https://youtu.be/lI2HayQsHrI We Shall Overcome Easy Ukulele Song - 21 Songs in 6 Days: Learn Ukulele the Easy Way
The origins of “We Shall Overcome” are not at all clear. Many scholars think that it is based on a gospel hymn called "I'll Overcome Someday” by Charles Albert Tindley published in 1901.
Tindley was the author of forty-five influential gospel hymns, including "We'll Understand It By and By" and "Stand By Me".
In February 1909 a letter printed on the front page of the United Mine Workers Journal says "Last year at a strike, we opened every meeting with a prayer, and singing that good old song, 'We Will Overcome'." It's not clear if this refers to Tindley's 1902 gospel song, since the lyrics and tune have not come down to us. The mention is significant, however, since this is the first mention of a song with this title being sung in a secular context and mixed race setting. It seems reasonable to suppose that this more militant version, or its memory, persisted underground in the labor movement during the 1920s to re-emerge during the 1930s and 1940s.
In fall 1945 in Charleston, South Carolina, members of the mostly female African American Food and Tobacco Workers Union began a five-month strike vs. the American Tobacco Company. To keep up their spirits during winter 1945–1946, strike leaders Lucille Simmons and Delphine Brown led a slow "long meter style" version of the gospel hymn "We'll Overcome" to end each day's picketing.
“We Will Overcome” was printed in Bulletin No. 3 (September 1948), of “People's Songs” with an introduction by union organizer Zilphia Horton saying that she had learned it from the Tobacco Workers' Union workers and had found it to be extremely powerful. Pete Seeger, learned it from Horton's version in 1947.
Frank Hamilton, who was a member of People's Songs and later The Weavers, picked up Seeger's version. Hamilton's friend Guy Carawan, learned the song from Hamilton. Carawan and Hamilton, accompanied by Ramblin Jack Elliot, visited the Highlander Folk School. In 1957, Seeger sang for an audience there that included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who remarked how much the song had stuck with him. When, in 1959, Guy Carawan succeeded Horton as music director at Highlander, he reintroduced it at the school. It was the young (many of them teenagers) student-activists at Highlander, however, who gave the song the words and rhythms we know it by today when they sang it to keep their spirits up during the frightening police raids on Highlander and their subsequent stays in jail in 1959–60. In the PBS video “We Shall Overcome”, Julian Bond credits Carawan with teaching and singing the song at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1960. From there, it spread orally and became an anthem of Southern African-American labor union and civil rights activism.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. recited the words from "We Shall Overcome" in his final sermon delivered in Memphis on Sunday March 31, 1968, before his assassination.
“We shall overcome. We shall overcome. Deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome. And I believe it because somehow the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. We shall overcome because Carlyle is right; "no lie can live forever". We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right; "truth crushed to earth will rise again". We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right:
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the then unknown
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above his own.
"We Shall Overcome" was sung days later by over fifty thousand attendees at Dr. King's funeral.
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