Saturday, June 11, we will gather at Uptown Bill’s (where it will be COOL) to sing together from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. This is the fourth of five sing-alongs moving sequentially through our new songbook, Rise Again. This session will focus on these chapters: Musicals, Old-Timey & Bluegrass, Outdoors, Peace, Play, Pub Songs, Rich & Poor, and Rock Around the Clock. Bring instruments! Come enjoy a cool soda or milkshake! Hope to see you Saturday.
The Press-Citizen ran this column on Thursday, May 19. Hope to see you at the concert!
by Jean Littlejohn
The Family Folk Machine presents a free concert this Saturday, May 21, at 2 p.m. at the Englert Theatre with the Senior Center’s Voices of Experience. We’re calling the concert “Hard Times Come Again No More: Songs of Struggle and Hope,” and the program features songs about social justice in order to present a community angle on the University’s “Just Living” theme semester.
The notion that songs can help further the cause of social justice is an old idea, even if it’s not a straightforward one. Even though you can’t scientifically prove that songs can move the cause of justice forward, many people agree that they have played a powerful role in social movements—things like helping slaves maintain their dignity and spreading secret messages about the Underground Railroad, giving workers the courage to organize into a union, galvanizing the African American community to fight racist policies in the deep South in the 1960s, and cleaning up the polluted Hudson river. Some of our concert songs honor past struggles for human rights, and others call us to action.
The concert will be framed by the rhetorical device of the hammer as the means of action in the world. We’ll sing the classic Pete Seeger/Lee Hays song, “If I Had a Hammer,” where the tools for working for a better world are the “hammer of justice,” the “bell of freedom,” and the “song about the love between my brothers and my sisters.” The concert ends with the recent Steve Earle tribute to Seeger, “Steve’s Hammer (For Pete),” where we imagine laying the hammer down once peace and justice are achieved. In between, we’ll sing “John Henry,” which seems to have begun as a true story about this heroic steel-drivin’ man who beat the steam drill with his hammer and then came to represent the dignity of human work.
One recurrent problem in the struggle for social justice is the feeling that the world’s problems are large and systemic and that individual actions can never prevail against them. But past struggles teach us that, as we’ll sing on Saturday, “step by step the longest march can be won”—by working together: “Many stones can form an arch; singly, none.” When Patti Smith performs her song “People Have the Power,” she often ends with the entreaty, “Use your voice!” If you’re ready to use your voice, you can believe her words: “People have the power to dream, to rule, to wrestle the world from fools.”
The Family Folk Machine is pleased to be sharing the Englert stage with the Voices of Experience for this concert, swelling our numbers to around 80 singers of all ages. The concert is free and open to all, and we try to make it easy for the audience to sing along on many of the song choruses. After the concert, there will be time to gather and socialize at a reception at the Senior Center celebrating the Center’s 35th anniversary.
“Free to Be” is the one song on our FFM spring concert program that the FFM has performed before–the kids sang it at our very first concert, in May of 2013. I’m happy for the kids who have joined us since that time to get to know this optimistic and affirming song. From a programming perspective, Free to Be has taken on a new shade of meaning for me as a result of putting it in a social justice context. It’s easy to bring to mind examples of kids who are not free to express who they really are, not free to be their best and truest selves either due to political or economic hardships or due to social norms. Imagine the kind of world we could have if all these kids were free to be themselves.
The FFM kids are also singing the African American spiritual “O Mary, Don’t You Weep.” When my daughter Claire first learned this song with the Newton Family Singers (http://www.newtonfamilysingers.org), I remember her asking over and over to hear the story about the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt (for one summary from a non-religious viewpoint, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Red_Sea).
The text of this song is a rich mixture of various passages from the Bible; the chorus references the sorrow of Mary of Bethany over the death of her brother, Lazarus, as well as Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. The song includes memorable verses like “If I could, I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood,” and “Moses stood on the Red Sea shore, smotin’ the water with a two by four,” and “God gave Noah the rainbow sign: no more water but fire next time.” (The part about the fire isn’t in the Noah story, but can be found in places like II Peter 3:6-7: “By the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world of that time was deluged with water and perished [as in the flood]. But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless.”]
The song dates from before the Civil War, and the themes of hope and deliverance would have had a clear appeal to the slaves who first sang the song. Like quite a number of spirituals, this one gained new life during the Civil Rights movement. The FFM kids are singing and playing clarinets and string instruments using the minor-mode version of the tune, but there’s also a major-mode version. In the 1960s, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee made new words for this song to refer to the bus boycotts: “If you miss me from the back of the bus, and you can’t find me nowhere, Come on up to the front of the bus, I’ll be ridin’ up there” :
We have three songs on this concert program that use a hammer as a central image. And there are more folk songs about hammers, like the Lead Belly classic “Take This Hammer”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQxXtXondhw
Were Pete Seeger and Lee Hays thinking partly of John Henry when they chose a hammer to be the tool of justice in “If I Had a Hammer”? Maybe–they’re certainly talking about work that needs doing. It’s work that you can do all morning, all evening, and all over this land. Part of the reason the song has been so successful and has spread so far over the world (with versions in many different languages) is its lack of specificity. It requires something of the listener; it requires that we fill in the blanks: where do you see injustice that needs to be hammered out? What dangerous developments should you be calling attention to? What actions can you take to strengthen the love that binds us together so we can do our common work?
I first learned of Steve Earle’s friendship with Pete Seeger when I heard him singing “Bring Them Home” as the credits rolled in the Pete Seeger documentary, “The Power of Song.” Since most of us don’t have Pete Seeger’s work ethic, the vision in “Steve’s Hammer (for Pete)” of laying the hammer down seems appealing, especially if he’s laying the hammer down because the struggle is through and things have improved.
“When there ain’t no hunger and there ain’t no pain, I won’t have to swing this thing. When the war is over and the union’s strong, I won’t sing no more angry songs. When the air don’t choke you and the ocean’s clean and the kids don’t die for gasoline . . . one of these days I’m gonna lay this hammer down.” Earle covers a lot of ground in this song, and he traces this social justice work directly to the work of John Henry. Maybe it’s not just that he’s imagining John Henry’s work as having been on behalf of everyone and on behalf of justice but also that he’s entreating us to work as hard as John Henry worked (well, almost as hard, being mindful of our heart health).
My original plan was to program “Midnight Special” last fall with our other train songs, since the Midnight Special is, well, a train. But as I thought about the words more, I started to like the idea of moving it to this spring, with our focus on social justice. Read more
David Bromwich writes in the New York Review of Books, “Let me start with a proposition: the great social calamity of our time is that people are being replaced by machines” (“Trapped in the Virtual Classroom,” July 9, 2015). Read more
Some of the songs we’re singing this spring come with a rich background. I thought I might say a few things here about the history of some of the songs or about why these particular songs are appearing on our program (out of the hundreds of possibilities). Read more
Our third Sing, People, Sing! session will be this Saturday, May 14, at Uptown Bill’s from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. We’ll be exploring the middle of the new songbook, Rise Again, with chapters on Healing and Letting Go, Home and Roots, Hope and Strength, Jazz and Swing, Love, Lullabies, Millennial Songs, and Motown and R & B.
The last two sessions in our Sing, People, Sing! series will be:
Session 4: Saturday, June 11, 3:00 to 5:00, at Uptown Bill’s
Musicals, Old-Timey & Bluegrass, Outdoors, Peace, Play, Pub Songs, Rich & Poor, Rock Around the Clock
Session 5: Sunday, June 26, 3:00 to 5:00, at the Senior Center
Seas & Sailors, Sing People Sing! Struggle, Surfin’ USA, Time & Changes, Travelin’, and Work
You can see a list of Rise Again songs by chapter by following this link:
Sing, People, Sing! Join us for a celebration of community singing as we welcome a new book, Rise Again, to the Rise Up Singing family. The Family Folk Machine will host a series of sing-alongs to introduce the new songbook and its almost 1200 songs. Come to one or come to all, look through the new book and pick out something you’d like the group to sing!
To help us get to know the new book better, we’ll assign a few chapters to each session and concentrate on those chapters.
Session 1: Saturday, April 9, 3:00 to 5:00, at Uptown Bill’s (part of Bill’s Birthday Bash)
Ballads & Old Songs, Blues, British Invasion & Rock, Country, Dignity & Diversity, Dreams & Mystery, Earthcare, and Faith
Session 2: Sunday, April 17, 3:00 to 5:00, at the Senior Center
Family, Farm & Prairie, Freedom, Friendship & Community, Funny Songs, Golden Oldies, Good Times, Gospel & Spirituals
Session 3: Saturday, May 14, 3:00 to 5:00, at Uptown Bill’s
Healing & Letting Go, Home & Roots, Hope & Strength, Jazz & Swing, Love, Lullabies, Millennial Songs, Motown and R&B
Session 4: Saturday, June 11, 3:00 to 5:00, at Uptown Bill’s
Musicals, Old-Timey & Bluegrass, Outdoors, Peace, Play, Pub Songs, Rich & Poor, Rock Around the Clock
Session 5: Sunday, June 26, 3:00 to 5:00, at the Senior Center
Seas & Sailors, Sing People Sing! Struggle, Surfin’ USA, Time & Changes, Travelin’, and Work
We’ll keep records of people’s requests and comments, and we’re planning to base our fall FFM program on songs from this book.
You can see a list of Rise Again songs by chapter by following this link:
It’s time to get together for some singing! Join us this Saturday, February 13, from 3:00 to 4:30 for our monthly all-request sing-along. Bring instruments, friends, neighbors, and children. We’ll have Rise Up Singing books. Read more
