in celebration. The song has been performed by almost every major gospel artist, but it never sounds the same. Compare Mahalia’s best-known recording, which resembles “Move On Up” in style and feel, with the equally well-known version by the Swan Silvertones. Lead vocalist Claude Jeter turns the song into a high-energy expression of how individual brilliance can merge with a highly structured, polished background; change a couple of lyrics and the Swan’s version could have been a Motown hit. In contrast, Mahalia’s version tells of a very different path to the promised land; the slower tempo, the give-and-take between her voice and Mildred Falls’s piano, lets you know that movement doesn’t have to be feverish, that what’s important is to keep on moving. As in Montgomery, Mahalia grounded the experience in both the realities of the past and the belief in a better world to come.
There’s a story that credits Mahalia with another role in the success of the March on Washington. The written text of King’s speech did not include the “I Have a Dream” section. And, while the crowd was certainly with King throughout, it’s clear that without the “dream” section, an improvised version of a set piece he had used several times previously, the speech wouldn’t have gone down as a classic. A few days before the march, Mahalia had heard King invoke the “dream” in a speech at the Detroit church pastored by the Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha’s father. The story goes that, feeling the energy starting to slip away, Mahalia leaned forward to King and whispered, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” At the moment when it seemed most likely that the movement just might get all of us over, it was about Martin and Mahalia, the politics and the music. Most important, it was about the movement as a whole.
3
“The Soul of the Movement”:Calls and Responses
It wasn’t just Mahalia’s voice, any more than it was just Martin’s courage and determination, that gave the movement its strength. The power came from the community that responded so deeply to the songs that, as King wrote, “bind us together . . . help us march together.” The songs Mahalia sang were both a call for renewal and a response to her people’s courage. Like their ancestors who imagined themselves as Daniel in the lions’ den, the black people who made the movement real in the small towns away from the cameras had been turning the moan into music long before Mahalia and Martin forged their gospel politics.
The core of gospel politics lies in the “call and response” principle of African-American culture. The basic structure of call and response is straightforward. An individual voice, frequently a preacher or singer, calls out in a way that asks for a response. The response can be verbal, musical, physical—anything that communicates with the leader or the rest of the group. The response can affirm, argue, redirect the dialogue, raise a new question. Any response that gains attention and elicits a response of its own becomes a new call. Usually the individual who issued the first call responds to the response, remains the focal point of the ongoing dialogue. But it doesn’t have to be that way. During the movement, Charles Mingus, fascinated with the political and spiritual implications of call and response, explored ideas of community based on the constant redefinition of the relationship between group and leader in “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” and “Three or Four Shades of Blue.”
Similar experiments took place in the ranks of the freedom movement, especially in the local communities where the activities organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) often differed sharply from those planned by King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Most of the leaders recognized by the media were men, but SNCC organizers were often women who remained in the communities long after the television cameras had moved on to the next event orchestrated by the SCLC leadership from its Atlanta offices. Like the music itself, the grassroots organizing that made the movement happen was rooted in the local culture of the rural black South. And that gave the women who carried that culture a unique sense of the relative value of leadership and community, the balance of call and response.
After several decades of work with leadership-oriented civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC, which she said had too much of the “pulpit mentality,” Ella Baker committed herself to SNCC, saying, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” For Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, the guiding spirit of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, it was about the “beloved community” as a whole: the women, the poor, the young. Reverend King was magnificent, but if the movement was going to work, it had to work in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and Barnwell, South Carolina, not just in New York, Atlanta, and whatever small town the SCLC chose for its stage.
While the SCLC focused on issues of political strategy, SNCC demonstrated a deeper appreciation of the role of culture, especially music, in the movement. Somehow, communities had to find a way to break the old patterns, transform fear into resistance. SNCC field secretary Phyllis Martin pointed to music’s crucial role: “The fear down here is tremendous. I didn’t know whether I’d be shot at, or stoned, or what. But when the singing started, I forgot all that. I felt good within myself. We sang ‘Oh Freedom’ and ‘We Shall Not Be Moved,’ and after that you just don’t want to sit around anymore. You want the world to hear you, to know what you’re fighting for!”
One of the original members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, Cordell Reagon, put it even more directly: “Without these songs, you know we wouldn’t be anywhere. We’d still be down on Mister Charley’s plantation, chopping cotton for 30 cents a day.” Bernice Johnson Reagon, then a member of the SNCC Freedom Singers, now presiding spirit of the black womanist group Sweet Honey in the Rock, recalls Ella Baker’s influence on her sense of the connection between music and politics: “She urged us as organizers to understand how to create structures that allowed others in our group to also be leaders as well as followers. Her power was in her wanting to increase others’ sense of their own power and their access to power.” Reagon describes the courage the songs gave to the Freedom Riders jailed in Hinds County, Mississippi; the students participating in SNCC’s voter education project in McComb, Mississippi; the marchers in Pine Bluff, Baton Rouge, Selma, Birmingham: “They sang as they were dragged into the streets. They sang in the paddy wagons and in the jails. And they sang when they returned to the Black community’s churches for strategy rallies.” One of those rallies took place in Dawson, Georgia, where, Reagon remembered, “I sat in a church and felt the chill that ran through a small gathering of Blacks when the sheriff and his deputies walked in. They stood at the door, making sure everyone knew they were there. Then a song began. And the song made sure that the sheriff and his deputies knew we were there. We became visible, our image was enlarged, when the sound of the freedom songs filled all the space in that church.”
Mahalia testified to the music’s power in her description of the Freedom Riders’ arrival at the Montgomery bus depot in 1961. Remembering how “gospel music had given the people courage and spirit when they were in danger” during the early days of King’s movement, Mahalia describes the community’s fear as “cars were set on fire and bombs were set off, but the Negroes kept right on coming. They filled up the church and began singing hymns and gospel songs.” Ultimately, music helped transform the burden into a movement. Mahalia describes Ralph Abernathy rising up and crying, “We don’t have to sweat and gasp in here! Those U.S. marshals are supposed to protect us. Open the windows! Let the fresh air in! Let those outside hear us singing a little louder!” No wonder King called music the “soul of the movement.”
As a man of the word, King attributed much of music’s power to the lyrics, but the local people usually echoed Bernice Johnson Reagon’s emphasis on the sound. The interlocking rhythms, the calls and responses, helped create a sense of the “beloved community.” If they marched alone, they could be isolated, picked off, made into examples of the futility of resistance. If they found a way to move together, then walking in Jerusalem could be, would be, real.
The words did help focus attention and spread the message beyond the beloved community. Bernice Johnson Reagon’s description of music’s importance anticipates Chuck D’s description of rap as “Black America’s CNN”: “With the need to gather supporters and disseminate information on the civil rights movement,