The struggle for justice, civil rights, and women’s rights in the U.S. has been a long, hard road. There are times we get so down that it becomes difficult to keep on walking, marching, fighting back, and resisting.
During those times what often lifts us up and moves us forward is the power of song—songs that motivate, songs that empower, songs that energize and educate. I’d like to again celebrate some of the sisters who have mobilized movements with their voices.
One of the most powerful contemporary grassroots groups in the U.S. today is the North Carolina NAACP’s Moral Monday’s Forward Together Movement, spearheaded by the Rev. Dr. William Barber, who preaches a powerful message. Coupled with his preaching is the soaring voice of Yara Allen.
Referring to Yara Allen as a staunch advocate for social justice might be a bit of an understatement, considering the various causes for which she has fought. Along with being a field organizer for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), Allen, a resident of Rocky Mount, is a vocal protester of recent actions by the N.C. General Assembly. This has included being part of the HKonJ (Historic Thousand on Jones Street) movement and the Forward Together Moral Movement...
Allen was arrested along with 48 other people, whom she describes as “soldiers for justice,” during a protest at the General Assembly. She is proud to have stood up for her rights and says she would gladly do so again.
“If anybody asks you who I am, know that I’ve worn many hats and traveled many miles,” Allen said in a statement. “But the essence of who I am can be summed up in this phrase: I am a soldier in the struggle for justice and I shall not be moved.”
Hear her voice:
Hatred, we’re gonna tear your kingdom down
You’ve been building your kingdom all over this world
But hatred we’re gonna tear your kingdom down
Following an event held at the The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, here’s what Foster Pickney wrote about Allen:
Yara Allen is the artistic voice of the Moral Mondays movement. She was the first to speak from the Forward Together/Moral Mondays movement, and stressed the need for “collective effervescence” in movement practice – creating prophetic spaces where the collective voice of the disenfranchised can be expressed. The personality of an action is largely determined by the music or chants used to connect voices and hearts to the struggle. Power is created when the message of the movement and the messages within commonly held cultural expressions are linked. Rev. Dr. William Barber, a key leader and the most public face of the movement, referred to the need to “exegete our music” and to approach rhythm and word with the same intellectual vigor that we approach sacred texts.
Listen to Allen lead a Jewish congregation in song:
“When we all get together, what a day of rejoicing that will be. When we all see justice we will sing and shout victory.”
January 15th, 2016 - After Rev. William J. Barber, II delivers a powerful message, Yara Allen, Cultural Artist, Movement Musicologist and angelic voice of the Forward Together Moral Monday Movement, leads the congregation in song at the Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Shabbat Service at Temple Emanuel in Greensboro, North Carolina.
A key component of movement building is grassroots training, which was honed at the Highlander Folk School. Here is Allen heading a song training session for fast food workers:
Allen is not alone in song-protest organizing in North Carolina. Moral Mondays’ events are swelled by the raised voices and fists of the North Carolina “gaggle” of Raging Grannies.
The original Raging Grannies were founded in Canada.
The Raging Grannies began in 1987 in Victoria, British Columbia, and quickly spread across the country. White, middle-class, educated, between the age of 52 and 67, they were anthropologist, teachers, businesswoman, counsellor, artists, homemakers, and librarian. Initially they were reacting to the threat to health and environment posed by the visit of US Navy warships and submarines in the waters surrounding Victoria, vessels that could be powered by nuclear reactors and/or equipped with nuclear arms. They were also reacting to sexism and ageism within the peace group they were involved with: relegated to making coffee, they found little receptivity for their ideas.
The organization is now international.
Pam Walton’s documentary about the Raging Grannies, distributed by New Day Films, follows a gaggle in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Their philosophy:
Let us be clear about the Grannies. We are totally non-violent, believe in only peaceful protest (with lots of laughter), work for the ‘many not the few’ (motto of the old Mechanics’ Institute) and see our work as the spreading green branches of a great tree, rising up to provide shelter and nourishment for those who will come after us.
Grannies are best equipped to make public, corrupt things that have been hidden (often for profit). Local toxic waste sites that no-one seems prepared to tackle, asbestos sites employing young people desperate for work, nuclear waste products being dumped outside an uninformed small town, laws that affect an entire community, passed quickly with no opportunity for study. The list goes on. Grannies always check their facts before acting, discarding rumours, conspiracy theories and the agendas of others. They wait patiently till the whole picture is clear before hitting the street with their pointed, original and devastating songs, written by any old gran who feels inspired.
The delights of grannying include: dressing like innocent little old ladies so we can get close to our ‘target’, writing songs from old favourites that skewer modern wrongs, satirizing evil-doing in public and getting everyone singing about it, watching a wrong back down and turn tail and run, sharing a history with other women who know who they are and what they’re about. Grannying is the least understood yet most powerful weapon we have. Sometimes, looking back, we can see grannying was the only thing that could have met the need.
Here they are in North Carolina:
A Gaggle of Grannies
Vicki Ryder, Liz Evans and Jane Hare, three members of the Triangle area's gaggle, all talk about their experiences as Raging Grannies and their motivations for speaking out against the powers that be through this light-hearted and entertaining form of expression.
Since I will be 70 this year, I truly appreciate the activism of savvy seniors.
As this nation sails into the perilous waters of the Trump administration and the tidal wave of xenophobic hate unleashed against immigrants and refugees and as we fight to establish sanctuary cities and spaces, I hear the voices of the political activist cultural workers of Sweet Honey in the Rock in my head.
As artists, activists, and humanitarians, Sweet Honey In The Rock® has, for forty years, raised her voice to advocate for truth, justice and compassion while addressing the critical issues of democracy, freedom, racism, and economic and social justice. Sweet Honey has also proactively advocated for accessibility and disability rights for the differently abled, and has welcomed the Deaf and hearing impaired by including a Sign Language interpreter in the ensemble.
Would you harbor me? was written by Ysaye Barnwell and comes from their album "Sacred Ground"
Her powerful lyrics:
Would you harbor a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew
a heretic, convict or spy?
Would you harbor a run away woman, or child,
a poet, a prophet, a king?
Would you harbor an exile, or a refugee,
a person living with AIDS?
Here is Ysaye Barnwell talking about the power of music, listening,and song.
All of the members of Sweet Honey, past and present, draw from the roots of gospel, blues, and folk music and from the voices raised in the civil rights struggle. Sweet Honey founder, activist, and ethnomusicologist Bernice Johnson Reagon, while organizing for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) met and sang with Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.
Reagon produced Songs My Mother Taught Me for Smithsonian Folkways.
The 20th child of a Mississippi sharecropper family and a commanding voice of the Civil Rights Movement, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) stood tall against the brutality, indignities, and intimidation of implacable racism. She harnessed her mother’s gifts of song and plain-spoken wisdom to steel her fellow seekers of social justice, the cause to which she gave her life. Songs My Mother Taught Me, a re-release of limited-edition 1963 field recordings, breathes new life into Fannie Lou Hamer’s inspiring legacy and her uncompromising call for a righteous world. 47 minutes, 32-page booklet with photos.
This recording is the eighth release in the Smithsonian Folkways African American Legacy Series, co-presented with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. This album was originally released as a limited-edition cassette tape at the Smithsonian Institution’s Voices of the Civil Rights Movement symposium in 1983. It was compiled by folklorist, activist, and GRAMMY-winner Worth Long and produced by renowned singer, song leader, and civil rights activist Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon.
From the album:
Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom
I said I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom
Well I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom
Hallelu, hallelu, Hallelu, Hallelu, hallelujah
The links and bonds forged in action and by organizing with song often become a family tradition. We see that illustrated by Bethany Yarrow, who is carrying on a political song tradition founded by her father Peter Yarrow. His song activism became known worldwide for his work with Peter, Paul and Mary, which he co-founded in 1961.
Bethany Yarrow is a singer and activist who has been involved in many social justice, environmental and water issues over the years. Deeply influenced by prayer and ceremonial music, she performs with cellist Rufus Cappadocia as one half of the cello & voice duo, Bethany & Rufus. In their role as musician activists, they often find themselves in the streets playing at demonstrations, rallies, and concerts for change around the word. Bethany is also the daughter of Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary and has been performing with him at concerts and rallies since she was 8 years old. She is one of the founding organizers of the Black Hills Unity Concert, as well as the Waterfall Unity Alliance (formed to stop pipelines in and fossil fuel infrastructure expansion in New York and transition to Earth based models of community power), and a member of the advisory board of the Center For Earth Ethics at Union Divinity School.
Bethany is best known as one half of the dynamic duo Bethany & Rufus that she formed with ground breaking cellist Rufus Cappadocia. “In 1999 I heard Rufus playing with the Paradox Trio at The Knitting Factory in NYC," recounts Bethany. "I thought he was an amazing musician and I needed a bass player for a gig. He told me that I should hire him, so I did. Eventually, we started experimenting as just a duo. His groove is incredible and the combination of the 5 string cello and voice was so simple, real and beautiful that we started to just focus on that. Now it's 17 years later and we are still experimenting.” As the daughter of a folk icon Bethany grew up surrounded not only by folk music, but also deeply influenced by her father's belief in music as a way of bringing people together -- of reaching into their hearts and dissolving prejudices to create a common humanity. Some of her earliest childhood memories are of marches and rallies... of people singing together in an open hearted way that is unusual in today's world.
"I now realize how formative that was for me," says Bethany, who continues to be a passionate activist especially around issues of climate justice, and the honor the earth movement. "These songs remind me where I come from and, like a compass encoded into my DNA, show me the way forward. Once I had that root experience of music in my own culture then I began to experience the musical spirit messenger inside of root traditions from other cultures in Africa, the Carribean, Brazil, as well as Native American music. Now it sometimes feels like it is all one song, one long woven braid of musical memory."
Her father Peter wrote the lyrics for Lift Us Up, which Bethany performs here.
Lift us up. Make our stand.Let love triumph in our land. Lift us up. Make us strong.Give us courage to right the wrong.
America, our hopes and dreams are truly all at stake.
Let not the hate divide us. Let not our spirit break.
Let not our courage falter. Let not our bravery fail.
Let unity bring victory. Let love prevail.
With a deep commitment to racial, social, and environmental justice, Yarrow has been an outspoken supporter of the Standing Rock Water Protectors.
Also standing up for Standing Rock was Buffy-Sainte Marie, who is a living legend at age 76.
And we will stand for the right to be free
And we will rebuild our own society
And we will sing, we will sing
We will sing our own song
Born on February 20, 1941 on the Piapot Plains Cree First Nation Reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada, she was raised by adoptive parents in Massachusetts.
A reviewer of her album Power in the Blood said “She believes in magic — but the practical kind, nurtured through centuries of rituals and shaped into songs meant to wake up the world.”
She will be the 2017 recipient of the Allan Waters Humanitarian Award.
The Allan Waters Humanitarian Award recognizes an outstanding Canadian artist whose humanitarian contributions have positively enhanced the social fabric of Canada and/or whose impact can be felt worldwide.
Not long after I first started blogging at Daily Kos in 2008, I wrote about Buffy and her song that had had such a profound impact on my life: My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying. The diary got only a handful of readers back then. I wrote:
I use this song each semester to introduce my university students to the concept of ethnocentrism, and have them deconstruct the symbolism, and then fact check Buffy’s assertions.
After hearing the song for the first time my student’s usually sit in shocked silence. They have been raised on the mythology of happy pilgrims breaking bread peacefully with Indians as part of annual Thanksgiving pageants, and somehow have never, or rarely heard tell of much the other side of our nation’s history.
They are familiar with Pete Seeger (shown in the video) only as an advocate for cleaning up the Hudson River here in NY on the sloop Clearwater and none have ever heard of Buffy St. Marie, nor do they know of the schools where Native American children were taken to be acculturated and rescued from "savagery."
That is still true today, as each semester reaps the same results. Students do not know her name and know even less about “the genocide basic to this country’s birth,” even though some have paid attention to Standing Rock.
Meteor Blades wrote Native American Heritage Day: No No Keshagesh, with similar results. He wrote:
The Cree Indian folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie has often complained that too many people saw her as Pocahontas with a guitar. She's anything but. Her career, which began in the early 1960s at beatnik coffeehouses in Canada and the United States, has been marked by political controversy, drug addiction and numerous hiatuses. This year she broke her most recent 13-year-long pause with a new album, her 18th, Running for the Drum.
If you know Buffy's songs - love songs, ballads, political - but haven't yet heard any takes from Running for the Drum, you may be surprised by her fresh sound in this new album, although that haunting voice hasn't disappeared. There's a message, however, that won't be a surprise to anyone. The lead song is called "No No Keshagesh." In her native tongue, Keshagesh means "greedy guts." "It's what you call a little puppy who eats his own and then wants everybody else's."
complete lyrics here
Ole Columbus he was looking good,
When he got lost in our neighborhood.
Garden of Eden right before his eyes.
Now it's all spy ware: now it's all income tax.
Ole' brother Midas looking hungry today.
What he can't buy he'll get some other way.
Send in the troopers if the natives resist.
Old, old story boys, that's how you do it boys.
Look at these people; ah they're on a roll.
Gonna have it all, gonna have complete control.
Want all the resources and all of the land.
They'll break the law for it: Blow things up for it.
When all our champions are off in the war,
Their final rip off here and is always on.
Mr. greed I think your time has come.
We're gonna sing it and pray it and live it then say it.
We will hear these voices.
We will lift our voices in song as we march, as we fight, as we organize, as we vote, and as we resist.
Join me in singing, and share the women’s songs that have moved you to action.