[August 28th marks the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the single most important events in 20th century American history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for and from that event—not including Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic speech, about which I’ve written a good bit already!]
On the 1963
musical performers who dominated headlines, and those we should better
remember.
In
yesterday’s post I highlighted the interracial makeup of the 1963 March’s leadership,
and the same was certainly true of its featured musical performers. Joan Baez sang “We Shall
Overcome” and “Oh Freedom”; Bob Dylan joined her for
“When the Ship Comes In” and then performed his own “Only a Pawn in Their Game”
(a controversial choice for this occasion since the song minimizes
the culpability of Medgar Evers’ then-unpunished murderer Byron
De La Beckwith); and Peter,
Paul, and Mary performed “If I Had a Hammer” as well as Dylan’s “Blowin’ in
the Wind.” Folk music was a core element of the Civil Rights Movement as it was
every part of American culture and society in the early 1960s; but at the same
time I have to agree with actor and radical activist Dick Gregory’s critique of the 1963 musical
performances as dominated a bit more than would have been ideal by these
popular white artists (perhaps especially since many of their chosen numbers at
the March were African American spirituals or folk songs).
They weren’t
the only 1963 performers, however, and it’s important not to deepen the problem
by focusing on them at the expense of the march’s impressive and inspiring Black
artists. One of the most impressive, pioneering and prodigiously talented opera
singer Marian
Anderson, was actually performing at the Lincoln Memorial for the second
time. In 1939, Anderson had the chance to perform in DC’s Constitution Hall but
the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to grant permission for her to
do so in front of an integrated audience; instead she performed an outdoor
concert at the
Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, April 2nd, in front of an
audience of 75,000. I don’t know of any 20th century moment that
better captures both the worst and best of America than that one, and better remembering
Anderson’s 1963
performance (she sang “He’s Got the Whole in His Hands”) can help us likewise
better remember 1939.
Another
1963 performer, Gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, was also making a return to this
setting, as she had performed
at the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom about which I wrote on Tuesday.
Her performance of two
hymns, “I’ve Been ‘Buked” and “How I Got Over,” was as stirring as every
time Jackson took any stage. But perhaps the least well-known of the 1963 March’s
three Black women musical artists is the most significant for contextualizing the
event’s musical performances overall. Folk legend Odetta
Holmes (who performed simply as Odetta) was called by none other than MLK “the
Queen of American Folk Music,” and was a vital influence on contemporary
artists like Baez and Dylan among others. I don’t mean to take anything away
from the talents nor the impacts of white artists like them when I say that the
respective lack of attention paid to Odetta, then and since, is due entirely to
racism and white supremacy. In a way, the responses to the 1963 March—where the
white artists performed a number of Black spirituals and folk songs, no less—frustratingly
replicated that trend. But we don’t have to do the same, so I’ll end this post
by linking to Odetta’s
stirring performance from the 1963 March on Washington.
Last March
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment