Pulitzer on the Road Podcast: Episode 3: "Freedom to Dominate" Music Liner Notes

By Bud Kliment

Songs are historical documents. Whether written down, performed or recorded, they can evoke the time when they first appeared and were circulated. Some of the songs heard briefly in this podcast mirror the years and the history being discussed.

“Go Down Moses” (08:19) is a spiritual, from the large body of songs created and sung by enslaved African-Americans. Often containing religious imagery and messages of deliverance, spirituals were identified and collected during the Civil War era, when Black regiments were heard singing them. According to Harriet Tubman, “Go Down Moses” (with its refrain, “let my people go”) was also used as a coded signal to alert fleeing slaves to the Underground Railroad.

By the early 20th century, the spirituals were recognized as cornerstones of African-American history and culture, and evidence of an emerging race consciousness and pride. In 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois wrote significantly about the “sorrow songs,” and in 1925, the poet James Weldon Johnson published The Book of American Negro Spirituals, with musical arrangements by his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson. It was the first of their two song books that helped to establish the spirituals as classic and representative American music. “Go Down Moses” is the first entry.

Also from the Civil War era, “Bonnie Blue Flag” (13:20) is a Confederate marching song whose melody is based on a European folk song, “The Irish Jaunting Car.” Its lyrics declare “We are a band of brothers,” a phrase appearing in Shakespeare's Henry V, and its verses name all the states that had seceded from the Union. (A revised version was sung by Union soldiers.) Referring to a lone star flag used by the Confederacy, the song’s title entered popular culture through the character of “Bonnie Blue” Butler in Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler’s only child, who is killed while horseback riding.

“Hell Hound on My Trail” (25:06) is a 1937 recording by the legendary Delta bluesman Robert Johnson. Audibly influenced by Skip James, another early blues artist, the song is considered one of Johnson’s greatest performances. With its spare lyrics and atmosphere of dread, interpretations of the song have ranged from the fantastic (about a Faustian deal Johnson struck with the devil) to the realistic (the pervasive fear of lynching felt by Blacks in the south). The assortment of meanings and feelings evoked by the song attest to Johnson’s artistry, and also to the depth and complexity of the blues.

Perhaps the best-known of these songs, “We Shall Overcome” (29:32) emerged over decades, largely from oral tradition. Its ancestors included “I’ll Overcome Someday,” a gospel hymn published in 1901 by Charles Albert Tindley. Sometime later, the song moved from the church to the picket line. In 1946, it was sung by union workers on strike against the American Tobacco Company in Charleston, SC. Zilphia Horton, the music director of Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., heard and loved the song and taught it to Pete Seeger. Later, Guy Carawan, Horton’s successor at Highlander, learned it at the school. Carawan and Seeger helped to popularize the song during the Civil Rights Movement, when it was embraced by protesters and became an anthem.

The version heard in this podcast is by the venerable gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

About “We Shall Overcome” King reportedly said, “There is something about that song that haunts you.” It also was performed at his funeral.

To learn more about the podcast episode, "Freedom to Dominate," click here.