #AltonSterling #PhilandoCastile
Making Movement Sounds: The Cultural Organizing Behind the Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement by Elizabeth Davis-Cooper (2017)
Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:39987965
Sit In, Stand Up and Sing Out!: Black Gospel Music and the Civil Rights Movement by Michael Castellini (2013) Georgia State University
https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_theses/76
From Sit-ins to SNCC : The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, edited by Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies. 2014.
Thanks, as always, to Aaron P and Jeffrey Christian for reviewing the episode.
Jacqui Clydesdale 0:06
Hi, I'm Jacqui Clydesdale
Liz Walker 0:07
and I'm Liz Walker,
Jacqui Clydesdale 0:08
and you're listening to the podcast that investigates why people love singing together, which we call Choral Fixation but what we should really maybe consider calling two choir nerds trapped in a closet. I don’t know... We were launched, launched in the worst year to start singing since, since the invention of autotune.
Liz Walker 0:27
Thanks 2020. But here we are in 2021, and we were actually, we're in the middle of a three-part series on protest singing. We are digging deep into why people choose to sing at protests, rather than say making giant puppets or lying down on the street. They do those too.
Jacqui Clydesdale 0:43
Yeah, those are tactics, those are valid tactics as well. In the introductory episode we talked about why people sing protest songs and how protest songs come about,
Liz Walker 0:53
Yeah, we started by reviewing what musicologist Dan Levitin says why people, they sync up when they sing. They're breathing together and their heartbeats are beating and there's a spiritual, physical kind of effect when we're singing together there's a, there's a feeling, and it feels great.
Jacqui Clydesdale 1:12
We want to get really loud and we want to make ourselves feel big, amplify both the message, and our feelings of togetherness. Yeah, we did kind of a historical overview of focusing on the European experiences and the pre 20th century, this episode we're going to shift our focus to more recent history, and to the United States, and dig deep into one particular song that people sang together and continue to sing together. The song that the Library of Congress declared the most influential song of the 20th century: We Shall Overcome.
Liz Walker 1:41
Jacqui, I am really excited to learn more about this song, I know it in a very vague way. But I...
Jacqui Clydesdale 1:50
If someone, if someone asked you “Hey, what's a protest song?” What would you start...
Liz Walker 1:53
I’d say
Jacqui Clydesdale 1:54
Yeah. What would you start humming?
Liz Walker 1:55
I’d say, We Shall Overcome, but I would, I would, I would hum the first couple of bars and then it'd be like I guess I don't really know it...
Jacqui Clydesdale 2:02
It peters out from there. Yeah.
Liz Walker 2:04
That’s right .
Jacqui Clydesdale 2:04
Yeah, it loses steam pretty quickly.
Liz Walker 2:06
That's right, and I mean we've been talking about, we've been talking about this for months and months and you've been... you've been working on this, and it's it's been really tricky. It's been, it's been hard for you to research.
Jacqui Clydesdale 2:15
Oh man, this song, honestly. (Laughter) It has 1001 ancestors, you know a lot of composite parts. They all came together eventually over the course of 150 to 200-ish years.
Liz Walker 2:29
That is a really long time to write one song.
Jacqui Clydesdale 2:31
I know! It's evidence of the folk tradition at work though, right?
Liz Walker 2:36
Right. Yeah, kind of distilling from the culture, rather than just from one person.
Jacqui Clydesdale 2:40
That’s right.
Liz Walker 2:41
Like an oral tradition, then? Where we've got lyric... Music, lyrics kind of being passed down like around a campfire, like on a guitar kind of a thing?
Jacqui Clydesdale 2:48
Sort of, yeah, I mean, in this case it was through churches and union meetings and schools. But yeah, like, by more conventional means too. There, there is sheet music for both We Shall Overcome, and the songs that came before it, but ultimately what happens is it all combines to create a song that delivers the kind of emotional punch that only comes from a 200 year wind-up. (Laughter) You don't get this kind of effect without, you know, a long and storied history. Listen, I'm only going to be able to touch on some of this, so I want to be really clear. Oh, here's something I really want everybody to keep in mind as they listen to this story, and that is why did people sing this song? Why did We Shall Overcome endure? And what does it mean to people, both then and now.
Jacqui Clydesdale
Alright, so, We Shall Overcome, is an amalgamation. It's a... it's an old school mashup. It's a dancehall remix of about, of about seven or eight-ish different religious hymns and songs. The two main songs that really provide the backbone for We Shall Overcome are I’ll Be Alright and O Sanctissima, a Catholic hymn that goes all the way back to 1790, which surprised me. In fact, I've even sung in arrangement of it, and it is almost note for note We Shall Overcome,
Liz Walker 4:20
so like the “bum, bum, bum, bum…”
Jacqui Clydesdale 4:23
You got it. You got it. So let's let's take a listen to it right now.
Liz Walker 4:28
Okay
Jacqui Clydesdale 4:29
It's also known as the Sicilian Mariners Hymn.
Liz Walker 4:32
I love that name, I want to see that tattooed on somebody.
Jacqui Clydesdale 4:35
Oh yeah, absolutely. This one morphed into a bunch of different hymns, including a German Christmas carol called “Oh How Joyful,” so they're like it took a lot of, like, twists and turns since 1790.
Jacqui Clydesdale
So yeah, oh Sanctissima was about. It was in churches, but I've recently watched a great YouTube story about the history of We Shall Overcome by a guy named Genie Deez. We'll link to it in the show notes. Something I did not know is one of the methods of transmission, so we've talked about churches, something that did not occur to me... Liz, did you know that during the civil war between battles army bands would play music?
Liz Walker 5:16
Wait, like, like at a football game?
Jacqui Clydesdale 5:18
Kind of, so... like, big pitched battle. Everybody retreats to take a little break and, You know...
Liz Walker 5:24
And there's a halftime show?
Jacqui Clydesdale 5:26
And there's a halftime show. Yes.
Liz Walker 5:27
Oh my God.
Jacqui Clydesdale 5:29
For each side. Both sides had army bands. Yeah, when you think about it, armies have bands, there's...
Liz Walker 5:35
No, yeah.
Jacqui Clydesdale 5:36
There’s always a tuba player.
Liz Walker 5:37
I never really questioned why they had the army band. I thought it was just to put their energy towards something other than killing and maiming.
Jacqui Clydesdale 5:45
Sure, yeah. And so what's really interesting about this is that one Northern Carolina regiment had O Sanctissima in its repertoire.
Liz Walker 5:54
Oh, wow. So that could be a direct link then, of how it got from churches out into like the wider public. Well, not that the wider public was going to church, but like got into the idea of struggle.
Jacqui Clydesdale 6:05
Mmhmm. Exactly.
Liz Walker 6:07
Oh my god, that's amazing. That's so cool. I'm like gripping my forehead. I’m, ummm. Like it's because my mind has been blown.
Liz Walker
Okay, that's O Sanctissima, what is this “I’ll Be Alright” song?
Jacqui Clydesdale 6:21
Okay, so I'll Be Alright, is a song that it's a lot more removed into the folk tradition. It's an old Baptist gospel song of sort of unknown provenance. I mean it's just been around for a long time. In 1930, it was recorded for the first time, but it had been around for much longer than that.
Liz Walker 6:40
And, and what are the like the lyrics of it are...
Jacqui Clydesdale 6:44
Well, they're all over the place, but
Liz Walker 6:45
Okay.
Jacqui Clydesdale 6:46
Essentially it's, “I'll be all right. Someday, I'll be
Liz Walker 6:49
Oh so the second half, which is the Oh, deep in my heart. I do believe..
Jacqui Clydesdale 6:58
Listen, it's a mash-up okay? It's a mash-up. It starts with the Catholics, but the Protestants get the last word. This is a hymn that’s still sung today, so let's listen to, I'll Be Alright by The Angelic Gospel Singers.
Jacqui Clydesdale
A lot of the small churches back in like the 1800s were at the forefront of social change, they were explicitly abolitionists. There were temperance societies, suffragettes, things like that. They were involved in all of those sorts of things, and there was lots of... Just as musically, the tune was evolving, there were lots of ideas that also evolved.
Liz Walker 7:33
I was thinking that I mean, funnily enough, I think a lot of those churches are Protestant churches, you know those small little Protestant churches that are always breaking off to fight with each other about like different points of...
Jacqui Clydesdale 7:43
Theology? The finer points of theology. Sure, yeah.
Liz Walker 7:46
I have a friend who's a Baptist pastor, and he says that if you have 12 Baptist churches, you've got 13 opinions.
Liz Walker
There is a circulation of ideas in these Protestant churches, and there's obviously, there's a circulation of music as well. You know you just can't keep a good tune down.
Jacqui Clydesdale 8:06
Yeah, for sure you can't, you cannot. But what we can definitely say is that the genesis for the lyrics came from a song, and that song was, I Will Overcome Someday,
Liz Walker 8:15
I will overcome... someday, okay.
Jacqui Clydesdale 8:17
Not “We Will Overcome” yet. It was written by a Black Methodist preacher named Charles Albert Tindley. He was a fascinating human being, who's born in 1851 in Marylan. He was born free, but he grew up around enslaved people, and as an adult he moved to Philadelphia, and he worked in an unpaid position in a Methodist Church. While he was there he decided he wanted to become a pastor, so he went to a local synagogue, and asked them to teach him Hebrew.
Liz Walker 8:44
Oh. Wow.
Jacqui Clydesdale 8:45
And yeah, and he took a correspondence course to learn Greek, he's completely self taught.
Liz Walker 8:50
Wow,
Jacqui Clydesdale 8:50
He asked for help with the Hebrew but he, but he had no formal education before that, and he sat the exams to become... a minister, I guess, and he goes back to preach at the church where he originally was working as an unpaid Deacon, so yeah. They call him one of the fathers of gospel music, and he wrote a song called Stand By Me which absolutely becomes morphs into Exactly, yeah, sometimes known as stand by me, father. It's a traditional gospel song, and it absolutely influenced the 1950s, you know, sort of pop music version. So that's one of his famous songs. And then the other one was I will overcome someday, clearly he was overcoming. He
Liz Walker 9:39
Yeah
Jacqui Clydesdale 9:39
...overcame an incredible amount to be rewarded by his Lord. And His own hard work, right? Amazing.
Liz Walker 9:46
So okay, so “I Will Overcome Someday.” When did that song come out?
Jacqui Clydesdale 9:49
It was published in 1900. I want to absolutely reinforce that it's not like the song we know, not, it's not the, it's not the “We Shall Overcome” yet. I'm going to let Pete Seeger talk a little bit about this, because he makes a distinction between song... the song that was sung fast and the song that was sung slow, so “I'll Be Alright.” He says, well, here, let's hear what Pete has to say and he'll give you a little sense of what “I’ll Be Alright” sounds like versus “I Will Overcome.”
Pete Seeger 10:16
Four years ago I was sent a book, and there was a Xerox copy of the letter in the United Mineworkers Journal of February 1909. And the letter on the front pages read “Last year in our strike, we started every strike meeting with a prayer and singing that good old song “We Will Overcome.” Now the, the song, which they brought it from was usually sung now as “I'll Be Alright”. I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright someday. If in my heart, I do not yield (or deep in my heart I do believe) I’ll be alright someday. I'll be like him, I'll be like him. I'll wear the crown, I'll wear the crown and a verse, I’ll overcome. So somewhere along the line, some union member changed it to “We will overcome.” Now, whether they sang it that fast or they slowed it down, I don't know. The newspaper article didn't say,
Liz Walker 11:22
That was amazing that like, the “I'll be all right” was really the body of the verses.
Jacqui Clydesdale 11:27
Yeah, and what I really enjoy hearing is him clapping along and having it have that very different feel. Much more joyful pickup.
Liz Walker 11:34
Yeah. Bit of a gospel vibe I guess there, too. So interesting.
Jacqui Clydesdale 11:48
In 1945, two men, Atron Twigg and Kenneth Morris, they were choral arrangers, they wrote the melody that we recognize today. And in 1945, in Charleston, South Carolina, there's a group of tobacco workers on strike, a group of mostly black women who are part of the tobacco workers union, and they're on strike for five months. It's pretty... it's a pretty long one, and it's cold and it's wet. Every day they were led by a woman named Lucille Simmons, singing, “We Will Overcome,” and they wanted, you know, obviously they want to say WE will overcome, and you know represent their cooperative action on the picket line.
Liz Walker 12:29
Right. Okay, so then you think that that version of that music and that those lyrics must have been floating around before Twigg and Morris.
Jacqui Clydesdale 12:38
So clearly, after 1900... so after Charles Albert Tindley and before the tobacco workers strike. We Shall Overcome was around, right. It was around. It was part of pickets, it was part of union meetings, it was being sung maybe a bit fast, maybe a bit slow. And it wasn't we shall, it was probably more likely either “I will be all right” or “I will overcome.”
Liz Walker 13:05
Right. Well okay so how did it, wind up being sung at the tobacco strike?
Jacqui Clydesdale 13:16
All right, so there's a couple different versions of this story...
Liz Walker 13:19
Of course there is.
Jacqui Clydesdale 13:21
Of course, exactly. Zilphia Horton. Zilphia Horton was a lady who, she was a real life, daughter of a coal miner. She was singing in 1945 when she was, she was the head of something called the Highlander School in Tennessee. And the Highlander School is fascinating and deserves its own show, but essentially what it was, was a school for music that focus primarily on folk music, but also sort of radicalizing efforts so they hosted workshops and taught union leaders how to organize protests and recruit members and taught people songs and how to share them with their membership. The idea was to foster community, and to ultimately to make striking more effective. So Zilphia, the story goes that Zilphia, who I should point out is a white lady.
Liz Walker
She also can I just say she's got an amazing name
Jacqui Clydesdale
She's got an amazing name, and we just saw an amazing picture ever and she had very fashion-forward bangs for 1945. [Yeah.] So, Zilphia, So she either went to the protest with, you know, Lucille Simmons and the striking women of the tobacco union, or some of their members went to Highlander,
Liz Walker 14:34
And brought it back to her...
Jacqui Clydesdale 14:35
Exactly. So I see sometime after that, like, in the late 40s or into the early 50s, someone at Highlander, or Pete Seeger, who was definitely there and around, changed the will to shall that is like, sort of gradually how “I Will Overcome Someday” became “We Shall Overcome.”
Liz Walker 14:54
Right, I will overcome, “We Shall Overcooooome….”
Jacqui Clydesdale 15:01
One of the quotes about that was something like a musical historian, who had written about Pete Seeger, said this is exactly the kind of thing he did, he loved to noodle on these kinds of things and make like what he called micro changes... not... the musical critic, not Pete Seeger! I don’t think Pete Seeger would call them micro changes.
Liz Walker 15:20
See what I did there? That was a micro change.
Jacqui Clydesdale 15:22
That's what I call them micro change... to songs to make them more singable, all the time. So, one of the things that's been pointed out about this is that will, and shall… will is a very sort of short vowel sound and shall forces you to open your mouth and sing it sort of bigger and louder. Right?
Liz Walker 15:43
Okay. We will overcoooome. And then, we shaaaall overcoooome...
Jacqui Clydesdale 15:46
Yep. Yeah.
Liz Walker 15:47
Yeah, yeah.
Jacqui Clydesdale 15:48
So it's more unifying. I think that goes back to some of the stuff that we talked about when we talked about Dan Levitin and getting people to sing together, effectively, to be louder and bigger and take up more space,
Liz Walker 16:01
And I think I think shall has... is just a slightly elevated verb.
Jacqui Clydesdale 16:05
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Liz Walker 16:07
It's a little biblical.
Jacqui Clydesdale 16:08
Yeah, that's right.
Liz Walker 16:09
I mean, that is really interesting, it's that iterative approach of, like, taking feedback, looking and seeing what's working and going back noodling making new micro changes. It's really art in a really practical kind of sense. It's, it's not, it's... I don't think it's a way that we think about the relationship of art and artists. We don't think of them as sort of, well, making lots of little changes to things. We think of it as like something comes out perfect.
Jacqui Clydesdale 16:34
That's right. And I think too, it's not the way we think about something like a protest song because a protest song is somehow supposed to be this natural explosion from the heart of like incredibly passionate feeling that you know we all just magically come together and the...
Liz Walker 16:51
Right.
Jacqui Clydesdale 16:51
And instead this was like a couple of, like, very conscious choices, a couple of several very conscious choices to tweak and make this song work for that context. In 1957, Pete Seeger plays it at a concert and Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks are in the audience, and the song gets a boost. More and more people come to Highlander to workshop, and to organize for civil rights at this point because before it was a little bit more focused on union...
Liz Walker 17:25
Like the labor stuff like the tobacco workers, right, of course.
Jacqui Clydesdale 17:28
but it's in the late 50s that things start to take a bit of a swing more in the realm of civil rights and MLK himself comes to Highlander, and hears the song. And apparently, I mean I like, I love this quote… he hummed it for the rest of the day to himself, and then said to someone, you know, that's song really sticks with you really haunts you, and I think that's really lovely, especially in light of the fact of he quoted it in his final sermon. Yeah, just before he was, he was murdered. A few days later 50,000 people sang it at his funeral. So, it really did embed itself in the hearts of a lot of people who were fighting. During that time, that was that was almost 10 years later, of course, so I don't want to completely elide over that, and in fact I want to take a quick detour before we, before we get to the sort of culmination
Liz Walker 18:18
The sixties
Jacqui Clydesdale 18:19
Yeah, I want to... I want to talk a little bit about the late 50s, early 60s when one of the people who is involved in the Highlander School, a guy named... GUY Carawan. I don't know how to say his name. Every time it comes up...
Liz Walker 18:34
It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Jacqui Clydesdale 18:35
It does not, I always want to say first of all, of course, having grown up in Eastern Canada, I want to call him “Ghee.” I think his name is Guy Carawan. Then in the spring of 1960, there are a lot of civil rights actions and protests throughout the South. And there are students from colleges and universities and high schools even around Nashville doing protests, where they go to lunch counters...
Liz Walker 19:01
So in Nashville, black people and people of colour could not sit at certain lunch tables, like... like, lunch counters like, like, Woolworth’s or whatever.
Jacqui Clydesdale 19:08
Yeah, and they go in and sit down and order lunch. What comes out of this is an album called “The Nashville Sit-in Story: Songs and Scenes of Nashville Lunch Counter Desegregation by the Sit-in Participants” and it's available. You can either listen to it… online you can listen to it on YouTube or Spotify, it's from the... it's from Folkways Recordings from The Smithsonian.
Liz Walker 19:32
Yeah, I listened to it and it is just astonishing. It's amazing to listen to. I didn't know what to expect, but there were so many things about the way that they were like, it is like this wild audio of people in the jails and they're like, they're smack talking each other and stuff and I was just, it was very charming, but it also felt really felt really wild.
Jacqui Clydesdale 19:56
Yeah, well, I mean, you know that that's a recreation though, right?
Liz Walker 19:59
Oh my god,
Jacqui Clydesdale 20:00
Like that's not actually taking place, I mean Guy Carawan carried around his recording equipment, and absolutely recorded like “man on the street” interviews and things like that, but those, those bits in the...
Liz Walker
The, the bits.
Jacqui Clydesdale
Yeah, the bits, kind of, yeah...
Liz Walker 20:17
Are you telling me they're not real?
Jacqui Clydesdale 20:18
They're recreated. They’re recreated. Yeah.
Liz Walker 20:21
They feel really, like, I honestly I thought that they were 100% real, so it was like they were trying to... I guess it would be dangerous. Maybe you wouldn't get good... [yeah] so they're trying to like make it kind of real sound.
Jacqui Clydesdale 20:34
There are scenes of them at... I found the scenes of them at the lunch counters having people scream at them horrible abuse. I found that incredibly moving, and I was really upset thinking that that's what they were. It turns out that they actually re-recorded that, just to give us the sense that we were there, and then there's, there's that beautiful, haunting recording of We Shall Overcome in the jail. Well, or maybe not in the jail, maybe? Maybe... it's very echoey...
Liz Walker 21:03
It sounds like they're in a drum in a metal...
Jacqui Clydesdale 21:04
Yes. Yeah, exactly. They may have decided to lean into a drum and sing it to give you that echoey feeling, but it is gorgeous and I would highly recommend anybody listening right now to give it a chance because it is... it's really beautiful. So the Nashville Sit-in Story was conceived by Guy Carawan and was co-written with one of the leaders of the Nashville Christian Leadership Council, a guy called the Reverend Vivian. Some of the students involved include Candy Anderson, Peggy Alexander, Diane Nash, and two famous names that jumped out at me: Marion Barry, who would go on to be the mayor of Washington DC, and John Lewis, who would go on to be a senator... no, not a senator, a congressman from Georgia.
Liz Walker 21:54
Amazing. So what was the idea behind the record? I mean like, what was... this is such an odd thing to do. What were they, what were they trying to achieve?
Jacqui Clydesdale 22:02
I think honestly it's supposed to take you right there. That's the thing, because I really think, like, it fits in with the thesis that we've been discussing so far is that strategy, tactics, to win hearts and minds. These students, and these civil rights leaders thought, okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to make our voices bigger? You can make your voices bigger by, A, leaning into a drum and singing, but, B, by recording it and then passing out that recording.
Liz Walker 22:28
Right. Getting it into the record shops, and then the kids were be looking at and saying, “What's this?” and then taking it home and...
Jacqui Clydesdale 22:33
Sure, yeah.
Liz Walker 22:35
You know one of the things that I was thinking when I was listening to this track was something that I don't think had ever occurred to me before, but imagining what it would have been like, as one of those people at the counter, as one of those jailers, as one of one of the people who were opposing the students... what would it be like to hear people singing that.
Jacqui Clydesdale 22:55
That's right, I mean we always, we always imagined ourselves as the singers. What would that be like, yeah? Right. We don't imagine ourselves as the listeners, and I would say, we also, being the kind of people we are, we envision ourselves as the resistors, not the oppressors. What does... what it does feel like is, it sounds like a church. It sounds like, you know, there's three-part harmony in there, and it sounds like a song that you would hear in church, so if you've got… if you're, if you're a hateful person, and then you hear something like that I can't imagine like...
Liz Walker 23:30
Right.
Jacqui Clydesdale 23:30
It must just transport you...
Liz Walker 23:32
Right. It would be calm you down at least a little bit...
Jacqui Clydesdale 23:35
Or, you know, strike a little terror into the heart of someone who's on the wrong side of history, right?
Liz Walker 23:40
Right.
Jacqui Clydesdale 23:41
I mean that's the hope. So one thing I really want to highlight here is that the underpinnings of We Shall Overcome are religious, and that that religiosity is part of the reason for its popularity as a tactic, right. So I want to read a quote from the Reverend Andrew Young, who worked with Dr. King, and a couple of years after his (Dr. King’s) death he talked about how the religious stories that people would have known and understood and been intimately familiar with... why those were used as the language for struggle, for helping people to understand the struggle that they were in. “Young explained that King and other preachers developed a language and mobilizing strategy based on the religious inclinations and understandings of local people. “Nobody could have ever argued segregation and integration and gotten people convinced to do anything about that,” Young recalled. “But when Martin would talk about leaving the slavery of Egypt and wandering in the wilderness of separate but equal, and moving into a promised land, somehow that made sense to folk, and they may not have understood it, it was probably nobody else's political theory, but it was their grassroots ideology, it was their faith. It was the thing they had been nurtured on.” That quote was from “Sit in, Stand up and Sing out: Black Gospel Music and the Civil Rights Movement.” We'll have a link to it in the show notes.
Liz Walker 25:07
Well this is Choral Fixation, it is a podcast about people singing together and today we are talking about people singing We Shall Overcome. It's an epic journey,
Jacqui Clydesdale 25:15
It is an epic journey. Come along.