They Hear America Singing

Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel and Bob Dylan are three of the most sought-after folk singers in the business. But last week they were doing the seeking. At a voter registration rally two miles out of Greenwood, Miss., all three stood on a flatbed truck parked on a dusty field beside Highway 82 and sang the gospel-like We Shall Overcome. The audience, 200 Negro dirt farmers, lustily joined in:

We shall overcome--some day,

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

We shall overcome--some day.

All over the U.S., folk singers are doing what folk singers are classically supposed to do--singing about current crises. Not since the Civil War era have they done so in such numbers or with such intensity. Instead of keening over the poor old cowpoke who died in the streets of Laredo or chronicling the life cycle of the blue-tailed fly (the sort of thing that fired the great postwar revival of folk song), they are singing with hot-eyed fervor about police dogs and racial murder. Sometimes they use serviceable old tunes, but just as often they are writing new ones about fresh heroes and villains, from Martin Luther King to Bull Connor. In Chicago, integrationist songs are sung not only at the North Side's grubby Fickle Pickle but also in the Camellia House of The Drake. In a cocktail lounge in Ogunquit, Me., a college girl shouts out: "Sing something about integration." Seeger has done so before a crowd of 45,000 at the Boston Arts Festival; and the Peter, Paul and Mary recording of Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind (TIME, May 31) is, according to Warner Bros. Records, the fastest selling single the company has ever cut. Blowin' is young Dylan at his lyrically honest best. It sounds as country-airy as Turkey in the Straw, but it has a cutting edge.

How many roads must a man walk down

Before you call him a man? . . .

How many years can some people exist

Before they're allowed to be free?

How many times can a man turn his head

And pretend he just doesn't see?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,

The answer is blowin' in the wind.

The prevailing integrationist theme made its most remarkable inroad at last week's Newport Jazz Festival. Folk is strictly music non grata at Newport. But there stood Duke Ellington singing about King and Bull Connor:

King fit the battle of Alabam, Birmingham, Alabam,

King fit the battle of Alabam, And the Bull got nasty, ghastly nasty . . .

The dog looked the baby

right square in the eye and said, "bye--scram!"

The baby looked the dog right back in the eye,

But didn't cry or lam.

When the dog saw the baby wasn't afraid, he turned to his Uncle Bull and said,

"That baby looks like he don't give a damn.

You sure we are still in Alabam?"

No one at Newport could remember the last occasion when Ellington had been moved enough to sing in public. What's more, the Duke himself had written the lyrics.

Times of national crises in the past have often inspired outbursts of folk songs. Independence-minded folk singers of the 1730s wrote anti-British songs so "seditious" that Governor William Cosby of New York felt called upon to stage a public song burning. In the America that Walt Whitman heard singing, New Hampshire's Hutchinson Family drew abolitionist admirers like William Lloyd Garrison. Today's folk singers are lyrically lashing out at everything from nuclear fallout (What Have They Done to the Rain?) and the American Medical Association ("We really love to stitch/ The diseases of the rich"), to direct-digit dialing ("560 million, 900,000 more, 137, extension 24"). But not since labor's big national organizing drive of the 1930s, when nearly everyone in the country knew at least a few lines of We Shall Not Be Moved, has there been such an outpouring of original songs as has been engendered by the racial problem.

The done-in and dying cowboy has been replaced by victims of racial violence like Medgar Evers. The stock villains, besides Policeman Connor, include Ross Barnett, "Mr. Woolworth" and, occasionally, John Kennedy. On the other side of the fence, Dallas Folk Singer Hermes Nye has been singing a bitterly resigned ditty called Mine Eyes Have Seen the Coming of the N.A.A.C.P.

A line like "Go down, Kennedy, way down in Georgia la-aa-and" is arid and unmoving, and certainly these songs include a lot that is unoriginal drivel. But the same can be said of any body of folk music. After time and taste sort out the songs that integration in the U.S. is marching to, one called Bull Connor's Jail is likely to last. Written last spring by Guy Carawan, a highly regarded California folk singer arrested at a Birmingham protest meeting, it truly says:

Iron bars around me,

Cold walls so strong;

They hold my body,

The world hears my song.

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