A Service by The Reverend Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, April 29, 2012
“Rhythm Saved the World”
According
to Pops Armstrong, rhythm has played a part in all justice movements, going
back to Joshua’s trumpet at Jericho.
In honor of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival this weekend, this service
pulls some hymns out of our UU hymnals and looks at how they came to be written
during what great social justice movement
in history.
Some
of what you learn today you might already know, but other information may be
new to you. Either way, knowing
how these songs were first used and what they originally meant will enrich our
experience of them. We on the
Worship Team hope you enjoy this service and that it sends you off to Jazz Fest in the right spirit. (And if you’re not going to Jazz Fest
today, that it gives you a great musical feeling anyway.)
“Bread and Roses”
The slogan "Bread and Roses" originated in a poem of that name by James Oppenheim,
published in The American
Magazine in December 1911, which attributed it to
"the women in the West." It is commonly associated with a textile strike
in Lawrence,
Massachusetts
during January–March 1912, now often known as the "Bread and Roses
strike".
The 1912 Lawrence Textile
Strike, which united dozens of immigrant communities
under the leadership of the Industrial Workers
of the World, was led to a large extent by women. The
popular mythology of the strike includes signs being carried by women reading "We
want bread, but we want roses, too!", though the image is probably
ahistorical.
A 1915 labor anthology, The Cry for
Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest by Upton Sinclair,
is the first known source to attribute the phrase to the Lawrence strikers. A republication of Oppenheim's poem in
1912, following the strike, attributed it to "Chicago Women Trade
Unionists". To circumvent an injunction against loitering in front of the
mills, the strikers formed the first moving picket line
in the US.[3][4]
The strike was settled on March 14, 1912 on
terms generally favorable to the workers. The workers won pay increases,
time-and-a-quarter pay for overtime, and a promise of no discrimination against
strikers.
The slogan appeals for both fair wages
and dignified conditions.
“Spirit of Life”
As a UU World magazine article put it
back in 2007, ‘Spirit of Life” holds a unique place in the spiritual lives of
UUs around the world. In
six short lines “Spirit of Life” touches so much that is central to our
faith—compassion, justice, community, freedom, reverence for nature, and the
mystery of life. It finds the common ground held by humanists and theists,
pagans and Christians, Buddhists and Jews, gay and straight among us.
Written in the early 1980’s, by
feminist and UU sympathizer Carolyn McDade, it was inspired by a late-night
meeting at a college over solidarity with oppressed people in Central
America. She scribbled the words
and a simple melody line on a piece of paper, and gave copies of it to be used
in mimeographed songbooks for women’s groups and groups working for justice. It circulated that way for years, and
in the early ‘90’s, the UU Hymnbook Commission asked permission to include it
in what we know now as the gray hymnal.
At First, McDade didn’t want it to be printed as a hymn, because she
didn’t think of it as a hymn. But
the commission members told her that if “Spirit of Life” was not in the new
hymnal, they feared they would all be killed by angry UUs!
She relented and it was enshrined as #123, perhaps the best-known and
most beloved of all UU songs.
“We Shall Overcome”
“We Shall Overcome” began its life
as an early gospel, originally called “I’ll Overcome Someday,” written by African-American
composer Charles Albert Tindley
in 1901. It underwent a slight
transformation in lyrics at the famous training school for labor and civil
rights activists, Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, where my
father trained before World War II and where Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King,
Jr. later attended. At Highlander,
Zilphia Horton,
wife of Highlander co-founder Myles Horton, who was serving as Highlander’s music
director (don’t you find it interesting that a social justice training center
had to have a music director?), reworked the hymn for use by organizers, with
help from Highlander alum Pete Seeger
and others. It was
published in 1947 as “We Will Overcome” by Pete Seeger’s People's Songs.
The song was
taught to countless organizers, who brought the song to
countless other people. The Highlander version was first recorded by folk singer Joe Glazer,
in 1950. It quickly became the civil
rights movement's unofficial anthem.
There is a story that is told about a
Unitarian summer camp at Highlander that was raided late one night by the
Tennessee State Police. As the
frightened youth and their counselors were rousted from their tents in the dark
by angry state troupers, the story goes, one Unitarian girl began to quietly
sing, “We are not afraid” and all the campers and the adult chaperones took it
up. And that is how that stanza
came to be part of “We Shall Overcome.”
I do not know if that story is completely true. I know there were Unitarian summer
camps at Highlander, and I know that one night they were raided by state
police. I don’t know if a
Unitarian girl began to sing – but I like to think that she did.
One of the most moving times I shared
this song was during my 1998 trip to
India with the UUA Holdeen India Program, where a group of UUs took
turns singing with a group of untouchable and lower caste workers organized by a
Holdeen partner organization. The
UUs sang in English; the workers and organizers sang in Hindi, Marati, and
Urdu, and I felt our group surrounded by a mighty cloud of witnesses of those justice-seekers who had sung the song before us and were spiritually singing it with us in the present. It was a powerful moment.
“Amazing Grace”
"Amazing Grace" is a Christian hymn
with lyrics written by Englishman John Newton
(1725–1807), published in 1779. With a message that forgiveness and redemption
are possible regardless of the sins people commit and that the soul can be
delivered from despair through the mercy of God, "Amazing Grace" is
one of the most recognizable and most famous songs in the English-speaking
world.
Newton wrote the words from personal
experience. He grew up without any particular religious conviction but his
life's path was formed by a variety of twists and coincidences that were often
put into motion by his recalcitrant insubordination. He was pressed
into the Royal Navy
and became a sailor, eventually participating in the slave trade. One night a
terrible storm battered his vessel so severely that he became frightened enough
to call out to God for mercy, a moment that marked the beginning of his
spiritual conversion. His career in slave trading lasted a few years more until
he quit going to sea altogether and began studying theology.
Ordained in the Church of England
in 1764, Newton became a pastor in Buckinghamshire, where he
began to write hymns with poet William Cowper.
"Amazing Grace" was written to illustrate a sermon on New Year's Day
of 1773. It is unknown if there was any music accompanying the verses, and it
may have been chanted by the congregation without music. It has been associated
with more than 20 melodies, but in 1835 it was joined to a tune named "New
Britain" to which it is most frequently sung today. It can also be
sung to be the tune of “House of the Rising Sun,” as First Church has done many times in the past.
“I Heard the Bells”
"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" is a strange hybrid – it
is an anti-war Christmas carol. The original poem was written in 1864
by American poet and Unitarian Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow during the Civil War. The song tells of the
narrator's despair, upon hearing Christmas bells, that "hate is strong and
mocks the song of peace on earth, to all good will" and concludes with the
bells carrying renewed hope for peace among humankind.
Longfellow's oldest son Charles joined
the Union army without informing his father. Longfellow found out by a letter dated March 14, 1863, after
Charles had already left. In November,
Charles was severely wounded in Virginia. Already grieving the recent loss of his
wife Frances, Longfellow was inspired to write "I Heard the Bells" on
Christmas Day in 1864. It was not
until 1872 that the poem is known to have been set to music.
It is not Christmas, but our country is
at war yet again, and we need all the encouragement we can get toward hope for
peace on earth, good will to all.
“We Are a Gentle, Angry
People”
Activist singer-songwriter Holly Near is
the author of this song, listed on her albums as “Singing for Our Lives.” She wrote the song in 1978, immediately
after the horrific hate-crime killings of San Francisco Mayor George Mosconi and Supervisor
Harvey Milk. Since then, it has
been translated into many languages, new verses have been added, and it has
been sung an uncountable protests and rallies.
“Steal Away”
Many if not most of what we now know as
African-American spirituals had more than one purpose. Of course, they are what they seem to
be – religious songs, derived from hymns taught by slave masters or
missionaries, based on stories and passages in the Bible. But the songs also carried coded hidden
messages about escaping to freedom, such as “Follow the Drinking Gourd” to follow the stars of the Big Dipper to freedom, and
“Steal Away” and “Wade in the Water” to avoid the bloodhounds, and disguised gibes at slave holders, such
as “Everybody Talkin’ ‘Bout Heaven Ain’t Going There” and “Let My People
Go.”
Under the guise of religious
services and entertainment, the enslaved people were able to send each other
signals about reaching freedom and what guides to look for. They were empowering songs of hope and
self-liberation in a time of despair and enslavement.
“Siyahamba”/”We Are Marching in the Light of God”
"Siyahamba" originated in South Africa,
originally composed around 1950 by Andries van Tonder, an elder of Afrikaans
Christian denomination; it was sung in this version in Afrikaans.
It was later translated into Zulu by Thabo Mkize,
sometime during the 1960’s. After
that, it was used defiantly and joyously for anti-apartheid protests.
In the late 1970’s, a Swedish choral
group heard the song being sung by a girls’ school in Natal. The choral director recorded the song
and transcribed it, and from there, “Siyahamba” went around the world.
It has been translated into many
languages, and several denominations, including ours, have a version in their
hymnals. It is also used in
schools internationally.
The first time I heard it sung at UUA General Assembly, it brought tears to my
eyes. Let’s sing it with feeling,
and put our bodies into it.
“If I Had a Hammer”
Pete Seeger
and Lee Hays
co-wrote the song in honor of Progressive political and social movements in
1949, and first performed it publicly on June 3, 1949 in New York City at a
testimonial dinner for the leaders of the Communist Party of
the United States, who were then on trial in federal
court, charged with violating the Smith Act
by advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. I guess you can figure why it didn’t
become a big hit at that time and in that context.
In 1962, the song was covered by Peter,
Paul and Mary and became a Top 10
hit. It has since been recorded by
dozens of other artists, in several languages. To many people, it has become divorced from its origin as a
protest/justice song, but remember the next time you sing it that it really is
“the hammer of justice, the bell of freedom, and the song about the love
between my brothers and my sisters all over this land.”
