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Stephen Stacks, "The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song After 1968" (U Illinois Press, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, my name is Kristin Turner and this is New Books and Music, a podcast of the New Books Network. My guest today is Stephen Stacks, author of the Resounding Revolution, freedom song after 1968, published in 2025 by the University of Illinois Press. What happened to freedom singing after Martin Luther King Jr. S assassination? This is the question that Stacks explores in the Resounding Revolution. He argues that the cultural myths around the civil rights move from 1954 to 1968, which are partially supported by the appeal of freedom songs, has at times hindered and inspired later activists as they grappled with the shadow of a simplistic and sanitized memory of what it takes to create political change. In a wide ranging book, he theorizes the difference between freedom songs and freedom singing, contemplates the role of nostalgia and political advocacy, investigates the work of one of the movement's great singers, Bernice Johnson Regan, after 1968, and explains how the media and crucial musical figures shaped and sometimes complicated the collective memory of the civil rights movement and its music. He also provides readers with short vignettes that illuminate how freedom singing continues to be a potent source of Political activism in 21st century Civil rights struggles. Thank you so much for joining me, Stephen.
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Thank you very much for having me, Kristin.
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So how did you come to this topic?
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Well, it's kind of a long story because it started in graduate school, but I usually point to a couple of kind of defining moments that, that shaped my, my consciousness, my thinking about, about the topic. And one of them was I knew I wanted to talk about. I do research into singing and political protest. And the civil rights movement is an obvious, you know, choice versus the American context. But I was kind of, you know, just poking around watching videos on YouTube back in 2014 or so, 2015 maybe, and came across this video of a congressional celebration of, of the Civil Rights Act, I believe. And they were singing We Shall Overcome. And kind of the congressional leadership at the time was up doing the, the arms crossed over the body thing. And they, they all look very different, like they're having very different experiences while they're singing. And then there's this kind of elaborate U.S. army chorus led choral arrangement. And just the vibe of the video struck me as really strange. And so I started thinking, okay, clearly this song doesn't mean the same thing to the people who are singing it. It doesn't mean the same thing that it meant during the civil rights movement. And that video just kind of piqued my Interest and started me down the path of what happened to, to this music after the movement. And then the, the second story that I usually tell is that in 2017, after the, in the first Trump administration, after Donald Trump was first inaugurated and what was then called the Muslim ban went into effect, I found myself at rdu, which is our airport here in Raleigh, and amongst thousands of people who had showed up to protest that. That ban and was just struck by how. By the sonic environment of it. There was singing, there was drumming, there was chanting that it was just a. It's a very kind of musical experience. And to me, you know, what, what I. The narratives that I had absorbed about singing in protest were more along the lines of the fact that it was an old fashioned way of doing musical protest, of doing protest. And so being in that space reminded me that, oh no, I mean, there's clearly more life here than I have heard being discussed, at least in a really kind of focused way on freedom singing. So those two experiences are kind of what really crystallized my thinking and kind of brought me into the topic.
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Just so we're sort of all on the same page as we start this discussion, can you just go through what you see as the collective memory of the civil rights movement now and what you see as the major problems or major distortions that that collective memory circulates?
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Sure. So I use the term consensus. I use some different terms for memory studies in the book. But what I would say is the consensus memory of the civil rights movement, US Culture, it tends to start, the narrative tends to begin with the Montgomery bus boycott, which already gives you a clue as to who that consensus memory focuses on, which is. Is Martin Luther King Jr. And his activism or activism that is kind of looks like the kinds of activism that King advocated for. And then that narrative kind of goes through the. The watershed moments that most of us are taught in middle school or so if you go to public school in America, which would be your march on Washington, your Selma, the kind of watershed moments. And that narrative usually ends in the late 60s, sometimes, or between 1965 and 1968. And the way that the end of the civil rights movement is talked about is one of the major distortions I think, that. That I'm concerned with in the book. And so sometimes the. The demise of the civil rights movement is blamed on the new kind of what, what is narrated is new elements within the movement. So black power, the rise of black power, or the rise of. Of a group like the Black Panther Party, a kind of more radical, more Revolutionary politics leads to the disintegration of the civil rights coalition. That's one way of talking about the end of the movement that is that we frequently hear. And another one is just that it did what it set out to do, right? We had the Civil Rights act, we had the Voting Rights act, we had the Fair Housing act, and then King gets assassinated and that, you know, and then it's kind of like we see King as a martyr figure, but he did what he set out to do, quote unquote. And thank you to the civil rights movement for making everything great.
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Right.
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And then one of the things that historians have talked about is what happens in the 70s is actually really important 70s and 80s for our current understanding of the civil rights movement. It's during the 70s and 80s that the memory of the civil rights movement is being contested. Who is going to have control over that narrative is kind of being argued over. And what, what actually ends up happening is that the kind of American status quo establishment kind of wins that that fight in the, in terms of our official history and in the process the types of activism that, that really were happening throughout that period get kind of limited and sanitized, circumscribed to what I, what Peniel Joseph has called the good 1960s versus the bad 1960s. So like, you know, the Martin Luther King's non violent activism, the Southern church based movement that features these traditional freedom songs, that's the civil rights movement. That's the true civil rights movement, the one that we want to remember. And then you know, once things get kind of scary, scare quotes intended there in the, in the mid to late 60s, that's, you know, that's the kind of, that's the version of the civil rights movement or the black freedom movement more broadly that American memory tends to downplay or at least or villainize I would say. And so we get these, this kind of dichotomy of different versions of the movement and we have absorbed the good 1960s into our public memory as just another narrative of American progress. And so that's kind of where I wanted to hone in on with the book was like, okay, so the music plays a role in this memory making this kind of establishment of our consensus narrative because that version of the movement is so associated with certain songs with, with our memory of how music played a role in the civil rights movement.
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Yeah, and I think also as you point out in the book, the Bad 1960s, as you say, or the Bad 1970s, there's a perception that music wasn't Important at that point because you can't sing in a movement that's not as committed to non violence as it was, as the good 1960s were. Right. So it also plays into. It's like if there's no music, then it's the bad protest. Protest part.
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Yes, and we see that repeated. That line of thinking continues to be perpetuated. I quote, I have a quote from Robert Darden, who's a, who's a gospel and black music scholar at Baylor, who was reflecting on the, the George Floyd protests and basically repeating that exact same idea that, you know, when, when he realized that, that what was in his words, kind of, you know, unorganized rioting and mobs, when it became a movement is when they started, when he started to hear these songs. And that it's, it's the people who aren't singing that the police need to be worried about. And I think that's just inaccurate. There's, there was. Music was, was still important and central. And even singing, what happened in those kind of other arms of the movement that we tend not to associate with singing, it was, it was prevalent in those protests and mass meetings as well. And so it's, it's just not really a, an accurate depiction of, of how music remained important. There was critique of the types of singing that were happening as a way, as a proxy, you know, as a way to kind of argue about what the future direction of the movement should be. But we tend to overemphasize that distinction.
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So you talk also about what you call a 1968 lens that runs through the whole book. So what, what does that term mean?
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Yeah, so I wanted a way to. A framework, a way to talk about what tends to happen the way commentators tend to interpret acts of uprising in contemporary US Culture that rely on the sanitized memory of the civil rights movement and especially on this anxiety about the late 1960s and the potential for the movement to have gone a different way than our consensus memory says the civil rights movement went. And so the 1968 lens was my way to, you know, to keep 1968 as an important year in my thinking here, but also as a way to recall that that year was in particular was particularly violent. It was particularly unsettling for American society in a lot of ways. And I think that that anxiety still lives in our collective memory. And so the 1968 when lens was my way of describing how when an instance of uprising happens in our, in a contemporary social movement, contemporary freedom struggle, those in power, or those commenting on the event tend to feed that uprising through this limited, sanitized filter of this. Of the. Of this sanitized memory, the civil rights movement, and then use that as a way to kind of critique or handicap what is happening in contemporary social movements based on that memory. So it's like a filter. It's a way of interpreting contemporary events, relying on this memory of the end of the civil rights movement.
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Part of that sort of 1968 lens is also nostalgia, I guess, for the movement you talk about. So there's a sanitized version of the movement, but part of that is this nostalgia that the farther away you get, get from it, like, oh, those were the days when, you know, fill in the blank when you did protest. Right. Or whatever it was. And so you. Do you talk about the role of nostalgia for the movement, I think, both within an activist movement and also in folks who are on the outside looking at it. And you use them as. As an example of that. A really interesting case study in Warren County, North Carolina, in like, late 70s, early 80s. Can you just walk us through sort of the main themes of that, you know, what was going on in Warren county, but also the main things that you bring out in that case study?
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Sure, absolutely. Yeah. I wanted one of the chapters to focus on protest, obviously, because it's the context from which this singing emerges originally. And I wanted to answer the question of what happens to freedom singing in protest movements after 1968. And so Warren County, North Carolina, was my chosen historical case study. And it does demonstrate. I talk about two different kinds of nostalgia that I'll get to in a minute that are kind of operating in Warren County. But what happened is in 1978, a transformer company in Raleigh dumped a bunch of contaminated. They dumped a bunch of PCBs, which is a carcinogenic byproduct of what. Of the work that they were doing along the highway system in North Carolina. And when it was discovered what had happened, the state had to figure out, what do we do with all this soil that's been contaminated? It was spread across a remarkable area, like over 12 or 13 counties in rural North Carolina. So it was a kind of a statewide problem. And as governments are. Want to do, they. They chose a site for this potential landfill in the. One of the poorest and blackest counties in the state, which is Warren County. And I think they were not anticipating the amount of resistance that they faced in Warren County. And I talk in the. In the chapter about why some of the elements that. That I think led to that resistance mobilizing There was a unique combination of people and activists who happened to be in North Carolina and in Warren county in particular at that time. And so the community mobilized against this. They started with litigation, and when that failed to stop the landfill from going into effect, they started civil disobedience campaign. They called in organizers from the civil rights movement who were still alive and
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around
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Golden Frinks and Ben Chavis and people who were still active in civil rights organizing. And they did a six week civil disobedience campaign that, that ended with them laying down on the road to try to stop the trucks from going into the landfill and, and singing and, and music and. And freedom singing was a. A large part of, of that movement. And it's one of the things that the activists from that movement point to as a central part of what they were doing. And so I kind of in the chapter, talk about the different types of music and singing that were involved in that Warren county movement and talk about what I think is a counterproductive nostalgia and a productive nostalgia. And um, so I don't think nostalgia is always a bad thing. Um, but when it relies on, you know, our memories tend to. The edges, tend to blur. Right. Um, and so that's kind of what happens when we get nostalgic about things. And, and when contemporary activists become nostalgic for a movement that never really existed or for this good, this mythic, good 1960s in a way that then hampers their ability to act in the present, that's what I would consider to be a counterproductive nostalgia. So I talk about the singing of a new version of Kumbaya that happened in Warren county and how one of the problems that contemporary movements face, especially multiracial movements like what happened in Warren county was, is the problem of white participation in a singing tradition that arises from the black church and from black music. All corners of black music, as Bernice Johnson Regan would put it. And how in order for freedom Singing to, quote, unify this group of people whose comfort and whose identity and whose vision of what's happening is going to be prioritized and whose is going to be sublimated. And that. That tends to be the tension that arises when freedom singing is thought of as this great unifier is, well, who's being unified to whom, right? And another example that just pops into my mind that I use in the book is after the Mother Emanuel shootings in Charleston, there was a vigilante kind of memorial. And communications professor Chenjerai Kumanyika talks about being at that Memorial and then announcing that they're going to sing We Shall Overcome and having this distinct moment of being told to grasp the hand of your neighbor in this. In the SNCC style, and kind of reaching over and seeing the white woman next to him as a black man, experiencing that event very differently from her and thinking, you know, for whom is the singing of We Shall Ever Come going to provide some kind of solace in this moment? And he wasn't feeling that it was going to do that for him as much as it was going to do it for his neighbor in that moment. And so I think, you know, it's that kind of complicated negotiation that happens whenever these songs and this. This whenever singing becomes a prominent aspect of a contemporary movement is we have to negotiate both our relationship to the civil rights movement, which is the capital T movement in American history, and also these contemporary entanglements that. That we have now. You know, the kind of the history that feeds itself into that moment.
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And I also think something that you don't get into as much in the book because you can't talk about everything, but is that I. There are movement activists who are still alive today or have been, you know, or have just passed the last 10 or 15 years. I went to the SNCC 50th anniversary, you know, celebration in 2011, and there are a lot of activists who. That is the nostalgia about the movement to them, they talk about the music in just those terms. So it's not even just. It's activists themselves who. Who are remembering the movement in that way and remembering them, the music in that way, 50 years on or 40 years on or whatever. You know, it's certainly not just folks who weren't involved. It is certainly people who were involved also who. Who smooth out the edges of those problems as time goes by. Right?
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Certainly. Yeah. And I think, you know, there's a lot of great scholarship on what's sometimes called nostorative nostalgia, sometimes called. There's a scholar who talks about Afro nostalgia and the way that there can be a type of recalling of memory, even if it is simplified from the past, that propels action, you know, action in the present in a way that doesn't kind of erase the differences or doesn't kind of oversimplify the differences that are. That are happening in the present, but uses that memory, even if it's a simplified memory, to kind of push things forward. And then there's sometimes nostalgia that again, kind of flattens the. The history of. Of tension and struggle within social movements. And that's the kind that then expects that not to happen now, you know, when. When it's nostalgia for. Oh, you know, back in the movement, we never had disagreements. We just sang We Shall Overcome and everything was fine or, you know, that kind of stuff. That, again, that's not how it was. And those, you know, I'm sure at the SNCC 50th anniversary, those folk know that. Right. So when they're kind of having nostalgia for their activism in the movement, I don't think it includes a papering over of those tensions that were present within the movement coalition or the kind of racist white backlash to what they were doing at the time that people tend to forget that. You know, I think I talk about in the book that rather than the revolutionary side of the movement or rather than the movement accomplishing its goals, it's really the racist white backlash and the kind of violence of the US Government, really, against the Civil Rights movement activists. That. That ends, quote, unquote, the Civil Rights movement. That's a. That's a third explanation. Right. It said that there really. There's this whole other thing that's happening that the nostalgia tends to kind of whitewash.
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Yeah. Yeah. That was an interesting meeting because there was a lot of talk about the end of the movement and not the end of the movement, but, you know, that 1965, 68, 1970 period. And. And. And also the, like, deep divisions between sncc, between SNCC members, but also between SNCC and other people. And they taught it. But there was also a lot of talk of, like, at the end of the day, then you would sing a song and you would find, you know, that was like, how you. How you were able to work together the next day was you argued all day and then you sang and then you argued all the next day. But. But, you know what I mean? Like, so they weren't forgetting the arguments, but they also saw there were. There was a lot of talk about this mo. You know, there's. The only way to move forward is at some point you still have to work with these people until it just falls apart, you know, until it gets to be too much. But there was a lot of years where there's a lot of arguing, but they still work together the next day, you know, so.
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Right, right. And I think that actually that thought really speaks well to the point I want to make about Bernice Johnson Regan's activism in the book and how really what her. How she uses singing and music in her. Both her political work, but also in her Performance is as a way to build coalition. And that's kind of exactly what you're talking about, is that, you know, good coalitions know that they don't agree on everything and they, they refuse to sublimate things that are important to each member of the coalition, but they find a way to, to work together on the things that they can work together on. And I do think that freedom singing has been, has, has always been one of the ways that activists have, have said, have found a way to work together on the things they can. So in some senses, you know, it's not a pie in the sky harmony that is achieved through freedom singing, but there is a relationship that is developed in the moment of singing that can continue to exist, can, can work, can be productive despite difference or because of different, you know, kind of without ignoring difference at all. So I think that's exactly what you're kind of talking about. These, these SNCC activists remembering is how music is able to bridge those tensions and those differences for the activists and, and allow that coalition to continue even though the tensions are still there.
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Well, I'm glad you brought up Bernice Johnson Reagan. So if anyone who is interested in civil rights music is going to come across Bernice Johnson Reagan, and even if folks don't know her name, if you have heard civil rights singing from that period, you will have heard her voice. She has a very distinctive, like, incredible voice or head. She died a few years ago and she, she kept on with her activism and her musical activity long after. Let's put in scarecrows. The end of the civil rights movement. Right. And so you, you, you trace some of these activities, in particular her musical activities. She has a PhD in history, and she worked for the institution for many, many years. So she was doing a lot of history stuff too. But she had these very specific musical projects. And I think most people, if you know about Regan, know that she was a member of the SNCC Freedom Singers during the movement. And you might know that she was a founder of Honey in the Rock or Sweet Honey in the Rock, which is a great women's musical group. But her work in the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project is much less well known. I think, I think that project has been largely forgotten. And so I'd love for you to talk about that project in particular as part of Bernice Johnson Regan's long standing commitment to music and coalition building.
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Yes, absolutely. First, I would just say that if you are one of the people I ask my students every semester, how many have heard of Bernice Johnson Regan. And inevitably, usually none, maybe one person has every semester. And I mean, you know, young people are young people. Right. But I asked that question among adults too. And it's. I. I think she's one of the most criminally under known people in American music history. She had her brilliant mind and hands in so many things that happened over the course of the 20th century. And I think not enough people just know how important and how amazing she was. So I'm always, always love a chance to talk, talk about her and, and all the things she did. And so, yes, I, in the chapter I wanted to focus in on this period right after the Civil Rights movement, quote, unquote. Again, people in 1968 didn't think that it was the end of the Civil Rights movement. And this is only in hindsight that we have kind of put dates on it. And I do quibble with those dates in the book quite a bit, you know, is did the black freedom movement end or did it evolve or what. What happened? Right. But in that period, right, 1968 and following, I wanted to see what Bernice Johnson Regan was up to and how her musical activities could shed light on the ways that freedom singers, people who do freedom singing, were kind of evolving politically in that moment. And so I talk about this collaboration that she forged with a white folk singer named Ann Romaine. And that's the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project that you mentioned a minute ago. I wonder every time I talk about it, whether the name of it was part of its. Is part of the fact that it's not remembered because it's such a long name. It's hard to say, you know, Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, I abbreviated sfcrp, but even the acronym is is hard to remember. But it was a really fascinating musical project. So Anne Romaine was kind of one of these white folk singer activists who kind of white liberal folks who were involved in civil rights movement activism. And she was hooked up with Bernice Johnson Regan, kind of right, in that late 1960s period. And they both discovered that they had this love for, for singing and especially for Southern folk traditions, black and white, and how those can demonstrate the shared and the history of cultural exchange and kind of shared history and also like solidarity between people in the South. And so they developed this organization whose goal was to continue the work of the Civil Rights movement through music in the South. And they did that in a few different ways. But one of the ways was to take an integrated troupe of musicians, folk musicians, on tour through the South. And this is again still the late 60s. So it's, it's not really a time period that, that was a, you know, a given or a safe thing to do. It was still a pretty radical thing to do. And they were in danger many times. And then that the. The SFCRP kind of evolves into doing different kinds of things. But I see it as an example of. And Bernice Johnson Regan and Anne Romaine had a. An interesting relationship. They, they had this shared passion. But Bernice Johnson Regan was forever challenging Ann Romijn to live up to her ideals and to. Kept pushing her politically beyond where she started because of that relationship. And so I see that as a great example of what I call musical coalition politics. And we just talked about what coalition politics kind of is. But it's also not just a, it's. It's a. An academically theorized term among feminist scholars especially. And Bernice Johnson Regan was kind of moving in those circles as well during, during the. The time. The. The time. But before it starts getting. Starts coming out in academic work, I see Bernice Johnson Regan and Anne Romaine doing it in their musical activities together. And so one of the examples that I talk about in the book that I think is one of the most poignant examples of their collaborations is this record that they issued about Joanne Little. And Joanne Little was a woman, a black woman who was in prison in 1974. Three oh God, I'm gonna check my date there, I think 1974. And she was attacked by a prison guard in Raleigh and who attempted to rape her. And in the process of that attack she killed the prison guard in self defense and fled the prison, was able to escape and was on the run for a little bit, little while. And when she was recaptured this, the state charged her with first degree murder, which is unbelievable. And it of course it enraged activists around the country and they really rally behind Joanne Little. And in response to that, in musical response to that, Bernice Johnson Regan and Ann Romijn issued this record. On one side of the record was Bernice Johnson Regan's song Joanne Little, which she wrote inspired by Joanne's story. And it is in her kind of spiritual inflected style that it's acapella with some, some kind of hand percussion and has all the elements of Regan's voice and freedom singing in it. And then Anne Romaine sings a song called on the Line that is in this kind of like honky tonk classic country style. That was her style. And I see this to the two sides of this record as them Embracing this idea that we can come to struggle together. We can neither of us have to not be who we are. In fact, we embrace who we are and the traditions that we bring to this fight. But we find common ground and we fight together where we can. And so I think that. And the other great thing about the Joanne Little example is that kind of calls into question the dichotomies that, that are a part of that false memory of the civil rights movement. Bernice Johnson Regan was in the center of the non violent act, you know, activism of SNCC as a member of the founding member of the Freedom Singers. She was also in groups like the Harambee Singers that were singing at all the black power gatherings in the late 60s. And she is defending Joanne Little's self defense killing of this prison guard vigorously. And so I think the Joanne Little example is one that refuses to abide by the binaries that we have set up about our memories of the civil rights movement. So it's just a really powerful example of their work together in that period following the movement.
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But it's also an example, and I think you do this so well, both in the Warren county example and then talking about Bernice Johnson Regan of how difficult these multiracial coalitions are and how, you know, in the end, you know, Romaine and Regan, that relationship breaks down. And in Warren county you trace how at different points over the, you know, succeeding years after 1982, when the problems with this ongoing environmental crisis in Warren county come up, that coalition changes, breaks, reforms itself, you know, and it's, it is, it's another counter example of this idea that the, that the multiracial coalition and the civil rights movement was without problems and you know, without power struggles and without all of those things. But of course it was had all of those things, as do all of the subsequent coalitions like this.
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Right, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because that's, you know, one of the things that I want to really emphasize is that we tend to, this is part of the 1968 lens idea, right. Is that we tend to interpret things that happen in the present through these mis memories and, and then judge them by that. So like when a coalition breaks down, say between Bernice Johnson Regan and Anne Romaine, because yes, eventually Regan got upset enough with some of the things that Romaine did that she said, you know what? You know, I can't be involved in this anymore. And the same again, you, you mentioned the Warren county coalition has, they had, there are a lot of ongoing, ongoing to this day, actually tensions between the activists who were around in. In 1982 in Warren county and, And the Path forward, and it does kind of break their coalition up. But that those tensions are. Are inherent to the work, and they're not something to be. They're not aberrations, I guess, is my point. And. And we tend to, through this kind of counterproductive nostalgia about the civil rights movement, we tend to read them as aberration rather than as a normal part of. Of freedom struggle that they are. And so. And that. That hampers our ability to build these coalitions and to keep them active. Is this kind of a judgment that we place on when the tension comes up that, oh, this is not how it's supposed to be? Well, of course, this is how it has always been. That's. That's a part. That's part and parcel of doing that type of organizing and that type of work is you. You have to have the ability to have these tensions and these disagreements, to hold them and to continue doing the work if you are able to. And it's also okay to step away from it if you need to. As Bernice Johnson Regan shows us, that is also an option, but it's not something to be denigrated and blamed, to assign blame to.
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I have more questions that I want to ask, but I feel like I have to stop for a moment and make sure that we define what you mean by freedom singing and freedom song. Right. Because I mentioned that in the intro, and then we sort of. We keep using those words. But you. Have you really sort of theorized that freedom singing is something separate from singing freedom songs? So can you. Can you talk about that a little bit?
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Yeah, absolutely. That's the. The chapter on that is kind of speaking to my musicological community more and more, maybe more than, you know, the general public. But the idea is that since the civil rights movement. Freedom songs. Freedom song has become a, like a circumcised, circumscribed genre of. Of music, that we have a canon of freedom songs from that time period that are kind of held up in the same way that we have canons of. In other genres. Right. And other cultural spaces. And when people say freedom song, they tend to mean those traditional freedom songs that have been canonized from the civil rights movement. And my point in moving from that discussion to freedom singing, which I define as in the terms of Christopher Small, who talks about musicing as an activity, as a process or a practice, not as an object, that is that we, when we focus on the Songs themselves. We. We tend to miss the ongoing act of freedom singing. So. And then we tend to reinforce this narrative that freedom songs died out. But really what happens is that if we look at freedom singing, if we look at people who are making music and, and using their voices in conversation with the black freedom movement or with ongoing freedom struggles, then we see that it continues. And we can analyze how that activity of singing continues to be really vital and important, an important site for negotiation and for movement building in all the years intervening since 1968. And so for me, freedom singing is any act of. I. I do narrow it to vocal musicing. In the book, I'm really focused on singing. That's my wheelhouse, right? That's. That's what I'm interested in. But, you know, one could also write a whole nother book on instrumental music that. That was, you know, an ongoing and important part of black freedom struggle. And many people have. But I think that vocal musicing that is in relationship to the ongoing black freedom struggle is what I mean by freedom singing. So it's related to freedom song as a. As a genre, but it's. It really shifts the emphasis away from the songs as kind of abstract objects to the act of singing within the. Within movement, within ongoing social movement. New Year, New Me. Cute, but how about New Year, new money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save, and get matched with credit card offers giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're gonna crush. Start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on fico's great model. Offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check, which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details. Experian.
- [41:52]
B
So you mentioned that freedom songs. There is a canon of freedom Songs. And I think the people most responsible for creating that canon are Guy in Candy Carawan. And full disclosure, I wrote a master's thesis about that. You know that that was one of the things I talked about, which you have clearly read because you use it as a source for in your book. So I would love to talk about Guy, Candy Karawan and also Lomax, their friend. And tell us what you have to say about. I will say for the folks listening, Guy and Candy Karawan are white. Guy Karawan was a folk singer about 10 years older than his wife Candy, and she joined his activism in the civil rights movement after they got married in 1960. But he had been involved prior to that as she was, but he was much older, so he'd been been there longer and, and they were, they were an important part of the music of the movement. But, and so take it away. Tell us about, about those folks.
- [42:58]
A
Sure. Yeah. So I, I mean I kind of consider the Carawans and Alan Lomax and the, the other people that I talk about in this chapter as all a part of this stream of white progressives who are concerned with ongoing issues of social justice, who want, who are concerned with issues of freedom for, for all kinds of people. And you can think of them in the same vein as, as your Pete Seegers, your Woody Guthrie's, you know, that this, this is the stream of, of people that we're talking about. And also in terms of those white activists, especially younger people who were very impressed by civil rights movement activism and who joined in solidad think about freedom and people who kind of came down from these white northern institutions to join in civil rights activism, it's that, it's that those folks who we're talking about. And so whenever I talk about the Carillons and Lomax, I always, I always want to emphasize that two things can be true at once. That they did incredible work, that very valuable work, very ethically and morally important work. And without their work we wouldn't, I wouldn't even have the archives that I had to do my book. So it's, it's extremely valuable work. And at the same time we can also not view it with rose colored glasses. We can, we can look at their work and see how their, their biases as all of us have influenced the work that they did. How their whiteness may have limited their ability to kind of accomplish the aims that we know they had. Right. Their good intentions aside, we have to evaluate our history through these lenses that we have available to us now. And so I don't want my critique of them to diminish the fact that their work was extremely valuable and good work. Right. I mean without, without Guy Carowan teaching We Shall Overcome to the, to the original meeting of SNCC at Shaw University in Raleigh. Like would We Shall Overcome have become the international song of, of freedom struggle? Probably not. So like even that data point alone is, is interesting to, to consider. Right. His role in just that, that one moment. So yeah, I always like to preface talking about them with that, that I think we can take both things at once. And so, but what I, what I do write in the chapter is that they especially the Carowinds but Lomax a little bit too, and some others were really, because they were responsible for a lot of the collection of recording and collection of the songs that were happening. They were the primary documenters. And Lomax. This is Lomax's thing, right? He went around collecting music, folk music all over the country. So this fits right with his whole project. And so they were doing a lot of the collecting and the presenting of the music of the civil rights movement that by nature, gave them a really prominent role in shaping what of this music we remember, how it enters our public memory, how it is canonized, what gets left out. So they had a lot of power to. In shaping. And historically, we can trace how they shaped which songs become the freedom songs. And what I'm concerned with in that history is when that becomes something that reinforces this kind of faulty memory of the civil rights movement that I'm talking about throughout the book. So there is a particular quote that I think illustrates this from the preface to one of the Carowinds collections of freedom songs, where they say. And I say they because as you talk about in your thesis, Candy was really, you know, kind of the. The force behind the. The throne, as it were. And although Guy was the upfront figure who gets acknowledged more than Candy, Candy was really pivotal to a lot of the writings and things that had Guy's name on them. So, anyways, I try to say they or be specific about which one of the Carawinds I'm talking about. But in that preface, they say that the Selma march was one of the last marches with a hopeful spirit. And after that, things go away from singing and turn into an angrier turn to an angrier mood. I'm quoting that from memory. So it's close. And in that quote, you can kind of see this ideology developing of the decline of the movement and how it's being associated with what type of music making is happening. And Guy and Candy Caroline were also. They were very taken by and struck by black folk traditions. And that is the. That is the music that they thought ought to be central to black activism in the. In the 60s. And so they were really not just documenting, but also arguing for a certain type of black music over others as what should be central to their struggle. And a great example of that is their long time that they spent on John's island. And then the kind of the ways that they talked about that experience. And then Lomax and Guy Carawan exchange correspondence about one of the documentary albums they produced and talk about how, you know, jazz is the faint echoes of what can be heard on this, this folk, these folk traditions. And I, I talk about that album. Freedom in the Air is the one I'm, I'm talking about where I went and, and listened to the, the archival recordings that Gaia collected. So there's more music than obviously than what ends up on the album, which is true of every album. But what, what was left out, what was left on the cutting room floor for that album is instructive. Right? There's a couple of songs in particular where you can see the shaping of what Guy and Lomax thought was the most important music. Where some things got cut that were versions that the students were singing of do like kind of popular music of their day or Bernice Johnson Regan singing a very gospel y kind of modern gospel version of a hymn. Those are the types of things that they didn't include in the album in favor of the more traditional lined out hymn singing and kind of spiritual tradition songs that the ones they wanted to emphasize. And so again, I'm extremely grateful for the Carowans and for Lomax and for the fact that we have this music in these recordings. And I also agree with him that singing is incredible and incredibly important. I just don't want to hold it up in exclusion of the other types of music that were also important to activists at the time because I think that gives us a limited understanding of the movement itself and also it has impacts on. On the present that I. That I think are sometimes harmful.
- [50:51]
B
So the Carawans didn't just create songbooks that were based on their recordings and then lots of recordings, some of which Candy had something to do with, most of which Guy was really more of recording stuff. But they also were the organizers of a bunch of workshops. And I, and I think the workshops in some ways when you. When the songbooks become the canon, because there's music in them and so people can look at the songbooks and like, oh, this is the canon. Here are these songbooks. But within the movement they were teaching those songs in the songbooks and they were bringing in folk musicians, black folk musicians to sing those songs and to talk to activists and sort of about the importance of. Of a particular type of black folk culture. So, so. And that I think helps to consolidate the canonization that also happens in the song books. You see what I mean? Like, you can't have the other.
- [51:47]
A
Yes, sure. And like, yeah, you know, I mentioned the moment where Guy teaches. We shall ever come to the, you know, to the original meeting of sncc but he continue. He continue that model in the workshops where he's bringing as many central activists of the civil rights, black freedom movement as he can to these workshops and kind of reinforcing this idea of what type of music becomes the central music, or he wants to be the central music of the movement ongoing. And again, I say he is. And he's not the only one who thinks this. It's just his role is a prominent one. Right. And so you're absolutely right that those workshops are not as obvious, they're not as public as the songbooks and the recordings that get released are, but they certainly played a really pivotal role in disseminating the canon of Freedom Song among those who were going around doing the teaching in their local communities. Right. So it's like a centralized way to really heavily influence what happens around the country, really, because every. All the activists are coming to Highlander. Right. They're all coming to these places and learning and going back out to their communities. And so by. By having those centralized workshops, it really broadens the influence, for sure.
- [53:14]
B
Yeah. Yeah. And I think the other thing that. That you talk about a little bit with someone like the Carawans and the narrative of the late 60s was sort of the disintegration of the movement and the singing stopped and all of that stuff is it's also a period when people like that, white people, like the Carowinds, start to feel unwelcome in a lot of spaces in the movement. Like, this is a time when that multiracial coalition starts to break down. And I think one of the reasons I talk about it that way is their absolute. Their grief over losing this community of people that was so important to them. And they channeled their activism into white communities for a while. Like, they were working with Kentucky coal miners. And. But when. When I talked to Candy in 2011, she was still mourning the loss of that community. Like, that was. That was a present loss for her. And I think that when you look at who wrote the history of the movement among activists, there's Bernice Johnson Reagan, who writes it a very different way, but a lot because of, like, the white supremacy of the publishing industry. A lot of the first memoirs that come out are by white activists, which, be sure, people at SNCC realized, like. And we're not so happy about that, but were by white activists. And they tell this history of this disintegration of the moon, in part because for them, it did disintegrate. Right? They did. They weren't part of it. Right. For you know, for a while. And I think there's. There's a story to tell about. About that grief being part of why that story happens.
- [54:58]
A
Absolutely. I think that's a. That's a great point, honestly, you talking about. That's making me want to go back to the. Go back and, you know, investigate that more. But I. I definitely sense that grief among the white activists who really. I mean, they really bought in and to the vision that was being cast in those multiracial coalitions that were a part of the. Of the movement. And it's not to say that the black activists did not. It's just that there came a point where the tensions between competing visions of what to do next became too much to bear. And the folks who had done enough of the bearing at that time were the black activists. Right. So it was like, we can no longer experience the harm of this relationship for you. And that doesn't diminish, though, the. The fact that those white activists were doing their best, quote, unquote. They. They. They wanted to still be a part of that. And so I think you're absolutely right to point out that it's just the historical problem is that their voices were privileged.
- [56:06]
B
Right.
- [56:07]
A
And their voices shape the narrative to an outsized. In an outsized way. Until very recently, you know, those were our histories of the movement, and they influenced not just collective understanding, but all the textbooks that we use to teach our kids about the civil rights movement were influenced by those same ideas that were coming from. And again, the grief is real. There's nothing wrong with the feeling of the grief. It's just that that narrative is incomplete. And that's the narrative that gets taught for several decades.
- [56:43]
B
Yeah. And also a narrative that, as you say, if it's being told by white people and they are not part of the movement now, of course, it's ended as far as they're concerned. And if the white memory of the move is the privileged one in the sort of memoir space, in the interview space, and all of that, that then becomes replicated in the textbooks. Right. It's like, you know, that. That these structures of white supremacy are so deeply embedded in how history is remembered. You can see that in the Lost Cause. You can see that in founding generation, like all these big collective memories about America are all, you know, are. Are. Are created through the white lens.
- [57:30]
A
Yes. And it's interesting that you say that, because I'm just thinking again about the activists in Warren county, and that exact same thing is repeated in their experience as well, where, like, the White activists who were central to that movement really felt that they were reviving the. The civil rights movement of old. Right. This is how it was supposed to be. I think, you know, my sense of the black activists is that they didn't think of it as disconnected at all from. I mean, it was only 10 years ago. Right. It's not like this is just another instance of our ongoing experience of struggling for freedom in this country. And then when it breaks down, there is that same grief that you can sense among the white activists as they talk about how this is not the way they hoped it would go. And then, you know, I think the black activists, it's like, yeah, you know, that's how it happens. So there's this disconnect of experience. And you're. You're right to point out that, like, for the. For the activists who were writing this early history, the movement did end, because for them, it did. It's their. Their experience of it. But. Yeah, exactly. When we don't include the voices of the black activists who are leading the black freedom movement, then we. We internalize a narrative that isn't the whole truth.
- [58:52]
B
Yeah. Well, we need to sort of wrap up this great discussion, and I want to wrap it up with one last question. So you open each chapter with these little vignettes. They're not very long. That highlight civil rights activism in the 2010s, mostly. And if this book had finished, you know, where it's going to come out in 2028 instead of 2025, I have no doubt that one of the things you would talk about is the ICE out movement that has started in response to the oppression and violence against immigrants, particularly perpetuated by ICE and the Customs Border Patrol. And they have something called the Singing Resistance as part of that. So can you sort of maybe take this time to talk about, like, how you see this activism, I don't know, continuing in the very near, you know, right now or last 10 years?
- [59:58]
A
Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that has struck me throughout the process of getting the book through to publication is, you know, I keep wanting the book to not be relevant anymore, but it continues to be relevant, you know, frequently. And one of those instances has been the. The resistance to ICE occupations that have. That have happened very recently. And in fact, I would say that I. I mentioned in the book that I have sung Bernice Johnson Regan's Ella's Song outside of an ICE facility, detention facility back in the first Trump administration. So I was already attuned to the fact that this tradition was moving into that space. And so to watch what has happened in Minneapolis, especially in the. In the last couple of months, has been both as a. As intellectually as a scholar, has been fascinating, has been as a human, has been both, you know, horrifying but also inspiring. And, you know, I sat and watched hours of. Of social media videos of what was coming out of Minneapolis because I was so struck by how singing was becoming a feature of that resistance. And so I think it just, to me, highlights the point I was trying to make with the contemporary vignettes throughout the book, which is that freedom singing is not dead. It remains an active part of freedom struggles in our context. And if we can get outside of our kind of oversimplified memory of the civil rights movement, then I think we will be much more better positioned to understand how music is working in our contemporary movement and how it might be, you know, signaling to us a different way, a different way of living together now.
- [61:51]
B
So this is a great book. As you said, it's based upon work you started doing in grad school. So now that it's out, obviously you could just keep writing this book if you wanted to, because, as you say, it is as relevant today as it was the moment that it was published. But what are you working on right now?
- [62:12]
A
Yeah, yeah. So I. Although this book was about the black freedom movement, I'm actually a Lumbee Native American from North Carolina. And I have my have biting interest in race and music and identity and politics, as the book demonstrates. But I'm really moving into the space of Native music and identity with my next. I actually have two kind of things going simultaneously. One is I'm examining the history of Sonic Red Face in the US and how Native people have been represented, starting from the kind of minstrel era, but moving forward into various spaces. And also how Native musicians have resisted, both collaborated and resisted Sonic Redface. And then I'm also interested in Native and black kind of musical exchange and collaboration, and mostly in the popular music sphere. So I've been doing a lot of interviewing with Native musicians and such to kind of think about. I think I'm thinking those two things separately right now, but we'll see what happens. But that's. That's where I'm at.
- [63:24]
B
Well, that sounds fascinating, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of all of that research. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Kristin Turner and I have been talking to Stephen Stacks about his book, the Resounding Revolution, freedom song after 1968, published in 2025 by the University of Illinois Press thank you so much.
- [63:45]
A
Thank. You.
- [63:59]
B
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