Folk Music: They Hear America Singing

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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The done-in and dying cowboy has been replaced by victims of racial violence like Medgar Evers.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.