6 Lift Every Voice
I’ve been a trucker for most of my life
Can’t tell you the places I’ve seen
I’ve pushed this old diesel from east coast to west
And about every place in between
The pleasures are many for a truck driving man
I’ve tasted them all in my time
But of all of my good times the one I like best
Is playing the old songs with old friends of mine
I left West Virginia to fight in the war
It’s thirty-two years I’ve been gone
I wish I could stay here a few nights at least
But I’ve got to start driving at dawn
Making a living is hard work at best
But you know that it eases my mind
To know I can always stay here for the night
Playing the old songs with old friends of mine
John, take down your banjo from the nail on the wall
Jackie, come rosin that bow
Rich, hit us a lick on that sweet mandolin
We’ll play every tune that we know
When the sun hits the mountain I’ll be on my way
Got a long way to go down the line
As the miles slip by me I’ll smile to think
Of playing the old songs with old friends of mine
I became an organizer because of how my parents raised me and because I was lucky to stumble into the Southern Civil Rights Movement when I was still young enough to have my working life shaped by it.
I became a songwriter because I fell in love with the old songs. I heard them first in the late 1950s on the old red vinyl LPs issued by the Library of Congress, later on Moe Asch’s Folkways Records. The stark, spare recordings of Texas Gladden, Sin-Killer Griffin, Samantha Bumgardner, McKinley Morganfield (later to become famous as Muddy Waters), and Aunt Molly Jackson reached straight into my soul, rocked me, talked to me, reached me in ways that more apparently elaborate and acceptable musics had never been able to do.
In the 1960s and 1970s, working in the Deep South with SNCC and in the southern Appalachians with the UMWA, I discovered that not only were the old songs and people who wrote, rewrote, and sang them alive and well, but that many of these musicians were active in progressive movements, using their music as a tool for progressive change. I listened to the SNCC Freedom Singers (led by Bernice Johnson Reagon, later founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock), Sarah Ogan Gunning, Florence Reece, Dorothy Cotton, Nimrod Workman, Phyllis Boyens, George Pegram, Roscoe Holcomb, Hazel Dickens, and many others, not on a record player or concert stage, but on front porches, in living rooms, at rallies, in churches, and on picket lines. In African American churches, I heard choirs and congregations raise a joyful noise as together they sang James Weldon Johnson’s great poem, set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson in 1900, known then as the Negro National Anthem:
Lift every voice and sing
‘Til earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song
Full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song
Full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on ‘til victory is won.
I was particularly impressed by the ability of these singers and songwriters to describe the lives of poor and working people, their hardships, heartaches, anger, pain, dreams, and struggles. In songs of apparent simplicity and directness, they conveyed rich layers of emotion and meaning. Their songs were often intensely political, but without the heavy-handedness of many so-called protest, struggle, and topical songs.
So I decided to write old songs as well as new ones, using the musical structures, rhythms, and cadences that were interwoven with the history of these time-honored movements for justice, of which I had now become a small part. These ancient poetic forms and structures—think of call and response songs as one example—serve a powerful purpose, bringing history forward, enriching the songs with memory.
New songs tend to describe. Old songs tell stories. Their language is conversational. In the best of them, you can hear the people who are living out the song’s story talking to each other, just like they were sitting around the potbellied stove in some country store, chopping a long row of cotton, drinking corn whiskey in the shadows of the pines outside a country dance. The language is sparse, laconic, dry humored, economical. It’s this understatement that allows the songs to be angry without moralizing, political without being preachy.
They do this partly by using as few words as possible. I had this lesson reinforced for me by the semi-legendary Dr. Banjo himself, Peter Wernick, Columbia sociology PhD turned bluegrass bandleader, whose brilliant production work and banjo playing helped bring the songs on my CD Been a Long Time to vibrant life. Successful bluegrass singing, Pete explained, depends on there being as few words in a song as possible, so that there’s space for the singer to explore, emphasize, expand. He kept leaning on me to go through each song again and again, cutting every word that could possibly be cut, so that the remaining words would have enough space to breathe and do their job.
Many of the old songs are almost like paintings, parallels to the portraits and landscapes my mother Rosalind Kahn created in oils and watercolors. Even as we hear the song, whether we’re singing along with others or just listening, we visualize it. We can see what’s happening even as we hear the words.
You can say something in a song that you couldn’t in ordinary speech, crank up a conversation you might otherwise have a hard time getting started. In a song called Just a Lie, I retell, with a slightly different cuisine, a story Pop once shared with me about his childhood. In winter, when evening came, his mother, my grandmother Celia Liebovitz Kahn, would send him and his three brothers out with sacks to walk the railroad track and pick up the coal that fell off the passing trains, so there would be fuel for the stove in the morning:
Those good old days
Were really low and mean
With cornmeal mush
And sometimes streak o’lean
Picking up coal
Along the railroad track
Why would you want
To have those hard times back
When my aunt Freda Shore was in her eighties, she remarried. She was the oldest of the five Kahn siblings, with the strenuous, thankless job of keeping the four roughhouse brothers in line.
At a celebratory supper at Pop’s house after the ceremony, the seating was more or less by generations. I was out on the back porch with half a dozen of my first cousins. At one point, the conversation turned to trying to figure out what our family’s class background was, and how to describe it accurately.
Pop, as the host for the evening, was making the rounds, checking in to make sure everyone was doing all right. As he passed our table, I called him over. Thinking about that story, I asked him whether he considered himself to have grown up poor.
I could see in his face how angry my question made him. “We were never poor.” His voice was strained. “What ever gave you that idea?”
What about the story? I asked. Did he remember telling it to me? Was it even true?
“Oh, absolutely.” Pop’s stance shifted, his voice turned soft, his eyes warmed with memory. “Ma would send us out just about every evening in the fall and winter. Bill, Hoddy, Dubby, and me, we’d all go out together.” I knew the brothers tended to stick close, at least partly to defend their late-night newspaper territory against the Irish kids who shared poverty with them. “We’d walk along the track and pick up coal until our sacks were full. Then we’d go home and give it to Ma, so she could build a fire in the morning and cook us all breakfast before she sent us off to school.”
“Pop.” I looked him as straight in the eyes as he would ever allow. “Scavenging for coal every night along the railroad tracks, so there’s enough fuel to make a fire in the morning—you don’t consider that growing up poor?”
“Absolutely not. We always had food on the table. Being poor means not having enough to eat.”
Of course, since Pop grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, there was never streak o’lean on his parents’ table. A staple in poor southern households, both Black and white, it’s bacon that’s almost solid fat, with only the thinnest line of meat, or lean, passing through it.
Did you like the story?
Did it bring back something about your life, your family, memories fond or harsh?
Did it matter that perhaps you weren’t raised Jewish, or poor, or religiously Orthodox, or in a mill town in New England with Yiddish-speaking parents who ran a tiny store in The Acre, for over a hundred years the traditional first stop for immigrants arriving in Lowell, Massachusetts? Or that you weren’t one of four slightly crazy brothers who were sometimes just a little too quick with their tempers or fists?
Could you still find a place for yourself at the table, in the tale, around the coal-fired stove?
When creative community organizers use culture, we should make it as inclusive as possible. We need to tell stories from different cultures and traditions—including our own, but also many others. This means we tell them in a way that encourages and inspires the people with whom we work to tell their own stories, to share their own cultures.
Performance and presentation can be wonderful. Where would so many struggles for justice be without the many extraordinary artists who have made themselves a part of, and contributors to, those movements—and the organizers who have learned to use culture, quietly and effectively, in their work?
But, from the point of view of creative community organizing, participation is often, though not always, the thing to aim for. We shouldn’t be the only ones to tell stories. Everyone has them. Everyone needs to tell them.
Songs are for singing together, not just to perform for others. Choruses, especially short ones that repeat the same words and lines, and are therefore quickly learned, invite others into the song. That’s why so many of the old songs, and the new songs that are modeled on them, repeat lines, couplets, choruses, over and over. That’s one of the ways the old songs gather and build power.
It’s a long way to Harlan, long way to go
Long way to Harlan, long way to home
Yes it’s a long way to Harlan, long way to go
Long way to Harlan, long way to home
But it’s not as long a way as you might think. The old songs do help take us home, even if they were written yesterday.
By now, you will not be surprised to learn that I go through life humming to myself. On a clear day, you can hear me before you can see me. Even when by sheer mental effort I succeed in sealing my lips, if you look deep into my eyes, you can see the notes silently making their way along the staff.
Where did all this music come from? What is a nice Jewish boy doing singing in a place like this?
When I was growing up—not here in the South, where I’ve now lived and worked for forty-five years, but in the Deep North—our family sang together. On the Sabbath and on holidays, we would stay at the dinner table long after the food and dishes had been cleared, and we would sing. Because musical instruments were not allowed on the Sabbath, we sang without instrumentation—but not without accompaniment.
From my grandfather, Gabriel Kahn, who had traveled through Russia with his uncle’s Yiddish-Italian opera troop, before he got drafted into the czar’s army and suddenly became highly motivated to emigrate to the United States, I learned the fine points of creating a rhythm section, using only two basic variations (closed fist and open palm) of the basic hand-on-table technique. From my parents, Rosalind and Benjamin Kahn, I learned—once my sister Jenette Kahn and I had the basic tunes down—the rudiments of high and low harmony, made up as you go along.
The songs we sang were mostly prayers, composed thousands of years ago in Hebrew. There were prayers for different holidays, for the beginning of each lunar month, for the Sabbath, and for various combinations thereof.
Naturally, over that many years, melodies had changed. My mother’s side of the family was convinced that my father’s side had changed them, accidentally or deliberately, and vice versa. The preferred method for settling these disagreements was to sing as loudly as possible. Whichever side of the family was able to overwhelm the other was generally conceded to have history on its side, along with the correct version of the melody.
We sang a little bit in Yiddish, too, folk and story songs from the Old Country, which in this case meant almost any place in Europe. Hebrew had been the language of prayer for the Jews of Europe, but Yiddish was the language of everyday life. In our house, except for the songs, it had been reduced to the language of secrets, which our parents used when they wanted to communicate with each other privately in front of us. Despite this incentive to learn Yiddish, I never did, beyond the few phrases known to anyone who has lived in New York, regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin.
So the truth of the matter is that although I learned many songs and am amazed at how many I still know by heart, I never understood most of what I was singing. What’s wonderful is that it never seemed to matter. I understood quite well what the songs really meant to us as Jews, as a family, as people in the world. They were our bond, our unity, our affirmation, our courage. They were our way of claiming our rhythmic and harmonic relation with each other and with our community. Our songs reinforced our solidarity, our sense that we could overcome the obstacles in our path. They helped us feel proud of the side we were on.
This heritage came mostly from my father’s side of the family. He was, after all, a rabbi, a teacher, someone who studied Talmud and midrash, the great collections of Jewish oral teaching and storytelling over many centuries. Pop was also religiously observant and deeply comfortable in that tradition.
My mother’s upbringing had been as traditional and observant as my father’s. But the branch of Judaism we now followed as a family was the conservative tradition (the term refers to religious observance and ritual, not to my parents’ politics, which were quite progressive), which when I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s reserved almost all of the public roles to men. Although I watched Mom light the candles on the Sabbath, I cannot remember her performing any other public or private religious ceremonies. (Contrary to folklore, cooking Jewishly is not a religious practice, nor is there anything in the tradition other than gender roles that keeps men from preparing the Sabbath meal.) It was my father who started the prayers and songs around the dinner table, led the services, gave the sermons in the synagogue, prayed three times a day at home.
But if Pop gave me song, Mom gave me poetry. She did not, however, read poetry. She spoke it. As prayer, a ritualized public form that can embody private feelings, gave comfort to my father, poetry was healing to my mother. She knew many poems by heart (an interesting expression, no? Isn’t memorization an intellectual feat? Shouldn’t we know poems by head?), and she used them in conversation. If I came home from school and greeted her with, “Hi, Mom, how are you?” she might well reply
Tired of these
for restful death I cry
save that to die
would be to leave my love alone
If I said, “Well, would you like to do something together this evening,” her answer might be
Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table . . .
I was not naïve. Like all teenage males, I knew I was sophisticated far beyond my years. I understood that all these great lines were written down somewhere, that it wasn’t really my mom who had made them up and memorized them. (In case you’re curious, it was Shakespeare, in Sonnet 66, paraphrased slightly, and T. S. Eliot; Ernest Dowson is on deck.) But it was definitely Mom whose answer to “Did you have a good night’s sleep?” might be
Last night, ah, yesternight
Betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara
Thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine
And I was desolate and sick
Of an old passion
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara
In my fashion
I miss my mom, who died in 1968, when she was fifty-five and I was twenty-four, after a long, painful battle with cancer. I find I no longer remember all the poems we used to declaim to each other, standing in front of the stairs, the piano, the kitchen door. My mind, my mouth, my heart play tricks on me. If I commence with one of the poems we shared, I can be short-circuited by a common rhyme scheme, hurtling from one beginning to another ending, starting as Edna St. Vincent Millay and ending as Matthew Arnold:
Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Soliloquies, too. We were probably one of the few families around, if not the only one, that would announce a swimming trip by shouting, “Once more unto the beach!”
I know, I know, it’s from Shakespeare’s Henry V, it’s his speech rallying the troops just before the battle of Agincourt, and the lines are really
Once more unto the breach, dear friends
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
But do you care, or do I? Or did my mom?
Here is what this personal history has to do with the role of culture in creative community organizing. By the time I headed South in 1965, I was already in love with poetry and song. In addition to what I’d learned from my folks, I knew some of the classic songs that are part of the social justice hymnal through recordings by Leadbelly, the Almanac Singers, the Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Josh White. Seated in the cheap seats in the balcony, I even heard Pete Seeger in concert. I saw the news reports on TV, watching as the marchers on the highway from Selma to Montgomery, who were beaten by horseback-mounted Alabama state patrolmen wielding long lead-weighted clubs, linked arms and in the face of appalling violence sang to keep up their courage, to overcome their fear.
Until I went South with SNCC in 1965, I wasn’t aware that there was such a thing as political culture, or the extent to which it should be a regular item in any creative setlist. I didn’t know that singing together can help people prepare to act and take risks as one, how much it can move and change our hearts, and reinforce our willingness to act in the face of fear and danger.
That is what, during the Southern Civil Rights Movement, these songs did, not just for southerners, permanent or temporary, but for all kinds of people who never set foot or voice in the South. They reached us in a deep, personal way, even though they are in a sense a language we do not completely understand, a language that can only be translated by the heart.
Like all prayers, the great political songs connect us across time. Who can stand swaying in a circle with arms linked, singing We Shall Overcome, and not be taken back to the Movement and to the South, whether they were there in person or in spirit, whether they were even yet born? But we hear with different hearts, according to when the song first came to us. African Americans, women, Latinas/Latinos, trade unionists, immigrants, lesbians, Native Americans, peace activists, gays, students each hear the song with the words and through the ears of their own movements.
We can trace the genealogy of We Shall Overcome in the labor movement from 1945, when striking African American tobacco workers in Charleston, South Carolina, recycled the old Christian hymn I Shall Not Be Moved, to when demonstrators protesting ICE raids today march, singing, “Unidos en la lucha/no nos moverán.” What matters when we close our eyes and link arms are the images that float before us: of picket lines, marches, demonstrations, vigils, jails. We hear the places we have been, ourselves and others like us, in the lilt and lift of the songs.
We hear the people we want to be. We hear, too, those who are not like us, the segregationists, gun thugs, police chiefs and sheriffs who so often blocked the way. They, too, are immortalized in the songs, frozen in time, caught as if by a camera in a fast-moving moment of history. If it were not for Florence Reece’s unforgettable question in song, Which Side Are You On? who would ever remember Bloody Harlan’s Sheriff Blair? Yet as our singing voices build, we swear again that we will not thug for J. H. Blair, in Kentucky or anywhere else, because we are for the union, we know which side we are on.
We hear also the people we have been. There is Ralph Chaplin, organizer and songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the “Wobblies,” just back from the West Virginia mine wars at the beginning of the twentieth century. What was it Mother Jones said that affected him so deeply? “You don’t need the vote to raise hell”? “The Lord God Almighty made the women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies”? “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”? What was it about the South and southern workers that tears out of this Ohio-born organizer the amazing final lines to his enduring labor anthem Solidarity Forever, that are as fresh today as when he wrote them almost a hundred years ago:
In our hands is placed a power
Greater than their hoarded gold
Greater than the might of armies
Magnified a thousand-fold
We can bring to birth a new world
From the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong
He’s right, you know. The union does make us strong. The truth will make us free. We shall live in peace.