“We are not afraid”
The Power of the People’s Song
BY THE TIME PETE SEEGER first came across “We Shall Overcome” on a visit to the left-wing Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1947, it had already traveled a long way.
The melody dated back to eighteenth-century Europe and, like so many others, crossed the Atlantic and seeped into the soil of the Southern plantations, where it became the hymn “I’ll Be All Right.” Passing through Baptist and Methodist churches, and taking its lyrical theme from Charles A. Tindley’s gospel song “I’ll Overcome Someday,” it mutated once more into “I Will Overcome.” In October 1945, Lucille Simmons, who belonged to a local Baptist choir, made it the rallying cry of black strikers outside the American Tobacco plant in Charleston, South Carolina. I became We. The Lord became the union.
Simmons and another striker accepted an invitation to Highlander one day in 1947 and sang the song to songleader Zilphia Horton. Highlander, founded fifteen years earlier by Zilphia’s husband, Myles, was a pioneering force in civil rights, opening its doors to workers and activists of all races, and culture was integral to its educational programs. Zilphia, who had a clear, strong, alto voice, believed that teaching was a two-way process and was always eager to learn new songs from visitors to the school. “Zilphia was a very warm and encouraging person and a wonderful singer,” says folksinger Guy Carawan. “She was a good contrast to Myles, who pushed people to question their beliefs and actions. Zilphia helped people feel good about themselves, their music, their communities.”
Seeger was fascinated by the song. “It’s the genius of simplicity,” he once said. “Any damn fool can get complicated. I like to compare it to the backboard in basketball. You bounce your life experiences off it and they come back with new meaning.” Before returning to New York, Seeger added two new verses, which began, “We’ll walk hand in hand” and “The whole wide world around.” He also changed will to shall. “‘We shall’ opens the mouth wider; the i in will is not an easy vowel to sing well,” he explained.
In its new, though not its final, form, “We Shall Overcome” was protest music boiled down to its quintessence: we—the power of community—shall—the promise of a brighter future—overcome—defiance and endurance. The piecemeal nature of its evolution intensified the we. It traversed decades and states, groups and individuals, men and women, black and white—the antithesis of solitary genius. Seeger, who believed folk songs shone only when sung en masse and saw himself as a propagator of songs rather than a star in his own right, was the perfect vehicle for it.
“We Shall Overcome” would not be copyrighted until 1963, the year that it became the most famous protest song in America. Seeger, sitting there in Highlander in 1947, hearing Zilphia Horton sing it for the first time, could have had no idea how much he would have to personally overcome in the intervening years.
THE TWIN FAILURE OF PEOPLE’S SONGS and the Henry Wallace campaign may have alerted Seeger to how unforgiving Cold War America could be to a left-wing musician, but the full force of the new situation only hit him when he tried to arrange an outdoor concert in Peekskill, a town in upstate New York, in August 1949.
A few months earlier, Seeger and his wife, Toshi, had bought a seventeen-acre plot of land about fifteen miles up the Hudson River from Peekskill, and set about building a new life. The concert, also featuring Paul Robeson, was meant to be a convivial, picnicky affair, but it was a red rag to the war veterans of Westchester County, who made plans for a competing parade. There were rumors of Ku Klux Klan involvement, too; two effigies of Robeson were lynched on the eve of the show. Before Seeger could even get to the site, the veterans had mobbed concertgoers, screaming, “Give us Robeson. We’ll lynch the nigger up!” The crowd responded by linking arms in a chorus of “We Shall Not Be Moved.” They were, alas, moved—by ferocious veterans who marked their victory by erecting a burning cross. The local Daily Mirror’s headline was bluntly to the point: “Robeson: He Asked For It.”
Nevertheless, the concert was rescheduled for the following weekend. Seeger sang his recent composition “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song),” while Robeson, guarded by a ring of union men, essayed “Go Down, Moses” and “America the Beautiful.” They cut short their sets so that everyone could leave before nightfall, but despite this precaution, concertgoers drove straight into an ambush. Veterans, Klansmen, and other “concerned citizens” battered the convoy with stones. If the audience expected protection from the police, they were sorely disappointed: many state troopers joined in the attack, smashing windscreens and heads with their nightsticks. By the time the Seegers got home, their hair and clothes glittered with shattered glass, the road was littered for miles with smashed and overturned vehicles, and 150 attendees required medical attention. The aftermath was, if anything, even more shocking. A grand jury investigation exonerated the attackers, and local Representative Walton W. Gwinn absurdly branded the concert a “Communist military raid.” Mississippi Representative John Rankin thundered, “If that nigger [Rankin insisted he said negra] Robeson does not like this country, let him go to Russia and take that gang of alien Communists with him.”
Peekskill was just one sign of what Seeger was up against, as each month brought another fresh disaster for American Communists: the test detonation of the first Soviet nuclear bomb; Mao Tse-tung’s declaration of the People’s Republic of China; the perjury conviction of State Department offical and alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss; and the arrest of a New York couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for passing nuclear secrets to Moscow. Who could be trusted to root out the red menace? Step forward Joseph McCarthy, the opportunistic junior senator from Wisconsin, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and three ex-FBI agents who published the names of alleged Communists in their newsletter, Counterattack.
At the end of June 1950, in the same week that North Korean troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea and seized the capital, Seoul, prompting President Truman to mount a defensive “police action,” the Counterattack team published Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence on Radio and Television. Behind a cover showing a dastardly crimson hand reaching around a microphone was a list of 151 alleged showbusiness reds, including Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Will Geer, Burl Ives, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Orson Welles, and…Pete Seeger.
The timing could not have been worse, because the publication of Red Channels coincided with Seeger’s greatest success to date. It was the Almanacs story all over again: a brief, bright window of national celebrity snapped shut with savage force by politics. The Weavers, a quartet he had formed in the aftermath of Peekskill, had just released their debut single, a sanitized version of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene,” and Americans were snapping up Weavers singles as quickly as Decca could press them. Sing Out!—a new folk periodical edited by Irwin Silber—had just been launched, taking its name from the chorus of “If I Had a Hammer.”
The Weavers’ golden streak continued with covers of Woody Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line,” and Solomon Linda’s 1939 hit “Mbube” (retitled “Wimoweh”). The fact that none of these hits had subversive messages did not deter the FBI from stepping up its harassment. Agents tracked them from state to state. TV and concert bookings mysteriously disappeared. A Senate subcommittee, somewhat carried away, looked into charging the band with “seditious conspiracy.”
By that point, HUAC was in bullish form, having claimed several scalps with the recent conviction for contempt of Congress of the writers and directors known as the “Hollywood Ten,” and the blacklisting of hundreds more. Leon Josephson, the lawyer brother of Café Society owner Barney, was also found guilty of contempt, and the press pounced on Barney’s club, calling it a “Moscow-line nightclub” and precipitating its collapse. In August 1950, the State Department revoked Paul Robeson’s passport, declaring that his presence abroad would be “contrary to the best interests of the United States.”
One musical victim of the new paranoia (and one which Seeger would later cover) was Vern Partlow’s “Old Man Atom.” Partlow, a journalist by trade, had written this satirical talking blues (“We hold these truths to be self-evident / All men may be cremated equal”) after interviewing atomic scientists for the Los Angeles Daily News in 1945. In 1950, zoologist and part-time folksinger Sam Hinton released a hit version. But in August, Victor Records withdrew its cash-in version by “singing cowboy” group Sons of the Pioneers, fearing that its peacenik sentiments might be deemed unpatriotic, and a mooted recording by none other than Bing Crosby was quietly trashcanned. Partlow himself would soon be blacklisted.*
Another casualty of HUAC hysteria was friendship. Scared by the attacks on Café Society, Josh White severed ties with the club, and with People’s Songs. In 1950, he buckled and testified to HUAC, attempting to walk an impossible tightrope. He was not asked to finger anybody as a Communist, and defended his right to sing about social injustice, although he explained that he wouldn’t sing “Strange Fruit” abroad because “it’s our family affair, to be solved by Americans in the peaceful, democratic American way.” As another black folksinger, Jackie Washington, later argued, “To most black folks, the important thing is being clever enough to get by, and Josh White found a way to manuever through.”
Most people, however, were deaf to his subtle equivocations and he ended up shot by both sides: despised by the Left for smearing his old friend Robeson, yet still blacklisted by the Right. A dismayed Seeger sent White a letter featuring a sketch of a guitar broken in two; the Daily Worker branded him a “toad.” Burl Ives, testifying in 1952, was less scrupulous about singling out others, thus earning him a hot blast of contempt from Irwin Silber: “We’ve never seen anyone sing while crawling on his belly before.”
The Weaver-baiters finally found their smoking gun not in the shape of White or Ives but of Harvey Matusow, a chubby, cheerful volunteer at People’s Songs, who was both a member of the Communist Party and, Seeger discovered too late, an FBI informant. In February 1952, Matusow testified that three of the Weavers were members of the Communist Party, and, like that, the sky fell in. The Weavers were on tour in Akron, Ohio, when they saw the morning headlines: “Weavers Named Reds.”
Sheer stubbornness kept the band going for another year, until Decca dropped them and deleted their back catalogue. As Seeger’s biographer David King Dunaway drily observes, “Seeger was now one of America’s best-known, unemployable musicians.”*
IN 1953, THREE MAJOR EVENTS drained some of the poison from the Red Scare. Stalin died in March (a passing marked by such crowing country tunes as Ray Anderson’s “Stalin Kicked the Bucket”); the Rosenbergs, convicted of espionage, went to the electric chair in June;† and an armistice was signed in Korea in July. Meanwhile, McCarthy’s star was waning as even feral anti-Communists began to see him as a noisome liability. In June 1954, Army attorney Joseph Welch delivered the fatal blow during the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ Army hearings, accusing the senator of “cruelty [and] recklessness.” Before a live TV audience of twenty million Americans, Welch asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” By the end of the year, the senator’s reputation was so tattered that President Eisenhower quipped that McCarthyism had become “McCarthywasm.”
None of this, alas, helped Seeger, even if it allowed him a quick thrill of schadenfreude. The old gang was in disarray. Josh White and Burl Ives were both persona non grata, of course. Alan Lomax was in self-imposed exile in England. Guthrie, now officially diagnosed with Huntington’s, was in desperate shape, increasingly violent and erratic. People’s Songs, it would later transpire, was riddled with FBI informants. And HUAC’s zeal was as yet undiminished by McCarthy’s fall.
In August 1955, Seeger was raising a barn on his land when a black car pulled alongside him and a man handed him an envelope. He had been subpoenaed to appear before HUAC in two weeks’ time. He was faced with three options: cooperate, like Ives and White; take the Fifth and stay silent; or challenge HUAC’s right to question him, on First Amendment grounds, the same risky strategy which had landed the Hollywood Ten in jail seven years earlier.
During the hearings in New York, Seeger, stubborn as a mule, made himself an “unfriendly” witness, giving one-line answers and needling his interrogators even further by threatening to play his banjo, as if he could still their persecution with a song. He wanted to show them why “Wasn’t That a Time,” which tied together America’s past and present struggles for freedom, was his brand of patriotism—not, as they claimed, Soviet propaganda—but they were having none of it. He went home in no doubt as to what his principles would cost him. In the short term, his concert career was over. Farther down the line, a trial for contempt of Congress, untold court costs, possibly bankruptcy, possibly jail.
At least he had a friend in Folkways Records boss Moe Asch, who encouraged him to channel his creative energies into an epic recording binge, and paid him a weekly retainer. “We, the people, suffer, by not having the songs we need,” Seeger wrote in summer 1955. “We need thousands of new songs these days: humor, to poke fun at some of the damn foolishness going on in the world; songs of love and faith in mankind and the future; songs to needle our consciences and stir our indignation and anger.” He kept busy by performing at colleges, summer camps, private parties, anywhere that would have him, to audiences which included future stars Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. He also wrote one of his most famous songs, a lament for trampled idealism called “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
In 1956, Seeger’s manager, Harold Leventhal, orchestrated a surprisingly successful Weavers reunion and rounded up the old People’s Songs crew for a benefit concert to raise money for the hospitalized Woody Guthrie. Seeger later recounted that the finale “almost proved too melodramatic.” The performers were taking their bows after a version of “This Land Is Your Land” when the spotlight swung to the balcony, illuminating the shaky, spindly figure of Guthrie, let out of hospital for the occasion. Earl Robinson leaned in towards Seeger’s ear and whispered, “Sing the last chorus again.” As Seeger recalled, “The whole crowd of over one thousand, mostly teenagers who had never seen Woody before, stood up and sang his song to him, as though to tell him they would carry his music across the land. Tears were in the eyes of many old-timers as they listened to the strong young voices.”
But Seeger was fighting yesterday’s battles. After Khruschev’s famous 1956 denunciation of Stalin—which made public the horrors of the purges and show trials—and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Hungary, all but the staunchest believers deserted the party in disappointment and disgust.* The Communist Party connections which had enabled protest singing to thrive during the 1930s now constituted a crippling millstone around its neck. Meanwhile, the Left was turning its attention to a new conflict, one that it might actually win.
With its faith in the transforming powers of Communism and the union movement shattered, the Left regrouped under the banner of civil rights, and it did so in places like the Highlander Folk School. During the 1950s, Highlander’s patch of Tennessee became a kind of junction box of left-wing activism, running wires between black and white, urban and rural, labor and civil rights, folk and gospel. In the introduction to Zilphia Horton’s 1939 songbook, Labor Songs, union leader John L. Lewis had coined a phrase which would come to apply equally to the freedom songs of the South: “a singing army is a winning army.”
One visitor to the school in July 1955 was a seamstress from Montgomery, Alabama, named Rosa Parks. A little over three months after Seeger took the stand in New York, Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Years later, broadcaster Studs Terkel would ask her what part Highlander had played in her decision and she would answer, simply, “Everything.”
IN 1955, THE JIM CROW LAWS maintained an iron grip on the South. Restaurants, hotels, buses, lunch counters, gas station restrooms, water fountains—all maintained boundaries between white and black customers. On December 1, Parks, who was secretary of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had simply had enough. Montgomery black leader E. D. Nixon persuaded local ministers Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy to help organize a one-day boycott of the bus network. The twenty-six-year-old King was an unknown quantity outside of his own congregation, but his bravura speech on the night of the boycott was, in the words of local columnist Joe Azbell, “the beginning of a flame that would go across America.”
After the speech, which established King’s credo of nonviolence, the meeting voted to extend the boycott indefinitely. King’s trial and conviction on charges of organizing an illegal boycott made him a national celebrity, the face of the newborn civil rights movement. In November 1956, the Supreme Court finally declared segregation on Montgomery’s buses unconstitutional. After their victory, eight Southern ministers established a more activist alternative to the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with King at its helm.
Throughout the boycott, morale was boosted by singing repurposed hymns and spirituals.† During the slavery era, spirituals had been the protest songs that dared not speak their name. African slaves were forbidden to dance or play the drums, but they brought their homeland’s tradition of group singing into the plantation “praise houses,” where they were permitted to sing songs that weren’t overtly critical of their masters. You have to wonder, though, how even the dimmest slave drivers failed to notice their workers’ fondness for particular Bible stories: Daniel delivered from the lion’s den, Joshua bringing down the walls of Jericho, Moses leading his people out of pharaoh’s bondage. Other spirituals encoded references to the escape route popularly known as the Underground Railroad: flight by river (“Wade in the Water”), road (“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”), and rail (“Gospel Train”).
After abolition, an event fervently anticipated in the song “No More Auction Block for Me,” spirituals were shunned by most blacks as shameful reminders of past indignities. Even when Paul Robeson revived the likes of “Steal Away,” “Go Down, Moses,” and “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” in the 1920s, they only had niche appeal: the writer Zora Neale Hurston pointed out that formal concerts were no place for songs born out of informal group singing in the praise houses and plantations. So when the boycotters of Montgomery began singing “Steal Away” and “Go Down, Moses” alongside hymns, they were reviving spirituals as a form of mass communication for the first time in almost a century, only now the secret was out and there was no need for codes. Right from the start, Martin Luther King wove song lyrics into his speeches; they were an integral part of his conversation with black history.
King and Parks visited Highlander on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary in September 1957, the same month that President Eisenhower was forced to send paratroopers to enforce desegregation at a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. King was introduced to Seeger, who sang him “We Shall Overcome.” It was the first time King had encountered the song, and on the drive to Louisville, he found himself humming it. “There’s something about that song that haunts you,” he told fellow passengers.
“WE SHALL OVERCOME” also haunted two California folksingers, Frank Hamilton and Guy Carawan, who had first learned it on a visit to the school in 1953. Six years later, Carawan replaced the late Zilphia Horton as head of Highlander’s music program. Hamilton, who often played in black churches in Los Angeles, developed a new chord structure for the song, which Carawan then expanded upon. It was sprouting new verses all the time. The old union references were long gone; in their place were fresh references to Jim Crow and living in peace. A police raid on Highlander that July inspired yet another verse when one member of a visiting youth choir, Mary Ethel Dozier, responded to the raiders’ harassment with a cry of “We are not afraid.” The other choristers, already defiantly singing “We Shall Overcome,” folded the new line into the song as if it had always belonged there, which perhaps it had. It is not a statement of fact; it is a promise.
“‘We Shall Overcome’ is definitely not my song,” says Carawan, who is now in his eighties. “It is a movement song. My main role is being in the right place at the right time.” In February 1960, Highlander played host to some of the college students who had recently sparked a wave of antisegregation lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. At a musical workshop, Carawan led them in a chorus of “We Shall Overcome.” And it was that song, again led by Carawan, which crowned the three-day conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, that gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced snick) in April. Carawan and SNCC loosened its limbs, adding rhythm, harmony, and antiphony. “We put more soul in, a sort of rocking quality, to stir one’s inner feeling,” explained one SNCC member. “When you got through singing it, you could walk over a bed of hot coals, and you wouldn’t notice.”
Carawan disseminated the song on his travels through the South, which were “both exciting and scary” and punctuated with regular arrests. “As it passed through different campaigns it tended to take on the cultural flavor of each area,” he says. “In Albany, Georgia, it took on a new beat and some additional decorations. In Birmingham it was given a gospel feeling. You ask about a ‘final version’ and I don’t actually think there is one.”
Civil rights leaders were impressed and energized. “It is an oddity that the introduction of the Negro spiritual (with new freedom lyrics) into the movement as a means of clear group expression of common goals…was through a young white folksinger,” reflected the SCLC’s Wyatt Tee Walker. Among the songs Carawan brought with him were “We Shall Not Be Moved” and the 1920s gospel song “This Little Light of Mine.” Thus inspired, members of SNCC quickly adapted old spirituals into songs such as “Everybody Sing Freedom” and “I’m on My Way to the Freedom Land.” Veteran activist Ella Baker, the so-called Godmother of SNCC, was one of the first to embrace the potential of freedom songs to make even the lowliest member of the movement feel empowered. “The people were cold with fear,” remarked Georgia activist Vernon Jordan, “until music did what prayers and speeches could not do in breaking the ice.”
In May 1961, some members of the fledgling SNCC joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) on a mission to desegregrate waiting rooms and lunch counters on interstate bus routes, calling themselves the Freedom Riders. The good people of Alabama greeted the first bus by slashing the tires, smashing the windows, attempting to burn the Riders alive, and, when that failed, beating them to a pulp. The second bus sparked a full-blown riot; riders and reporters alike were set upon with bottles and lead pipes. CORE called off the ride but SNCC members in Nashville vowed to continue it. In Montgomery—hated, disgraced Montgomery—the violence was even worse, with more animalistic beatings, more cries of “Kill the niggers!” The next day, the Freedom Riders were escorted to Jackson, Mississippi, where they were promptly jailed for breaking local segregation laws.
The prisons became hothouses for freedom songs. Sitting in Hinds County Jail, CORE’s national director James Farmer put new words to Florence Reece’s thirty-year-old union anthem “Which Side Are You On?” and fellow Riders transformed Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack” into “Get Your Rights Jack.” Rock ’n’ roll songs, traditional ditties, labor anthems, blues numbers, hymns, spirituals—all were grist to the freedom-song mill. “In a sense the freedom songs are the soul of the movement,” wrote King. “They are more than just incantations of clever phrases designed to invigorate a campaign; they are as old as the history of the Negro in America.” When Sing Out! transcribed some of the freedom songs that Carawan and his wife, Candie, had collected on their travels, the couple “tried to explain these songs were evolving and changing, and the printed page was only a suggestion of what the songs could be.”
This is why even the four authors officially credited with “We Shall Overcome” are only part of the story. It was a vagabond song, circulating through the South, known by many, owned by none, mutable in its particulars but constant in its melody and message. It held out the promise of victory—maybe not today but someday, someday.
After performing at a Highlander benefit at Carnegie Hall in February 1961, Carawan and the Montgomery Gospel Trio recorded the song for Moe Asch’s Folkways on an album called We Shall Overcome: Songs of the Freedom Riders and the Sit-ins. Soon enough, because it had to, the song circled back to the man who had first tinkered with it back in 1947, when everything was different.
IN THE YEARS following his HUAC appearance, Pete Seeger had come to occupy a curious position in American life. To the swelling ranks of folk enthusiasts, he was a heroic pioneer. In the autumn of 1958, the Kingston Trio’s version of “Tom Dooley” had sold a remarkable 2.6 million copies, sparking a boom in a form of music which had now outgrown Counterattack’s smears. Folk scenes blossomed simultaneously in several major cities and college towns. So what if the fresh-faced Kingston Trio niggled the purists? They had suddenly, unexpectedly opened a door through which spikier talents could rush. And, as they were quick to acknowledge, they owed an enormous debt to Seeger.
In 1959, Seeger helped folksinger Theodore Bikel and formidable impresario Albert Grossman establish a folk festival in the high-toned Rhode Island resort town of Newport. An unknown eighteen-year-old named Joan Baez stood barefoot in the rain, singing “We Are Crossing Jordan River,” and a new folk star was born. The following year, Newsweek and Time both reported on the boom, citing Seeger, Baez, Bikel, and Alabama singer Odetta (whom Dr. King would crown “the Queen of American folk music”) among its stars. Not all commentators perceived the revival’s radical roots—in 1961, Time cheerfully called the Limeliters “as pleasant as an international blend of good coffees”—but to the Left, it represented green shoots after the long, harsh conservative winter of the 1950s. New Left activist Todd Gitlin described 1950s folk as “the living prayer of a defunct movement…gingerly holding the place of a Left in American culture.”
In 1961, Seeger visited England, where his sister Peggy had married the Marxist folk singer Ewan MacColl. MacColl was a more fearsome character than Seeger but the two men had much in common. Born the son of a Communist trade unionist in the depressed industrial region of Salford, which inspired his signature tune “Dirty Old Town,” he had started writing protest songs in the 1930s. After a long spell in experimental theater, he caught the folk bug from Alan Lomax in the early 1950s, when the American brought his song-collecting mission to Britain. Thus inspired, he spearheaded Britain’s own folk revival in partnership with A. L. Lloyd, taking the hard-line stance that English singers should only perform traditional English material. While his dogmatism alienated many, it fuelled a remarkable BBC radio series called The Radio Ballads, bringing the songs of fishermen, miners, railwaymen, and more to a national audience. MacColl also adapted folk melodies and sea shanties into brand-new protest songs about the atom bomb (“That Bomb Has Got to Go!”), apartheid (“The Ballad of Sharpeville”), and the glories of Communism (“The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh”).*
Seeger was so inspired by MacColl, and by Britain’s centuries-old tradition of broadside ballads, that upon his return to America he helped former Almanac Agnes “Sis” Cunningham and her husband, Gordon Friesen, establish a journal of topical songs called Broadside. The February 1962 launch issue was subtitled “A Handful of Songs About Our Times.”†
But even as his celebrity and influence grew, Seeger lived under a cloud. Every time he traveled to a show, which was pretty much constantly, he had to notify the district attorney by telegram. Various local school boards and arts commissions moved to prevent him performing on political grounds. And still his trial for contempt of Congress moved through the system with agonizing slowness, consigning him to a purgatory of uncertainty.
Eventually, in March 1961, he stood trial in New York and was found guilty of obstructing HUAC’s work. Turning up for sentencing, he asked permission to sing “Wasn’t That a Time,” just as he had six years earlier. Again, he was denied. “Do I have a right to sing these songs?” he asked. “Do I have the right to sing them anywhere?” The judge sentenced him to a year and a day in prison. But before he could serve it, in May 1962 the Court of Appeals overturned his conviction on a technicality (albeit while still describing Seeger as “unworthy of sympathy”) and his seven-year ordeal was over. Purely by chance, that very week the young folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary hit the Top 40 with their version of Seeger’s eulogy to pre–Red Scare idealism, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The songwriter was free, and he was famous, and he had work to do.
THAT OCTOBER, Seeger accepted an invitation to sing in Albany, Georgia, right in the fiery belly of the civil rights struggle. A long campaign backed by the SCLC and SNCC had ended in violent disappointment just two months earlier, with King on trial, crosses burning on Southern lawns, and segregation as strong as ever. “Albany remains a monument to white supremacy,” reported the New Republic.‡ As Seeger’s car pulled up outside the church, a gang of white people jeered and brandished lead pipes, while Georgia police circled watchfully.
Seeger wanted to present a crash course in the history of the protest song, explaining how hymns gave birth to labor anthems and so on, but found himself out of step with the congregation. When he sang “If I Had a Hammer” or “Hold On,” they had their own words, their own melodies. Only when he struck up “We Shall Overcome” did he win the crowd over, and only then by shutting up and letting them sing the song the way they liked it sung, steeped in the call-and-response rituals of the church. He left the church chastened.
Seeger, who prided himself on never meeting an audience that he couldn’t unite in song, smarted at his failure in Albany but, setting aside the matter of a bruised ego, wasn’t this exactly what he wanted? A song for the people, sung by the people, in part even written by the people? In a short space of time the freedom singers had made the Northern folksingers seem staid. The New York Times folk critic Robert Shelton celebrated the freedom song movement as “a different sort of folk music than one encounters among the pampered, groping, earnestly searching young people one meets in the Greenwich Villages of the North.”
Galvanized by what he had witnessed in Albany, Seeger advised SNCC to establish its own touring group to raise funds and awareness. Sit-in veteran Cordell Reagon and nineteen-year-old Albany student Bernice Johnson (later his wife) formed the four-strong Freedom Singers two months later; Bernice called them “a singing newspaper.” “If your heart is downcast or blue, if you feel discouraged and it seems as though the future is all darkness and uncertainty, take up some of their songs,” Seeger advised readers of Sing Out! “Songs have accompanied every liberation movement in history. These songs will reaffirm your faith in the future of mankind.”
“We Shall Overcome” was finally copyrighted under the joint authorship of Seeger, Horton, Hamilton, and Carawan (royalties went to the movement) in 1963, the year that it became a kind of alternative national anthem. In April, Martin Luther King led demonstrations in Birmingham, the largest city in Alabama, whose new governor, George Wallace, had taken office with the promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” After King was arrested, his SCLC colleague, the Reverend James Bevel, launched a new phase of the protest, preparing hundreds of children, some as young as six, to march on City Hall. Over the next few days, images from Birmingham shocked the country: black men, women, and children brutalized by police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor’s thugs, reeling from the explosive force of fire hoses, mauled by the fangs of police dogs, and still singing freedom songs, especially “We Shall Overcome.” “One cannot describe the vitality and emotion this one song evokes across the Southland,” wrote Wyatt Tee Walker. “I have heard it sung in great mass meeting 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 the students singing it as they were being dragged away to jail. It generates power that is indescribable.”
That summer, it also became the anthem of the movement’s white supporters in the North, sung by the new folk elite at both the Newport Folk Festival and the March on Washington. Summarized Seeger: “To hundreds of thousands of freedom-loving Americans it was in 1963 no longer just ‘a’ song but ‘the’ song.”
THE TIME THAT “WE SHALL OVERCOME” spent at the heart of the movement was, in fact, rather brief. Like many protest songs, it was overtaken by history. By the time King led his epochal march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, freedom songs were on the wane. “By 1965 people in the movement were becoming cynical and discouraged about overcoming any time soon,” remembers Carawan. “Too many people had died, and people recognized how deeply racism was embedded in American society. No wonder people didn’t find the same hope in ‘We Shall Overcome.’ I sometimes felt it was inappropriate to suggest it or lead it in civil rights situations.”
The “glad thunder and gentle strength” that endeared “We Shall Overcome” to Martin Luther King came to irritate more militant voices. Unlike the old Methodist hymns which promised relief in the “Sweet By and By,” “We Shall Overcome” didn’t postpone satisfaction until the afterlife but it postponed it nonetheless. “What kind of namby-pamby, wishy-washy song is that?” the staunch Stalinist writer Lillian Hellman complained to Seeger. “Mooning, always ‘Some day, so-o-me-day!’ That’s been said for two thousand years.”
Of course, King, who called his book about the struggle Why We Can’t Wait, found nothing wishy-washy about the song—someday did not mean the twelfth of never—but younger, angrier leaders shared Hellman’s reservations. “I don’t believe we’re going to overcome [by] singing,” Malcolm X told a Harlem rally in 1964. “If you’re going to get yourself a .45 and start singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ I’m with you.” Two years later, former Sing Out! employee Julius Lester, by now a preacher of Black Power, wrote an angry letter to the magazine in which he passed a death sentence on the freedom song. “Now it is over. The days of singing Freedom songs and the days of combating bullets and billy clubs with Love. ‘We Shall Overcome’ (and we have overcome our blindness) sounds old, outdated.”
One of Lester’s complaints was that the latest sheet music edition of “We Shall Overcome” featured not King but President Lyndon B. Johnson, a revealing sign that the song had been co-opted by the establishment. When Johnson cited it in his speech urging Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he essentially killed it as an expression of black dissent. But then something strange happened to the song. Even as it lost traction with one audience, it found several others, especially outside America, wherever there was strife and defiance. It flew to South Africa, where Robert F. Kennedy sang it alongside black Durbanites during his anti-apartheid tour in 1966, and the condemned anti-apartheid radical John Harris sang it at the gallows; to Eastern Europe, where it endured as an anti-Communist anthem right up until perestroika (somewhat ironically, given Seeger’s Communist affiliations); to Jamaica, Northern Ireland, Israel, India, and Bangladesh.
By the end of the decade, even as it resonated overseas, it could only really be sung in its home country with a touch of nostalgia, because the history it represented—the history of Highlander and picket lines, of bus boycotts and sit-ins, of folk and freedom songs—had been rendered archaic by the heat and flash of the 1960s. But Pete Seeger kept faith with the song longer than civil rights did. He really did believe, deep in his heart, that he would overcome someday.