The People’s Songbag

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30592, 7 November 1964, Page 17

The People’s Songbag

New Battle, Old Wine

[Specially written for "The Press" by DERRICK ROONEY] TT’S a fairly safe bet that on Wednesday, voting day in America, a group of vzhite and Negro students was gathered somewhere singing this adaptation of the old Negro song from Alabama, “Come On Up To Bright Glory”: If you miss me in the cottoi fields. And you can’t find me nowhere Come on over to the court house. I’ll be voting right there. The toughness and adaptability of folk-songs has nowhere been as forcefully demonstrated in our times as in the American civil rights movement. The Negroes’ struggle for freedom has become, almost incidentally, one of the great singing movements. Folk-songs and spirituals of the kind heard in the show “Black Nativity” have been given new words and a new poignancy. They have been sung on mass marches, on buses and picket lines and at lunch-counter sit-ins. Some have crept almost unnoticed into popular culture: a few, including “Michael, Row The Boat Ashore,” Bob Dylan’s “Biowin’ In The Wind” and “If I Had A Hammer” (written by two stalwarts of the old guard of folk singers, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays) have attained mass circulation as international hits. The singing movement as a force for freedom began effectively with the sit-in demonstrations at lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, four years ago, and was given impetus by the freedom bus riders who moved south soon afterwards under the direction of the Student Non-violent Co-ordin-ating Committee. The students sang revised versions of Gospel songs, blues, popular songs and even old union songs like “The Popular Wobbly,” which became “They Go Wild Over Me”;

Oh the manager went wild over me. When I went one afternoon and eat in for tea.

By far the most famous adaptation is from the hopeful old church song, “I’ll Overcome Someday,” which became the declamatory “We Shall Overcome.” “One cannot

describe the vitality and emotion this one song evokes across the Southland,” wrote Wyatt Tee Walker, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I have heard it sung in great mass meetings with a thousand voices singing as one; I’ve heard a half-dozen sing it softly behind the bars of the Hinds County prison in Mississippi; I’ve heard old women singing it on the way to work in Albany, Georgia; I’ve heard students singing it as they were dragged off to gaol. It generates power that is indescribable.” Other songs, too, have taken on a declamatory tone: “I Want My Freedom Now,” “Freedom's Coming and It Won’t Be Long,” “Buses Are Coming, Oh Yes,” “Ninetynine and a Half Won’t Do.” Many of the new versions were written by members of the S.N.C.C., which has sponsored the first collection in book form of freedom songs. “Those students,” writes Guy Carawan in his introduction, “who have faced the angry mobs, suffered the beatings and gaolings, and gone through so many other trails . . . have found from experience that singing these songs has inspired them and given them sustenance for the continuing struggle.”