Sing for Freedom

Julian Bond

Description

Two classic collections of freedom songs, We Shall Overcome (1963) and Freedom Is A Constant Struggle (1968), are reprinted here in a single edition which includes a major new introduction by the editors, words and music to songs, important documentary photographs, and scores of firsthand accounts by participants in this key movement which reshaped U.S. history.

Sujets

• USA
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: University of Georgia Press
• Date de parution: 30 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781603062480
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 12 Mo

Extrait

A LSO BY G UY AND C ANDIE C ARAWAN
BOOKS
Voices from the Mountains
Ain t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life
RECORDINGS
Sing for Freedom
The Nashville Sit-in Story
We Shall Overcome: Southern Freedom Songs
Freedom in the Air, Albany, Georgia
The Story of Greenwood, Mississippi
Birmingham, Alabama, Mass Meeting
Been in the Storm So Long
Moving Star Hall Singers: Folk Festival on Johns Island
Come All You Coal Miners
They ll Never Keep Us Down

NewSouth Books
P.O. Box 1588
Montgomery, AL 36102
Copyright 2007 by NewSouth, Inc.
New introduction 2007 by Guy and Candie Carawan.
Foreword 2007 by Julian Bond.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
This book was originally published as two volumes entitled: We Shall Overcome: Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement , 1963 Oak Publications, and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Freedom Movement , 1968 Oak Publications.
Where copyright holders are listed under a song, exclusive publishing rights are reserved to this original copyright holder. The editors have made every attempt to corroborate the song copyright information listed in the original editions of this book and to correct any omissions or errors. If any song is not properly credited, please contact us so we may correct future printings of the book.
Where no copyright holder is listed under a song, rights to the arrangement and transcription of the songs are 1963, 1990, 1992 Sing Out Corporation (for songs in Part One) or 1968, 1990, 1992 Sing Out Corporation (for songs in Part Two).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN-13: 978-1-58838-193-4
ISBN-10: 1-58838-193-5
Design by Randall Williams
Printed in the United States of America
For all who believe a world with justice and equality is still possible and live their lives accordingly, these songs are for you.
C ONTENTS
Foreword J ULIAN B OND
Editor s Note on Style and Organization
Preface to the 2007 Edition G UY AND C ANDIE C ARAWAN
Preface to the 1992 Edition G UY AND C ANDIE C ARAWAN
P ART O NE -W E S HALL O VERCOME
Introduction [from the 1963 edition]
1960: Sit-Ins, Stand-Ins, Wade-Ins, Kneel-Ins, Etc.
1961: Freedom Rides
1961-62: Albany, Georgia
1962-63: Voter Registration
1963: Greenwood, Birmingham
P ART T WO -F REEDOM I S A C ONSTANT S TRUGGLE
Introduction [from the 1968 edition]
1963-64: I Got On My Traveling Shoes
1964: Freedom Is A Constant Struggle
I Been in the Storm So Long
1963-65: Oh, Wallace, You Never Can Jail Us All
1966-68: We Got the Whole World Shakin
Bibliography
Photograph Credits
Index of Song Titles
General Index

F OREWORD
J ULIAN B OND
L ift every voice and sing isn t just the anthem of the freedom movement; it is also a description of what the civil rights movement did on almost every occasion. As a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1960 through 65, despite being unable to carry a tune, there was seldom a day when I could not drown my voice in a chorus of others-at mass meetings, on marches and protests, or sitting in the SNCC office.
SNCC people were far from the originators of freedom singing -singing for freedom or of the longing for it is as old as the African-American presence on American soil. But it achieved a special status and resonance in the decade of the 1960s-when the civil rights movement became more widespread across the South and across the nation, and when young people joined it in great numbers.
The young found special joy in these songs, and the multitude of youthful groups-SNCC s and CORE s Freedom Singers, CORE s Integration Grooves, Jimmy Collier and the Movement Singers and many more-is evidence of the attraction of lifting voices in song.
Bernice Reagon-one of SNCC s Freedom Singers and later founder of the acapella group Sweet Honey in the Rock-said this music is like holding a tool in your hand.
And tools these songs were.
Reagon has written that the songs [were] the language that focused the energy of the people who filled the streets and roads of the South during that period.
You can often say things in song better than you can say them in speech. You can say things in song you may not want to say in speech.
When Bettie Mae Fikes of the Selma Youth Choir added the graveyard to the places where Alabama Governor George Wallace might be found, and the crazy house to possible locales for Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, she was singing what she might not have dared to say. Or at least, what adults might not have wanted her to say.
And when Carlton Reese led the Alabama Christian Movement Choir in a complex arrangement of Ninety-Nine and a Half Won t Do, recast as a freedom song, he was employing a time-honored practice of using someone else s text and tune to express some new idea.
The sixties civil rights movement had many prominent singers-Bernice Reagon heads anybody s list, but you d also have to list Sam Block, Fannie Lou Hamer, Cleo Kennedy, Willie Peacock, Hollis Watkins, Mabel Hillary, and others-including many who were famous in their hometowns but unknown only a few miles away.
I first heard the movement s best-known song, We Shall Overcome, on Easter weekend of 1960, at SNCC s founding conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.
It was sung-and led-by Guy Carawan. The leading here was more important than his singing: while some few among the students gathered together by Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had no doubt heard an earlier incarnation of the song- I ll Overcome Someday -most had never heard the version that is now sung around the world at an incredible variety of protests.
Guy led the audience in singing it, and at the conference s end, several hundred young people had both learned and adopted We Shall Overcome as their song-as the modern movement s song, just as Lift Every Voice and Sing had been the anthem of earlier generations.
When I saw Guy take the stage at the Raleigh conference, my first thought was surfer! With longish blond hair and a fringed jacket, he looked like someone off a California beach. But he and his singing were as far removed from the Beach Boys as he could be-when he sang, you could tell he lived the songs, he felt the songs, in a way the June and Moon platitudes of sixties popular music artists never could.
I discovered later that Carawan came by his looks-and his feelings for the music-honestly. He was Los Angeles-born but came from Southern roots in the Carolinas, and he came to the Highlander Folk Center in 1959 to find a base for his researches into Southern music and culture.
He stayed at Highlander, and America s musical life has been enriched ever since.
Guy (and later Candie) was a troubadour-traveling, singing, and teaching-preserving old songs for a new generation and teaching them wherever he went.
These songs-old ones, new ones, familiar and unknown-were the message he carried across the country, and as he sang them, others learned and repeated them, sometimes changing verses or just a word or two to make them adaptable to a particular movement or emotion.
Do yourself a favor-read this book-and then sing these songs. Invite your family or neighbors to join in.
You ll all feel better-and to use an overused but appropriate word, you ll all feel empowered-as these songs empowered many before you.
E DITOR S N OTE ON S TYLE AND O RGANIZATION
T his 2007 volume of civil rights songs-issued appropriately in the seventy-fifth anniversary year of the Highlander Folk Center-was originally two books. The first, We Shall Overcome , was published in 1963 when the civil rights movement was in full bloom. Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Emmett Till s murder (1955), the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-56), and the Little Rock school crisis (1957-58) were still fresh in the nation s consciousness. And the student sit-in movement, the Freedom Rides, the early stirrings of voter registration, and the major SCLC campaigns in cities like Albany, Birmingham, and St. Augustine were still happening as Guy and Candie Carawan collected the songs they and others were singing in protests, demonstrations, mass meetings, conferences, and jails across the South.
In their introductions and in the notes to the various songs in the 1963 book, the Carawans often wrote not merely in the present tense, but with an immediacy and urgency that could be felt. There were good reasons to be anxious and worried about laying your life on the line and going to jail in Mississippi and Alabama. But these songs were the antidote to fear, and the Carawans were eager to get them down and make them more accessible to an even wider audience. There was also optimism in the 1963 volume-obstacles were being overcome, black and white were walking hand in hand, nobody was turning them around.
In this new edition, the present tense was mostly retained even though the events being described and sung about are now decades in the past. As much as possible, dates have been attached to the introductions, notes, and chapter and part divisions to help orient the reader to the time period when the original writing occurred.
Similarly, the racial terms used in the original two volumes have been retained in this one: Negro was the preferred term in 1963. By 1968, black and Afro-American or occasionally African-American were more likely to be used, and the reader will notice this change in the commentary and even some of the lyrics in the later chapters of the book.
By 1968 when the Carawans issued their second volume, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle , much more had changed than terminology. By then Jim Crow, if not dead, was on life support. Except in isolated pockets of the deepest South, school desegregation had been accomplished, voting rights had been won, and barriers to acco