Does Music Matter?
The short answer is, yes. Now I must confess, the title of this article is slightly deceiving: the question explored here is not whether music matters so much as why music matters. The answer to that question is as complicated as one might expect.
Stretching back as far as forty-two thousand years ago (based on the carbon dating of a prehistoric flute) humans have created music, have used the fusion of melody and morpheme to interact with their milieu. One of the essential functions of this art form — the defining characteristic of this interaction — is the preservation and transmission of memory on the societal level.
Some of the earliest works in our cannon — e.g. the Iliad and the Anabasis — existed as song before they came to be written down. Still, while the role of music as a gateway to memory did not disappear over millennia, it did change. As time went on songs began to shift from merely recording memories to directing the movements and moments that begot them. The music within and surrounding the American Civil Rights Movement is a perfect example of the activization of musical memory.
Back to When it All Began
While it’s difficult to pin-point the beginning of a movement, historians generally agree that Harry T. Moore, the first murdered NAACP member, was the first martyr of the American Civil Rights Movement.
Harry Moore was born in Huston, Florida on November 18,1905. After the death of his father at the age of nine, Harry went to live with family in Daytona and later Jacksonville. During his time in Jacksonville Harry was exposed to the intellectualism of his maternal aunts, and upon returning home 5 years later, he enrolled in Florida Memorial College’s high school program. A near straight A student, Moore turned to teaching upon his graduation, accepting his first job in Coca, Florida. It was there that Moore met his wife, Harriette and together the couple had two children.
In 1934, nine years after graduating from college, Harry Moore founded the Brevard County chapter of the NAACP. Immediately Moore threw himself into fighting for equality, and in 1937 Moore, along with the help of NAACP council Thurgood Marshal, filled a lawsuit for the equalization of teacher salaries across racial groups. The case eventually failed in court, but it inspired a wave of lawsuits across Florida that eventually resulted in the pay equalization.
Moore’s efforts didn’t stop there: in 1941 he organized a state-wide chapter of the NAACP, relishing his work as executive secretary of the chapter while maintaining his teaching position. That chanced in 1946 when Moore and his wife, by now a well-known Civil Rights activists, was fired from their teaching positions and blacklisted from the profession. Instead of shying away from his work in response to these pressures Moore redevoted himself to the NAACP, becoming a paid organizer for the organization.
Still, up to this point nothing Harry Moore had done seemed to hint at his impending assassination. That came later, in 1949, when he began work on the Groveland Rape Case.
On July 16, 1949, Norma Padgett accused four men — Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shephard, and Walter Irvin — of rape. She was white and they were black. Within days three of the accused were in custody and the fourth was dead.
Unable to further harass the suspects in custody, a mob of angry Floridians turned to the African American community of Groveland as the outlet of their anger. For days Groveland burned and the terror did not stop until the national guard intervened. Left in the mob’s wake were the vestiges of what was once a thriving community.
In the context of this fervor the Groveland Rape case quickly became national news and naturally Moore (with the NAACP behind him) committed to the boys’ defense. After years in court — first in the trial and later battling the conviction that inevitably came down — the two defendants who appealed were granted a retrial. While being transported as a consequence of this retrial Irvin and Shepard were shot by the sherif transporting them. Shepard was killed, Irvin seriously injured, and Sheriff McCall was absolved of all wrongdoing.
That absolution did not stop activists from questioning what happend that night, and when Irvin (having survived by playing dead) was well enough to speak he described a different chain of events. McCall claimed he stopped to fix a flat and was attacked by his two chained-together charges; Irvin claimed McCall pulled them out of the car and started shooting. In response to this testimony Moore fought for Irvin’s suspension and indictment on murder charges. This particular campaign did not succeed.
Six weeks later, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, a bomb exploded beneath the Moore’s bedroom floor. That Christmas day, at the age for forty-six, Harry died; Harriette nine days later. Their killers were found only after four separate investigations and fifty years of speculation. The Moores remain the only couple to both have died in the civil rights struggle.
Now at this point in the article you have probably asked yourself what this has to do with music and memory. Well here it is: already famous for his work as an activist, Harry Moore became even more prominent in death. The Moores’ death quickly became a powerful reminder of the plight of African American’s within our incredibly broken system. Rallies were held across the nation and it was at one of these rallies that Langston Hughes debuted his elegiac “Ballad of Harry Moore”.
Preserved forever in Hughes’ lines is the quiet resolve amongst civil rights activists in the wake of the Moores’ death. The ballad’s refrain — “no bomb can kill the dreams I hold / Freedom never dies” — became the defining sentiment of the movement. In the following years Florida’s continued bombings did little to deter people from the cause.
Harry Moore is often pointed to as one of the forgotten names of the Civil rights movement. To quote Myrlie Evers-Williams, former chairwoman of the NAACP board of directors:
Often times we hear people say today that the civil rights movement started when Rosa Parks sat on the bus in the wrong place, or that it really started with Dr. King. What we fail to recognize when reporting the facts of the Civil Rights movement, of the modern Civil Rights movement, is that there were people involved without names, who were not known, in challenging a system of inequality in the 40s and in the 50s, but you seldom see anything documented about those cases.
Langston Hughes’ “Ballad of Harry Moore” was one of the forces that stopped Harry’s story from being forgotten, and recently Sweet Honey in the Rock resurrected “Ballad of Harry Moore” in their shows. After one performance an audience member exclaimed “it gives us a knowledge of things we really had no knowledge about…there are so many African Americans who don’t have a clue about African Americans”.
It’s nearly impossible to track the impact of a song (it’s one of the many ways in which music differs from oil spills and anti gun legislation). Still, it’s safe to say that the “Ballad of Harry Moore” was one of the first in a long line of Civil Rights era protest songs. From Bob Dylan’s “Blowin in the Wind” released a year later to Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” over a decade afterward, the civil rights movement is a story that is as well told in words on a page as it is in the groves of a record.
Music was there throughout, energizing people at rallies, transmitting troubles across races and classes and eventually continents. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez — as well as Mahalia Johnson and Peter, Paul, and Mary — played at the March on Washington, arguably the most famous gathering of the Civil Right movement. Johnson even sung as the introduction to Martin Luther King Jr’s landmark “I Have a Dream” speech. Their songs, carefully chosen to resonate with a crowd itching for change, served as testimonies to the need for it. Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game”, for example, is a jaded absolution (if you would call it that) of Medgar Evan’s murderer. The real culprit? The system that groomed him to perpetrate his crime. In it Dylan sings:
A South politician preaches to the poor white man,
‘You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,’ they explain.
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
Clearly this was a controversial position, but regardless Dylan’s song raises an interesting question: can something produced by such a broken system really work to fix it?
Can Change Really Come?
Early in 1964, shortly after the death of his eighteen month old son, Sam Cooke wrote and recorded his iconic “ A Change is Gonna Come.” The song, released just weeks after Cooke’s tragic death, was partially inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (look at that, connections are everywhere!). “ A Change is Gonna Come” quickly became an anthem for the Civil Rights movement and is generally viewed as one of the greatest songs of all time. Still, what makes “Change” particularly interesting here is not its top twenty spot on Rolling Stone’s list, but rather what happened to the song once it made it to the radio.
In one of the song’s most poignant moments Cooke cries:
I go to the movies and I go downtown
Somebody keep telling me, “Don’t hang around”
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
Here, writing in the wake of a racial run-in while on tour, Cooke strikes at the heart of the segregation and racial discrimination seen through America and concentrated in the South. These practices were no secret, but never before had they been sung about on a top forty hit. As a result “Change” made its way to the radio without the lyrics in question leaving only LP buyers able to hear all of Cooke’s reflection. In doing so record executives subjected “Change” to the limits of the very system he was speaking out against.
And so the question lingers, does it matter who makes the music of our memory? I don’t mean the artists themselves, the gate keepers who offer us trips into our past, but rather those who appoint those gate keepers to their positions. It’s more than simply naive to think that record executives don’t influence the songs they produce, it’s down right foolish.
And so as every record must be produced by someone, with every song comes an executive ( or a team of them) directing expression. Now in an issue focused around the politics of memory, there’s no ignoring the possible sanitation of protest pieces of music. Winston Churchill once said “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” Does the same apply for the once “subversive” songs that have become part of our musical cannon?
On some level, it must. As shown by the example of “ A Change is Gonna Come”, songs are not impervious from outside influence, from edits intended to make the song sell more records, even if it costs poignancy points. While music serves as an amazing reservoir of societal memory, it’s important to remember than even here things must be taken with a grain of salt.
Still, even with that in mind music remains one of the most effective ways we have of engaging with our past. Within the span of a song an artist, through the fusion of music and lyrics, is able to transport her listener back in time. Here the artist able to communicate the thoughts and emotions captured years prior for years hence in a way unrivaled by prose and even poetry.
Imagine reading an essay on the death of Hattie Carroll, or even reading the lyrics of the song on the page: something immeasurable is lost without Dylan’s voice and music driving home his point about its importance. The greatest songs of recent memory are inextricably linked with our collective memory, and our greatest memories are tied to the pieces of music that keep us from forgetting it. The songs mentioned above are just a small sample of the larger collection of music surrounding the Civil Rights Movement, itself just one example of a movement melded with its music.
