Song of the Week -- "We Shall Overcome"
The Singer Poets
First, the song itself, here sung by Baez in 1965.
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day
Note that this was a BBC4 production, when UK and US broadcasters felt a greater social need to reflect and cultivate culture more than make profits, including profits based on shock TV strategies just to make people angry or afraid. What I find beautiful in this video is not only Baez's beauty and her simple guitar, but her intimate invitation to an audience to participate instead of simply observing. Her solo performance would have been moving enough, but the idyllic faces of the singers in the room make this as intimate a performance as I've seen. Not spectacular. Community-building.
Note, too, that in this video, she simply assumes her audience knows the song -- "Will you sing 'We Shall Overcome' with me, please?" and then leads a simple call and response prompt pattern to help the audience members who are not as familiar with verses after the first with the simple lyrics.
We'll walk hand in hand
We'll walk hand in hand
We'll walk hand in hand some day
Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day
The lyrics come from the African-American musical tradition from the early twentieth century and were popularized by farm workers -- farm workers -- striking tobacco workers in South Carolina in the 1940s. By the 1960s, the sacrifices of striking workers had become an anthem for all counterculture protests of the people's revolution.
Each verse builds on the individual's greater reliance on and membership in a body politic -- a community of peers -- oppressed by a dominant culture old as humanity itself. The individual voice joins another, another, another until the "we" leaves the aspirations of the first verse and joins bodies, hand in hand, in the second. Sadly, we've lost that sense of song as community-building. Our popular musicians today are more interested in themselves as the focus of performance, instead of our heritage of men and women singing together around fire -- in the forests, around a hearth -- or in pubs, even in churches. Music itself has become a solo art, losing the intimate connection of the circle of friends. Yet it is within singing hand in hand that the single voice gains not only confidence but soul-bonding. A single soul learns he is not alone, and finds the sympathetic other soul yearning for freedom with him.
Truth will make us free
Truth will make us free
Truth will make us free
Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day
The song of course went beyond BBC4 before Baez's performance. Dylan sang it; Seeger chanted deep from his spirit, with baritone harmony that challenged his audience -- again, that communal expectation -- to move body and soul, mixing the lyrics with his own homily interspersed to teach his equals through the emotional bonds of music and public performance of the body.
We are not afraidI've emphasized the poet singers of the 60s and 70s here because their audio record is easy to find. But the sacred song was sung thousands of times without recording available. Marches, meetings, homes, churches, the single woman walking across a sun-filled field thinking of her past and future. That its simple lyrics are so easily remembered yet weigh so heavily on our heart makes it part of the great American canon songbook and deservedly so.
We are not afraid
We are not afraid today
Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day
Johnson
President Johnson, who I don't have the greatest respect for, did great things for myriad reasons. But he knew how to use rhetoric to strengthen his own ethos and move a resistant Congress and American people during the Civil Rights Revolution as my friend historian Andrew Joseph Pegoda argues. In his speech to Congress on 15 March 1965, urging the passage of what we would call the Civil Rights Act, he called upon the memories of oppression from Appomattox to Selma, the promise of a Constitution that promised full citizenship rights to all Americans. Would that that promise had not been rolled back so recently by courts and legislatures through gerrymandering and "voter ID" laws designed to disenfranchise those this VRA had promised to protect.But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome. (Johnson)
By community singing together, this song becomes one of the sacred -- truly sacred -- sacrosanct, even made sacred through the shedding of blood -- because of a hope in a different, brighter future. Communal singing here rekindles the hidden hope that the fears we live, the fears we carry in our alienation, our raised voices, our ad hominem fallacies, that those fears can be overcome with each other's faith in the future, with each other's belief and human love for each other, in the trust that comes with recognizing the common equality of man.
We are not alone
We are not alone
We are not alone some day
Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day
This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all, all black and white, all North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They're our enemies, not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too -- poverty, disease, and ignorance: we shall overcome. (Johnson)Instead of seeing institutions as the problem, both the song and Johnson saw the fear and insecurities of tradition -- centuries, millennial old traditions where dominant cultures oppress minority cultures for truly insane reasons -- poverty, background, genetics, education. He called for the institutions to change, not the people. Once the institutions change, the people change as well. As long as the institutions remain as they are, humans continue to thrash about, restless.
Johnson's speech that night has many notable ideas, but consider how he closed:
.... I came down here to ask you to share this task with me, and to share it with the people that we both work for. I want this to be the Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, which did all these things for all these people.
Beyond this great chamber, out yonder in fifty States, are the people that we serve. Who can tell what deep and unspoken hopes are in their hearts tonight as they sit there and listen. We all can guess, from our own lives, how difficult they often find their own pursuit of happiness, how many problems each little family has. They look most of all to themselves for their futures. But I think that they also look to each of us.
Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says in Latin: "God has favored our undertaking." God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will.
But I cannot help believing that He truly understands and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight.Here, he focuses, epitomizes the central hope of "We Shall Overcome" -- that through collective civil discourse, negotiation, purification, action -- American society will become better, stronger, more equitable, fulfilling promises from Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, Jefferson, Kennedy, and the thousands of unnamed rhetoricians who history forgets.
The whole wide world around
The whole wide world around
The whole wide world around some day
Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day
The Lost Art
We've lost the ability to sing together. We've lost the singer poets who taught us community through the songs around campfires, voices by the millions in public spaces. Something has been teaching us for decades to keep quiet. Stop singing. Don't shout. Keep to yourself. Look down, not up. Be part of the silent consumerist crowd -- that's the only patriotism we require any more. Be afraid.I look forward to a singer poet who disrupts again. Disrupts. Disrupts every meeting of suited institutionalized cogs who expect me to be afraid, who try to stop my heart, who feel they have already overcome me and my brothers. I look forward to that singer poet who believes, deep in his heart, that we shall overcome some day and brings tens and hundreds and thousands together to overcome together, again.
Sing unto the Lord, O ye saints of his, and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness. For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. (Psalm 30.4-5, KJV)
References
Johnson, Lyndon B. "Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Voting Legislation." 15 March 1965. Web. <http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/lbjweshallovercome.htm>. 9 November 2014.
