We Shall Overcome

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Joan Baez sings We Shall Overcome in the White House to US President Barack Obama on February 9, 2010.

We Shall Overcome is a protest song that plays an important role in the US - civil rights movement played. The chorus line, which also serves as the title, means: “We will overcome (it)!” Title and / or song are used today worldwide as a musical protest against all kinds of grievances. The best known version of the song comes from Joan Baez .

history

We Shall Overcome is considered one of the earliest typical protest songs and was a key song of the US civil rights movement. The piece goes back to a 1901 gospel song by Rev. Charles Albert Tindley, entitled We Will Overcome Some Day (“one day we will overcome it”). In 1945 the song was first used as a strike song. In October 1945, in Charleston, South Carolina, members of the Food and Tobacco Workers Union (mostly black women) began a five-month strike against the American Tobacco Company , founded in 1890 . To keep themselves happy in the cold, the pickets, including Lucille Simmons, struck up the gospel song We Will Overcome Some Day (I'll Be All Right) . The unionist, musician and folklorist Zilphia Horton found out about it and used the song in her cultural work at the Highlander Folk School , a training center for activists in Tennessee. In 1948 she published it under the title We Will Overcome in People's Songs (Bulletin No. 3 of September 1948). The following year, Horton taught the song to Pete Seeger , who chaired the People's Songs association . Seeger changed the lyrics to We Shall Overcome for technical reasons , added a few stanzas ( We'll walk hand in hand , The whole wide world around ) and made the song available to the Californian singer Frank Hamilton . From this it came to Guy Carawan , who popularized the song as Horton's successor at the Highlander Folk School. The course participants carried it to their hometowns, and so it became an anthem for the union and the African-American civil rights movement through continuous oral tradition .

In 1965, then US President Lyndon B. Johnson used the passage we shall overcome in a speech to Congress. The Selma to Montgomery marches had taken place just a few days earlier .

Record recordings

Pete Seeger - We Shall Overcome

The first record was made by Joe Glazer & The Elm City Four in June 1950 (LP Eight New Songs for Labor ; then We Will Overcome ). The song first appeared as We Shall Overcome sung by Laura Duncan & The Jewish Young Singers from 1952 as Negro Spiritual (Hootenany Records (Hoot 104-A), Folkways, FN 2513, BCD15720). The song was first protected by copyright as an unpublished composition on December 14, 1959.

The song is in the public domain as it was composed by Tindley in 1903. Today's version is an adaptation by Zilphia Horton, Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton and Pete Seeger. This group of people collects the royalties , which, like the royalties from the music publishers (Ludlow Music, Essex, Folkways Music and Hollis Music), go to a foundation. The song enjoys unbroken popularity; 84 cover versions were made between 1950 and 2009 .

Further use

Pete Seeger sang the piece on June 8, 1963 at Carnegie Hall . The song became famous in August 1963 when Joan Baez sang it in front of an audience of 300,000 on the March on Washington for Work and Freedom . Since then, the song has been associated with Joan Baez, who recorded it and performed it at a number of civil rights demonstrations and at the 1969 Woodstock Festival .

The song later found its way to South Africa , where it was sung during the anti- apartheid years .

In India the translation of the song into Hindi Hum Honge Kaamyab / Ek Din became a patriotic-spiritual song in the 1980s and is still sometimes sung in schools. There are two versions of the song in the Bengali-speaking region of India and in Bangladesh , both of which are very popular among schoolchildren and political activists. Amra Karbo Joy (a literal translation) was translated by the Bengali folk musician Hemanga Biswas and later recorded by Bhupen Hazarika . Another version was translated by Shibdas Bandyopadhyay as Ek Din Surjyer Bhor (literally: The Sun Will Rise One Day) and recorded by the Calcutta Youth Choir in 1971 during the Bangladesh War of Independence , where it became one of the best-selling Bengali records of all time. It was a favorite song of the Bengali Prime Minister Mujibur Rahman and was often sung at public events after independence.

The song was very popular in the left-wing West German youth movement of the 1970s and in the peace movement of the 1980s and appeared in a number of songbooks at the time.

Bruce Springsteen created a new interpretation of the song, which is included on Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Tribute to Pete Seeger and on his 2006 album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions . He also played this song on July 22, 2012 at the Utøya Memorial Concert in Oslo and dedicated it to the relatives of the victims of the 2011 attacks in Norway .

literature

  • David Dunaway: How Can I Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger. 2nd Edition. Da Capo, New York 1990, ISBN 0-306-80399-2 .
  • Pete Seeger, Peter Blood (Eds.): Where Have All the Flowers Gone ?: A Singer's Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies. Independent Publications Group, Sing Out Publications, o. Place 1993, ISBN 1-881322-01-7 .
  • ___, "The We Shall Overcome Fund". Highlander Reports , newsletter of the Highlander Research and Education Center, August – November 2004, p. 3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joe Glazer: Labor's Troubadour . University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago 2002, ISBN 0-252-07095-X , p. 34 ff. ( Limited preview in Google book search).
  2. ↑ a b Dunaway, 1990, p. 222 f., Seeger, 1993, p. 32
  3. ↑ Historyplaces on Johnson's speech
  4. ^ Dunaway, 1990, p. 243
  5. ↑ Examples: Klaus Amoneit (Ed.): Our flag is red. Songbook of the Socialist Youth of Germany. Bonn 1977; Annegret Keller, Peter Bursch (ed.): We want peace for all time. New and old peace songs. Plans, Dortmund 1982, ISBN 3-88569-007-1 .