The Freedom Singers

From a few years ago. Riffing on a picture, high on my horse.

Extrapolating the Freedom Singers

Iconic. A liberal wet dream.
Joan Baez’s ‘look at me, ma’ moment.
The photograph that fills a thousand
Books about the Sixties,
The Civil Rights Movement,
Folk music.
The books may change,
But the caption is always the same:
“‘We Shall Overcome’ finale at the Newport Folk Festival,
July 26, 1963. Left to Right: Peter, Paul, and Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan,
The Freedom Singers, Pete Seeger, and Theodore Bikel.”

Peter, Mary, and Paul, actually, or as one wag put it,
Two rabbis and a hooker.
The trio responsible for more PBS phone-in pledges
Than even John Tesh.
Joan Baez, the Forrest Gump of righteousness.
Bob Dylan, so earnest in this proletariat mask
As all his masks. Look at those clothes!
That year, Bob wielded a bullwhip backstage
“I flip people’s cigarettes out of their mouths with it.
That’s what I do, man.”
Two years later he’d wield a Fender Strat and say,
“Folk singing is a bunch of fat people.”
The Freedom Singers.
Pete Seeger, holy untouchable, right?
Two years later he’d threaten to wield an axe
To cut the power to Bob’s Fender Strat.
Theodore Bikel. Who? Usually cropped out of this photo, that’s who.
But, go back.
The Freedom Singers.
The Freedom Singers.
The Freedom Singers.
The Freedom Singers.
In every book’s caption
That’s who they are,
The Freedom Singers.
Just. Only.
Can you hear the irony
Once the wind of opportunism stops blowing?

The Freedom Singers, left to right:
Bernice Johnson, her future husband Cordell Hull Reagon,
Charles Neblett, Rutha Harris.
The Freedom Singers formed in 1962
To raise money for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
And to spread the bad news of the South and the good news
Of civil disobedience through song.
100,000 miles covered in a station wagon in one year.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, expelled from Albany State College in Georgia
For her civil rights work. Later she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock
And became a history professor at American University and a curator
At the Smithsonian.
Cordell Hull Reagon, longtime civil rights activist, murdered 1996.
Charles Neblett, first black magistrate elected from his county in Kentucky.
Longtime activist.
Rutha Harris: a high school teacher and leader of the New Freedom Singers.

The Freedom Singers, still working for civil rights,
Ignorant of the fact that the movement ended years ago,
For some, perhaps, just after this photograph was developed.

The Freedom Singers-Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round

And the only vintage film of The Freedom Singers I could find, backing Bob.