We Shall Overcome: Essays on a Great American Song ed. by Victor V. Bobetsky (review)

Of all the freedom songs sung at protests and mass meetings during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, “We Shall Overcome” is the most iconic. It remains central to the popular understanding of the spirit, accomplishments, and ultimate “decline” of the civil rights movement. It is most often presented as a song that erased difference for movement participants and continued to facilitate coalition politics from the United States to South Africa to Northern Ireland and beyond. The song’s legacy, however, is more contested than much of the literature on it would have you believe. As Clyde Appleton noted in 1975, in idiosyncratic local contexts it was not always the undisputed anthem of the civil rights movement; it evoked the “vague disquiet” of “unfulfilled hopes” for many black Americans, especially in the period after 1966 (Clyde Appleton, “Singing in the Streets of Raleigh, 1963: Some Recollections,” Black Perspective in Music 3, no. 3 [Autumn 1975]: 243). At times, it was even the target of ridicule and satire. Malcolm X famously quipped, “Black people are fed up with the dillydallying, pussyfooting, compromising approach that we’ve been using toward getting our freedom. We want freedom now, but we’re not going to get it saying ‘We Shall Overcome.’ We’ve got to fight until we overcome” (Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman [New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990], 38). Julius Lester’s 1966 prognosis is just as grim:

Now it is over. The days of singing freedom songs and the days of combating bullets and billy clubs with Love. We Shall Overcome (and we have overcome our blindness) sounds old, out-dated and can enter the pantheon of the greats along with the IWW songs and the union songs. As one SNCC veteran put it after the Mississippi March, “Man, the people are too busy getting ready to fight to bother with singing anymore.”

(Julius Lester, “The Angry Children of Malcolm X,” Sing Out! 16, no. 5 [October 1966]: 21)

We Shall Overcome: Essays on a Great American Song does not grapple with this narrative of contestation, but the collection does synthesize into one volume many of the well-traveled histories of the song and its performers with an emphasis on the song’s pedagogical value for music educators. The editor, Victor V. Bobetsky, is Associate Professor of Music Education and Director of the Teacher Education Program at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY), as well as Associate Professor of Urban Education at the Graduate Center of CUNY. Including Dr. Bobetsky, five of the seven contributors are music educators and six of the seven hold a degree in music education. The volume’s audience and focus are clear: this is a book about “We Shall Overcome” written by and for music educators, and more specifically, choral conductors. Because of this specificity, We Shall Overcome does not engage with all of the musicological discourse surrounding the repertoire of the freedom song; it does, however, collect and update traditional narratives about the song’s history and provide a window into the use of the song as an educational tool.

The collection contains eight chapters, two of which were written by the editor himself. The chapters fall broadly into two categories: (1) historical or theoretical studies of the song or its performance history, and (2) pedagogical explorations of the song in the classroom. In chapter 1, “The Complex Ancestry of ‘We Shall Overcome,’” Bobetsky makes the bold claim that in addition to summarizing current knowledge on the origins and evolution of the song’s melody and lyrics, he will also offer “a new perspective on the relationship between two of ‘We Shall Overcome’s’ earliest potential antecedents” (p. 1). Bobetsky argues, in contradiction to Bernice Johnson Reagon, that...