Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs

By Candie Carawan, Guy Carawan and Julian Bond

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781603062480

Julian Bond

Julian Bond (1940–2015) was chairman of the NAACP from 1998 to 2010. On Easter Weekend, 1960, he was one of several hundred students from across the South who helped to form SNCC, and shortly thereafter became SNCC’s communications director.

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ALSO BY GUY AND CANDIE CARAWAN

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.

CONTENTS

ForewordJULIAN BOND

Editor’s Note on Style and Organization

Preface to the 2007 EditionGUY AND CANDIE CARAWAN

Preface to the 1992 EditionGUY AND CANDIE CARAWAN

PART ONE—WE SHALL OVERCOME

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

PART TWO—FREEDOM IS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE

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

FOREWORD

JULIAN BOND

Lift 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.

EDITOR’S NOTE ON STYLE AND ORGANIZATION

This 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 accommodations in travel, housing, and dining had been swept away. It was a stunning social transformation in a remarkably short period of time.

But the change came at tremendous cost as well. Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were merely the most prominent of many martyrs to the civil rights movement. Organizations and strategies had also changed. SNCC had splintered, and many of its no longer so youthful leaders had moved on to more mainstream roles in politics, education, the ministry, or the law. The major civil rights organizations—SCLC, CORE, NAACP—were also facing the profound reality that the systemic and institutional challenges of racism were going to be much harder to root from the American landscape than were the dogs and fire hoses of Birmingham or the night riders of Mississippi.

All these shifts are visible in the songs and commentaries collected by the Carawans in this songbook of the movement.

PREFACE TO THE 2007 EDITION

GUY AND CANDIE CARAWAN

The civil rights movement without its music would have been like a bird without its wings . . .

So spoke Congressman John Lewis when we saw him recently. He added that we need to be singing more now. We certainly agree and that is one reason we are now publishing a third edition of this collection of songs from the movement. These songs helped lift the spirits and tell the story of perhaps the most powerful movement for social justice in U.S. history.

We were extremely lucky to have been in the company of John and hundreds of other freedom fighters in the early 1960s. Based at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, we were able to sing with people from around the South as they gathered at Highlander to share stories from their communities and to lay plans for challenging segregation and discrimination when they went home. We were able to travel to those same communities to join demonstrations, to record mass meetings and smaller gatherings, to speak with people about their experiences, and even occasionally to join some of them in jail.

We experienced firsthand the power of these songs. Guy’s job at Highlander was making sure that music had a place in every gathering. He was building on the work done by Zilphia Horton at Highlander during the labor movement. She had both encouraged people to share songs they knew and used in their labor struggles, and taught songs that she knew from her own life experiences. It was a good model for Guy. He heard from young freedom activists wonderful songs like the rock ’n’ roll songs used by a quartet from American Baptist Theological Seminary during the Nashville sit-in movement. And in turn he taught songs from his repertoire like I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table and Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, Hold On. He was able to pass on We Shall Overcome, which had been a theme song at Highlander since Zilphia learned it from striking Food and Tobacco Workers from Charleston, South Carolina, in 1947. Zilphia had sung it all across the South and at countless Highlander workshops until her death in 1956.

The singing in Nashville in 1960 had sustained Candie as she participated in the sit-in movement there as an exchange student at Fisk University. The power of singing at the mass meetings where people gathered before and after marches and demonstrations was unlike anything she had heard or felt previously. When more than a hundred students were arrested and jailed in late January, the singing from cell to cell sustained a frightened white girl from California.

Sing for Freedom illustrates the evolution of the music of the movement.

Between 1960 and 1966 the freedom repertoire grew from a limited number to more than one hundred songs—thirty or so widely known throughout the South. Different types of songs emerged for every kind of situation, expressing a full range of emotions. There were songs for mass meetings and demonstrations—stirring and hopeful; there were angry, serious and determined songs; songs for jail cells; songs for parties and celebrations—full of humor, satire, jubilation; there were songs expressing grief and sadness—songs in a minor key.

As the movement evolved and fanned out across the South, the songs began to spread and became more varied. Nashville had one of the first citywide campaigns against segregation, and songs emerged there to suit the sit-ins. Some of the first adaptations of older spirituals were created by sit-in participants, especially after some hours in the Nashville jail.

One cannot underestimate the importance of the nonviolent trainings that took place in Nashville, under the leadership of Jim Lawson. A core group of student leaders including Diane Nash, John Lewis, and others became thoroughly committed to nonviolent resistance as a way to confront discrimination and injustice.

When the 1961 freedom rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality faltered after serious violence, the Nashville movement students picked up the campaign and got on the buses. They used singing to sustain their courage. When they landed in Parchman Penitentiary along with hundreds of volunteers who came South to support the freedom rides, they shared their songs and encouraged others to add to the repertoire.

Following the freedom rides, Mississippi became an important target area for the movement—the state with the most deeply entrenched segregation and repression. As the youthful organizers moved into Mississippi, they needed all the tools and skills they could muster, not the least of which were courage and a basic optimism that things could change. They also found that song leading was an asset. Powerful local leaders emerged, some with a natural ability to fill a room with song. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer from Ruleville, Mississippi, was one example.

The campaigns in Albany and Birmingham were especially important to the evolution of freedom songs. In Albany, the mass meetings began with traditional congregational singing—lined-out hymns with a powerful surge of voices. This would be followed by a vigorous session of the newer freedom songs. The SNCC Freedom Singers—Bernice Reagon, Rutha Harris, Cordell Reagon, and Chuck Neblett—came from the Albany Movement and carried freedom songs across the nation to college campuses and church gatherings. A second group of SNCC Freedom Singers would incorporate the original and relevant compositions of Matthew Jones.

The Birmingham Movement grew in an urban setting, and Birmingham churches favored modern gospel music. A high-powered choir under the direction of Carlton Reese sang for forty nights running at mass meetings throughout the

Reviews for Sing for Freedom

[aulsmith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Compiled for SNCC, this songbook has words, music and chords. Nice book of civil rights songs.