On Monday I blogged about 5 songs that had helped shape Civil Rights Movement, and were sung during the rallies, sit ins, marches, arrests and beatings. These songs, often spirituals adapted during or after slavery, had no authors, but belonged to everyone. They were a civil rights soundtrack made of the people, for the people, and by the people. But what about the original songs that were written, composed, performed, and recorded to capture the injustice and racism that made the Civil Rights Movement so urgent? They may be written by songwriters, and not by the people. But they were certainly written for the people. These next songs are 5 of the countless ballads whose poignant lyrics and moving melodies raised awareness, called for action, and helped create that the Civil Rights Movement.

1. Old Man River (1927) was written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II for the 1927 musical Show Boat and is sung by the character Joe, a black dockworker. But it was Paul Robeson who immortalized the song in the 1936 film version of Show Boat directed by James Whale. Paul Robeson, the singer, actor, athlete, trained lawyer and activist performed the song on countless occasions in recitals all over the world. But he would sing his own version, with his own lyrics which made the character of Joe more empowered and dignified. For example, instead of saying “Tote that barge! Lift that bale! Git a little drunk, An’ you land in jail,” Robeson sang “Tote that barge and lift dat bale! You show a little grit and You lands in jail.” And Robeson replaced “Ah gits weary. An’ sick of tryin’; Ah’m tired of livin, an skeered of dyin. But Ol’ Man River, he jes’ keeps rolling along!” with “But I keeps laffin, Instead of cryin, I must keep fightin; until I’m dyin. And Ol Man River, he’ll just keep rollin’ along!” Although the film was extremely popular, the 1936 version was taken out of circulation because of the black list against Paul Robeson until it debuted on cable television in 1983. Both Show Boat, which was the first integrated musical, and the song Old Man River highlight taboo subjects like passing for white, interracial relationships, and the tragedy of racism.

2. Strange Fruit (1939), which most people think was written by Billie Holiday, was actuall originally a poem, written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish school teacher and activist from the Bronx who had seen a disturbing and gruesome photograph of a lynching. After writing the poem, Meeropol set it to music and performed it at a New York teachers’ meeting. Ultimately the owner of an integrated Greenwich village jazz club heard the song and introduced it to jazz and blues singer Billie Holiday. Holiday, at 24 years old, performed Strange Fruit for the first time in the jazz club in 1939. When Columbia Records, Holiday’s record label, refused to record the song because it was too controversial, she recorded it with Commodore Records in 1939. The song, with its hypnotic melody and haunting lyrics, sung by the inimitable Holiday, became the anthem of the anti-lynching movement, a movement in which Paul Robeson was also active. Between 1882 and 1998, 4743 people were lynched. A Journalist explained the power of the song “It is as if a game of let’s pretend had ended and a blues singer who had been hiding her true sorrow in a set of love ditties had lifted the curtain and told us what it was that made her cry.”

3. Mississippi Goddam (1964) was written and recorded by Nina Simone, the Grammy Award-nominated singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger and civil rights activist, also known as the “High Priestess of Soul.” Like Holiday’s Strange Fruit (which Simone would cover as well) the song was a response to racist terrorism, which sadly was still around three decades later. Specifically, the refrain “Alabama’s gotten me so upset/ Tennessee made me lose my rest/ And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam” refers to 1963 when a white supremacist shot and killed NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers in Mississippi; when the KKK bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church and killed four young girls in Alabama. Always outspoken, Simone opens the song by saying “The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam and I mean every word of it.” It’s upbeat melody underlies her condemnation of racism and frustration with the gradual and incremental response to it. The song was banned on some radio stations in the south. And Simone performed the song in front of 40,000 people at the end of one a Selma to Montgomery march. Simone’s other civil rights songs include To Be Young, Gifted and Black
about Raisin in the Sun author Lorraine Hansberry, I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free, and Why? (The King of Love is Dead) about Martin Luther King.

4. The Klan (1968?) was recorded by folk singer Richie Haven who is most famous for opening at Woodstock. Born and raised in Bed-Stuyvesant Brooklyn, Haven sites Nina Simone as a major musical influence. Haven was part of the same Greenwich Village folk scene as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and while he has written some of his own songs, frequently covers the songs of other writers like the Beatles and Dylan. Havens explains “I really sing songs that move me. I’m not in show business, I’m in the communications business. That’s what it’s about for me.” The Klan certainly communicates emotion. I can’t find any information on the song’s origins, just that it was released on Haven’s 1968 album Something Else Again. But I think it’s one of the most moving and powerful songs about Jim Crow South and the Ku Klux Klan. And, as Havens explains, “There’s a universal point to which we all respond, and where all songs apply to everyone.” There’s no video, but you can listen to the song here. You won’t regret it!

5. Hurricane (1976) is one of the last explicit protest songs by Bob Dylan. Dylan had already become involved in the civil rights movement, having performed at rallies including the March on Washington, and written songs like A Pawn in Their Game about Medgar Evers and The Death of Emmit Till. And it was because of Dylan’s commitment to civil rights that, in 1976, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the African American prizefighter who had been imprisoned for murder sent the singer a copy of his autobiography The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to #45472. Moved by the book and the injustice and racism Carter had faced, Dylan visited Carter in jail and was inspired to write the song Hurricane, with the help of Jacques Levy. Through the popularity of the song and the benefit concerts he organized, Dylan raised the awareness and money needed to get Carter a new trial. Ultimately, with the help of lawyers from Canada, Carter was acquitted. He served as the president of Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted and his story inspired the Oscar-nominated Norman Jewison movie The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington.

Are Inspired by the singers to use your voice to fight for civil rights? Then visit The Color Of Change. and sign their ColorOfChange.org pledge and check out their other Take Action campaigns.