I am thinking about resistance. And because I’m me, I’m thinking about how resistance finds force and fuel through music.
Now I know that not everyone connects with music in the same way, and as such this week’s column may have a more narrow audience than others. I hope there may be some relevance here even for those who do not resonate with music in the same way I do.
I find it curious, for instance how music can take on new meaning when its context changes. When in the late 1960s the bluesman Blind Gary Davis joins protests against the Vietnam war and plays “Death Don’t Have No Mercy in This Land” and “Samson & Delilah” (with its chorus “If I had my way, I’d tear this old building down”) — both of which had been recorded years prior — the songs take on more than just another nuance: they become something altogether new.
There was a hymn by Charles Tindley called “I’ll Overcome Someday” that was published in 1901 that spoke of our future triumph with Christ in overcoming all the obstacles that set us back in our present circumstances. Somewhere along the way — and certainly by 1945 — a simplified and modified version of Tindley’s chorus was joined to the tune of the spiritual “No More Auction Block for Me.” This evolved song would later come to be called “We Shall Overcome,” and it was sung by the mostly female and African American members of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers union to close each day’s picketing during their five-month strike. For most of us today, the song is inseparable from the Civil Rights Movement.
But what too of the subversive spirituals and encoded protest songs that are the heritage of both of these examples? Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is an obvious example of the latter. Regarding the former, I routinely think of “Shoes (Goin’ to Shout All Over God’s Heaven).” In that covert way of resistance necessitated by the powerless, the revolutionary sentiment is buried in one line of the chorus (“Ev’rybody talkin’ ‘bout Heav’n ain’t goin’ there”). It’s easy to miss.
What are the songs that are resonating with you right now? Are there pieces of music that have taken on new meaning in light of current circumstances, like those performed by Gary Davis or the slow evolution of “We Shall Overcome”? What about more recent compositions that are intentionally subversive, akin to “Strange Fruit”? Do you have a “songs of resistance” playlist to encourage you when current events beat you down? Do you wish you could find more? Are you willing to share what you’ve found?
And perhaps more important: is any of this a conversation you want to continue at all? Reach out and let me know.
Peace+
Pastor Michael