June 2006

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B-Girl Be there

Wish I didn't have to miss most of this, but family comes first. See links at the bottom for much more.

Recently posted elsewhere:

"Out Loud: They scream. They wear tacos for underwear. Meet Faggot, rock's next big gay thing" (citypages.com 6/21/06), What else can I say? Everyone is-- (cpculture.com 6/21/06), Travitron is backitron (cpculture.com 6/21/06), Keston and Westdal release new album online (cpculture.com 6/21/06), 3-D chalk drawings by Julian Beever (cpculture.com 6/21/06), Faggot, stronger than Pride (complicatedfun.com 6/21/06), Pride Twin Cities off the beaten path (cpculture.com 6/22/06), Rhymefest at Fifth Element (cpculture.com 6/22/06), Sleater-Kinney breaks up (cpculture.com 6/27/06), Atmosphere finally get some media attention (cpculture.com 6/28/06), Songs about Minnesota (cpculture.com 6/29/06), North Star Gay Rodeo this weekend (cpculture.com 6/30/06), Soul Asylum play Taste of MN, release album (cpculture.com 6/30/06), B-Girl Be there, especially Saturday night (cpculture.com 6/30/06)

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at June 30, 2006 6:47 PM | Comments (0)

 

Roxanne Shante, Lovebug Starski in Minneapolis tonight

A couple can't-miss old-school hip-hop events are happening tonight in Minneapolis. Former teenage legend Roxanne Shante (official myspace) delivers the keynote for the B-Girl Be hip-hop festival (more here) at the Capri Theatre on Broadway at around 6:00 p.m., with the fest continuing tonight through this weekend at Intermedia Arts and other venues. If you don't know Shante, you better ask somebody.

Also tonight, hip-hop founding father Lovebug Starski (a.k.a. Love Bug Starski, Luvbug Starski, Luv Bug Starski, Star Ski, Starsky, etc.) spins at the Dinkytowner (more here; RSVP here ASAP). Then, later (at around 12:15 a.m.), check out Heat at the Red Sea.

Starski is arguably more influential and less known than Shante--one of hip-hop's founding DJs and MCs, he never had much commercial success beyond touring with Run-DMC in the early days. He began his career carrying records for Pete DJ Jones in the Bronx, and worked every club in the early hip-hop scene of the 1970s, becoming house DJ at legendary joints such as the Disco Fever, the Renaissance Ballroom, and Harlem World. Online searching turns up facts I haven't checked: Starski recorded his first single, "Positive Life", on Tayster records, and cut the soundtrack to the 1985 film Rappin' on Atlantic Records before recording his first LP, House Rock, on Epic. A prison sentence kept him out of the late '80s scene, but in the '90s he began DJing again with his old friend DJ Hollywood. I'll have to ask him if it's true what promoters claim, that he coined "hip hop."

In Yes Yes Y'all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop's First Decade (Da Capo, 2002), Afrika Bambaataa remembers Starski as one of the earliest Bronx MCs: "In the early '70s, we was already indoors in many of the community centers in the area [Southeast Bronx]. One of the first DJs that came out of the Black Spades organization was a guy by the name of Kool DJ D and his brother Tyrone, and they had a MC by the name of Love Bug Starski."

"My grandmother lived like four blocks away from Bronx River," says Starski in the same book, "and we used to be in the Spades--in order to walk in that neighborhood I had to be in the Spades. So I met Afrika Bambaataa and Kool DJ D, and DJ Tex and all them, who were old school DJs, you know? People don't even mention them anymore."

Starski tells the authors he was introduced to Pete DJ Jones by Grandmaster Flash. "I worked with Pete DJ Jones for about four or five years carrying equipment and filling in with him when he was too tired to play. We played all the clubs, like Superstar 33, Nell Gwynn's, Leviticus, Justine's, places like that. Pete DJ Jones was big on the mature club side. Flash, Mario, Bambaataa, Kool Herc, Breakout form Uptown, and Grandmaster Flowers from Brooklyn, that was the only heavy hitters that was out back in those days, besides Eddie Cheba and Hollywood."

He also says he put on Kool DJ AJ, who has this to say: "Love Bug, he was a great guy. He might be one of the first to have that crowd response. 'Look in the sky, look in the tree, who do you see? Star-ski!' And that 'Bob didda bob de danga dang diggy diggy diggy diggy, diggy diggy with the bang bang boogie.' People used to love that. And he'd make the people shout, 'Chant my name. Somebody say AAAAAA-JAAAAAY."

"You know the way some people go to church to catch the Holy Ghost?" adds Starski. "That's how I caught the Holy Ghost--at a party. That was my spiritual thing. When I was about fifteen, between fifteen and seventeen, and I used to stay out way beyond my hours and accepted that ass whipping from my mother, for real. She thought I was on drugs at one time, and all I was doin' was house parties and playing in the parks."

According to Busy Bee Starsky (who apparently borrowed the last name from his friend), "Love Bug Starski was the only person I ever heard that played in a Burger King. Imagine that: Coming to a disco in Burger King! The lights is out, and you're playing the music, and it was different, I mean... a party in the Burger King, where you buy your burgers and fries at? That's amazing! And he did it."

"Sylvia Robinson will tell you: I was 'Rapper's Delight,'" Starski concludes. "She got the idea off of me. I did her birthday party at Harlem World, and that's where she got the idea. She said, 'I've got to have him." She'll tell you that. But I wasn't interested in doing no record back in them days, 'cause I was getting so much money for just DJ-ing."

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at June 29, 2006 5:19 PM | Comments (0)

 

Faggot, stronger than Pride

(Click the above photo for full image.)

As I wrote in today's City Pages, the Minneapolis rock and roll group Faggot is much more than a provocative name. Here are more photos (the studio shots above are by Nick Vlcek, as is the cute one at the very end of this post).

Faggot have invited dozens of bands to do the Mexican hat dance in their attic. Singer Tim Carroll puts the number at 80.

Faggot's self-titled 2005 cassette

Watercolor poster by Michael Gaughan (a.k.a. Ice-Rod, of Brother and Sister and NOW, more here, here, and here, and here) for his Rock 'n' Roll Escape from Summer School event (click for Lindsey Thomas's article) featuring Faggot and a dozen other bands.

(Click the above photo for full image.) Faggot drummer Jon Nielsen plays in funk trio Synchrocylotron during the Rock 'n' Roll Escape from Summer School scavenger hunt. Nielsen also played in his rock duo Knifeworld (or Knife World) that day. Here are more photos from the event.

(Click the above photo for full image.) Faggot guitarist Jason Wade is also an experimental filmmaker (more here).

(Click the above photo for full image.)

(Click the above photo for full image.)

(Click the above photo for full image.) More on Faggot bassist Saira Huff's fashions here. A former member of Detestation and Resolve, Huff is also a member of the hardcore punk band Question. She says she's never had as much fun with a band as with Faggot.

Email from Sara Shapouri, of the NYC band Animental:

sorry i'm on tour so i don't have much computer time and i don't know if you are finished with your article but i just think they are amazing. it's dirty drunken rock n roll at its very best but that doesn't even really come close to describing them as their show and energy is way more dynamic than that...i feel like everything i could say will sound a bit trite but they do totally kick ass and are totally inspiring too in their literally balls out approach to performance. they're everything that a band should be... wild, raw, psychedelic, scary, sexy, heavy, you name it. my band animental was inspired by them after the show we just played together. they don't hold back, they aren't afraid, which is exhilarating and wonderful to behold. and the best thing is it's not an act at all which is probably why they are also the coolest band around. so maybe that helps or doesn't but i am excited to read the article when its done.

best,
sara

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at June 20, 2006 11:00 PM | Comments (5)

 

Happy Father's Day, Winstons. Love, drum-n-bass

Watch Can I Get an Amen?, an absolutely awesome 2004 video installation/documentary short by Nate Harrison, which comes to my attention via fimoculous via youtube, and has apparently been making the blog rounds since appearing at last year's EMP Conference. Harrison makes a pretty damning case against the British company Zero-G, and its Jungle Warfare CDs, for appropriating and copyrighting a breakbeat created by somebody else, one that had essentially existed in the public domain for three decades: the "Amen break" from a 1969 gospel funk track by the Winstons, "Amen, Brother," an instrumental cover of 1968's "We're a Winner" by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions and b-side to the Winstons hit "Color Him Father" (hear both songs on myspace, read the "Amen break" wiki, and this ILM thread).

I won't add much to this except to say that most of the above sources appear unaware that the Winstons still exist in Washington, D.C.--here's their official site:

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Agency/3263/
or
http://winstoncd.com

Today I phoned Joe Phillips, owner of the Winstons trademark (listen to this interview with him), who re-launched the group in 1996. Since the death of guitarist and musical director Quincy Mattison, he says, and the retirement of lead singer/tenor saxophonist Richard Lewis Spencer (who published a novel in 2003 on Lulu Press, The Molasses Tree: A Southern Love Story), no original members have been involved, though the band continues to record new Winstons gospel albums. Spencer lives at an unpublished number in North Carolina, while organ player Phil Tolotta plays regularly at JD's Restaurant and Lounge in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida. (I'll phone him tomorrow night.) Otherwise, I'm still looking for alto saxophonist Ray Maritano and bassist Sonny Peckrol.

My hope is to find drummer G.C. Coleman, who created the "Amen, Brother" beat, and who seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. He was reportedly another veteran of Otis Redding's band, but unlike Richard Spencer or, say, "Funky Drummer" Clyde Stubblefield--the other most sampled drummer in history, still giggling regularly in Madison, Wisconsin--Coleman has yet to come forward and take credit for his influence. Phillips said he might be able to track Coleman down, and if so, I'll let you know.

[Update 6/14: Brian Poust of Georgiasoul says that Mattison might have told him Coleman still lived in the Atlanta area (mentioned here, too), and here's a Coleman album credit from The Spirit of Atlanta's 1973 LP The Burning Of Atlanta (Buddah), a project put together by Tommy Stewart.]

I wonder if Coleman is even aware that he essentially birthed a genre of music--drum-n-bass (dnb, jungle), or that his drum part appears on literally thousands of releases. On May 17, 2003, Phillips responded to an email from somebody on this message board thread, saying, incredibly, that he hadn't known anything at all about the legacy of the Winstons "Amen" break:

Thanks Andrew, I was not aware of the huge following from the drum break of Amen. I am looking into right now. Thanks for making me aware of that. Joe Phillips(The Winstons)

So in anticipation of Father's Day, and in honor of my own father's loving role as a stepfather, and my own stepfather's love, here's an excerpt from an article about Richard Spencer and "Color Him Father," a sweet ode to a fictional stepfather who marries a woman with seven kids, and raises them as his own. May drum-n-bass track down its dad, too.

The lyrics are not Dylanesque or even Smokeyesque, and Spencer himself admits, "It's not a great piece of music." But the song struck a chord in 1970 America. It was a staple of AM radio stations and won Spencer a Grammy award for R&B songwriter, and versions of it hit No. 1 on the country, R&B and easy listening charts.

The idea and most of the words for the song came to Spencer
after a painfully embarrassing incident when he was a child.

"When I was 13, we had something at school, and I had to wear
a tie," he told me earlier this week. "My mother tried to tie it,
but she didn't know how. It looked really bad. I went to school,
and the other kids laughed at me. That's when I created an
imaginary guy who would do all the things a real father was
supposed to do, like teach me to tie a tie."

He had to create an imaginary dad, he said, because his own
father was often missing in action. "He wasn't much of a father,
but I loved him very much. I don't know why."

Spencer never repeated the success he had with that one song--the band broke up a year later, and he drove a bus in
Washington, D.C., while going to college, but he has no regrets
about being a one-hit wonder. "That song was one of the important
things in my life, and I'm glad I did it."

(See "Oh, my; Papa strikes back," News and Observer, Raleigh, NC, June 17, 2001.)

(Click first image for Kalamu ya Salaam's history of Amen break, the second image for Nate Harrison's video.)

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at June 13, 2006 8:22 PM | Comments (3)

 

Why Nagin beat Juvenile

The new reconstructionwatch.org blog (from the Institute for Southern Studies and its Facing South publication) already has a number of pieces of essential reading, including a report on why New Orleans isn't hurricane-ready (see also levees.org to do something about this apalling situation, as well as the Army Corps of Engineers' recent admission of responsibility for the failed levees) and an analysis of why Ray Nagin won the New Orleans election despite the popular distrust echoed by rapper Juvenile and others:

It was the deliberate efforts of the white elite and their supporters to take control of city government and prevent poor African Americans from returning that created the racial fear and distrust that sent black voters into Nagin's camp. It was white people, not blacks, who got Ray Nagin elected.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at June 12, 2006 9:25 AM | Comments (0)

 

Weekend fun: Heat and "Escape From Summer School"

Heat are simply my favorite new myspace page, www.myspace.com/heatonline--Minneapolis rappers who will gnash you up, and kill live. Below, if you're in Minnesota, don't miss this scavenger hunt event tomorrow with some of the more creative bands on the planet:

Details here and here!

Good Riemenschneider piece on Michael Gaughan in preview of the scavenger hunt.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at June 9, 2006 9:31 AM | Comments (0)

 

"Something about that song haunts you"

(Roger Johnson and Pete Seeger leading Freedom School students singing "We Shall Overcome" at Palmer's Crossing Community Center, August 4, Freedom Summer, 1964, photographed by Herbert Randall, more here and here.)

(Zilphia Horton singing on a picket line in the 1940s, from the Highlander Research and Education Center photo collection, via this article.)

It's been years since I first noticed that less and less people were joining in every time somebody would start to sing "We Shall Overcome" as a protest. Like marching itself, the anthem of the Civil Rights movement is boring work. Slow and mournful, it lacks the backbeat of "Eyes on the Prize," another movement song with a parallel history. "We Shall Overcome" can be thumping and repetitive, like Woody Guthrie's "This Land as Your Land," but also spellbinding, like my father's own "They'll Know We Are Christians (By Our Love)." It is so overloaded with historical significance, and that significance is so intimately connected with real and unfathomable courage and trauma, that singing the tune can be deeply moving, or deeply embarrassing, or both at the same time.

"Simple strains and dogged sincerity made the hymn suitable for crisis, mourning, and celebration alike," writes Taylor Branch in Parting the Waters: America In the King Years 1954-63 (Simon & Schuster, 1988), describing the tune's rapid spread through the student sit-in movement of 1960 after an April workshop at Highlander Folk School in Grundy County, Tennessee.

Yet today the tune's unfunky earnestness seems stranded in its era even as the lyrics are being taught in Arabic and Chinese. People everywhere else seem to believe this song still has something to tell them, even if Americans have heard it all. The communal and universalist "we" is a relic of starchy, Kennedy-era idealism (who's "we" paleface?), as annihilated by hip as the turtle-necked folkie's acoustic guitar in Animal House--the one John Belushi smashes after hearing a few verses of "I Gave My Love a Cherry."

Even Bruce Springsteen, who'll play the song on Sunday at the Xcel Energy Center, can only bring himself to revive "We Shall Overcome" as a love ballad, on his new album-length tribute to Pete Seeger--the man who helped make the tune an international protest staple. (See reviews here, here, and here.) You'd have to go back to 1968 to find another good recording of the song, specifically to the Maytals and Marion Williams--the former a Jamaican reggae 45 cut in 1968 (probably not long after Martin Luther King's assassination, and certainly before the new genre had a name), and the latter re-imagined as a cut-time gospel workout. (Though Beenie Man deserves a mention for effort. Here's a "We Shall Overcome" discography, with audio sources here.)

So why even learn about "We Shall Overcome"? Because it has a history worth knowing, and the truth of that history is worth defending, and not just in the way you protectively indulge grandparents their remembrances. Songs that function socially, evolving in the mouths of different singers without ever being recorded, don't really exist anymore, except on the playground--the last true bastion of un-self-conscious folk culture. In the era of A Mighty Wind (a parody my folk-mass singing dad thought was hilarious, by the way), what do young people make of a figure like Seeger?

(Pete Seeger playing for sailors in the 1940s)

The man turned 87 recently, a persistence of breath that might frustrate his anti-Communist attackers, forever revving for the obit. Writing in last summer's City Journal, Howard Husock traced indigenous American radicalism to its only possible source--Moscow--and framed left-wing Yankee folk music as just another Popular Front strategy, with Seeger the key figure in this deception (see "America's Most Successful Communist" by Howard Husock, City Journal, Summer 2005). By way of example, he offered:

Another Popular Front success from this period was the 1937 reworking, at Tennessee's communist-founded Highlander Folk School, of the traditional black gospel number "I Will Overcome" into "We Shall Overcome," soon a labor rallying song.

The only problem with that sentence is that just about every part of it is wrong. Highlander was "communist-founded" (note the bet-hedging lower-case "c") only in the same sense that Booker T. and the M.G.'s were a "white band." One of the people who started the Appalachian folk school in 1932, Don West, was a member of the Communist Party, but he had moved on by the time the school received its charter in 1934. Principle founder Myles Horton, who ran the school through the 1960s, never joined the party (though even this has been spun). Horton studied under theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the intellectual godfathers of anticommunism, and a key figure in the intellectual development of Martin Luther King, Jr. Niebuhr himself raised start-up funds for Highlander, enlisting help from International YMCA Secretary Sherwood Eddy ("YMCA-founded"?), and two of Niebuhr's graduate students became teachers at the school.

After decades of criminal, legal, and media attacks on Highlander by the political allies of the Ku Klux Klan, no evidence has been brought to light to support the segregationist slander that the institution was a "finishing school for communists." (Larded with mild accusations from unnamed informers, the FBI files are a joke.) Today the Highlander Research and Education Center stands 20 miles east of Knoxville, outliving a campaign that long ago should have blown back on those playing the guilt-by-association game (see "Myles Horton (1905-90), Educator and Social Activist of Highlander Adult Education Center, Tennessee" by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, April 10, 2006 blog; and "Myles Horton, Civil Rights Leader and Teacher, Dead at 84," by Rob Wells, Associated Press, January 20, 1990).

(Myles Horton)

The rest of the "Popular Front success" sentence is simply incorrect: The song "I Will Overcome" was not reworked into a political anthem at Highlander, and it wasn't reworked in 1937.

The actual origins of the tune, not to mention where Seeger took it, argue the opposite of Husock's thesis that radical folk music was somehow a foreign plot. "We Shall Overcome" is more American than the national anthem, and became more international and universal through the Civil Rights movement. Its political transformation occurred on a tobacco picket line in 1946, well before arriving at Highlander the following year. Seeger was a member of the Communist Party between 1942 and 1950 (a period during which he also served in WWII, singing to hospitalized troops in Saipan), giving the international Communist conspiracy about four years of overlap with the song. Seven years after Seeger left the CPUSA, he sang "We Shall Overcome" for Martin Luther King at Highlander. Eventually, Seeger sang it in East Berlin as well, and in the Soviet Union, where it became a popular anthem of resistance to Communist rule.

(See "Pete Seeger: Still Singing for Peace," by John W. Barry, Poughkeepsie Journal, April 27, 2003; "Pete Seeger: Despite his best efforts, this radical is finding honors are being added to his fame," Laura Outerbridge, The Washington Times, November 28, 1994; "Life from the left: Folk icon Pete Seeger tells staff writer Jeffrey Weiss about his years as a communist," Jeffrey Weiss, Dallas Morning News, July 17, 2005; How Can I Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger, by Pete Seeger with David Dunaway, Da Capo 1981/1990, as cited by Wikipedia; Susanne's Folksong-Notizen, also cited in Wikipedia.)

Husock concludes:

Happily, some have embraced the Popular Front's legacy in ways that Seeger probably didn't anticipate and wouldn't likely approve. In March, a crowd in Taipei, several hundred thousand-strong, sang "We Shall Overcome" and "Blowin' in the Wind" as part of a protest against forcible annexation by mainland China--and the prospect of Communist Party rule.

You have to wonder whether the writer ever stopped to consider how these songs reached the Communist world in the first place.

When Seeger was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, "he was grilled on whether he was a communist," writes David Corn. "Seeger declined to talk about his political associations or ideas, but offered to tell the committee what songs he had sung in public. The committee was not amused" (see "Springsteen Does Seeger," David Corn, The Nation, March 6, 2006). What the singer actually said was:

I will tell you what my answer is. I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature and I resent very much and very deeply the implication of being called before this Committee that in some way because my opinions may be different from yours, or yours, Mr. Willis, or yours, Mr. Scherer, that I am any less of an American than anybody else. I love my country very deeply, sir.

Chairman WALTER: Why don't you make a little contribution toward preserving its institutions?

Mr. SEEGER: I feel that my whole life is a contribution.

(Read the full transcript.)

I've seen Seeger sing many times, and I interviewed him in 1993. I've never once heard him talk about the wonders of Communism. As he said half a century ago, his songs speak for themselves.

"We Shall Overcome" says more than most. It had existed in one form or another for as long as a century before it was copyrighted in 1963 by Seeger and three other white Civil Rights and labor activists associated with Highlander: Zilphia Johnson Horton (Myles Horton's first wife), who first transcribed it; Guy Carawan, who taught the song to sit-in students and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee founders in 1960; and Frank Hamilton, who taught the song to Carawan (see "The Rise Of the Rights Anthem; 'We Shall Overcome': The Song, the History" by Caryle Murphy Washington Post, January 17, 1988). This version of the tune, whose royalties go to a Highlander "We Shall Overcome" Fund for "grassroots efforts within African American communities to use art and activism against injustice," has become standard:

Chorus:

Deep in my heart I do believe
We shall/will overcome some day

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
Some day

We'll walk hand in hand
Some day

We shall live in peace
Some day

We are not afraid
Today

The whole wide world around
Some day

There's inevitable mystery at the heart of the question of where this song comes from, but also unnecessary confusion. In The Music of Black Americans: A History, Third Edition (W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), for instance, Eileen Southern cites different lyrics than those above:

"We shall overcome/We shall overcome/We shall overcome some day/For I know in my heart/It will come true/We shall overcome some day"

She doesn't offer a source for these lyrics, though she does recommend James J. Fuld's The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular, and Folk (Dover, 1966/1995), still the definitive study of the song's early beginnings. The assertions that follow are as fascinating, and similarly un-sourced:

Its opening and closing phrases point back to the old spiritual "No More Auction Block for Me"... The middle section of the freedom song seems to be a contemporary insertion. The text of the song apparently derived from Charles Tindley's gospel song "I'll Overcome Some Day" [circa 1900]... and there are musical similarities as well between the gospel and freedom songs.

My only problem with the above is that the transcribed melody of Tindley's tune sounds exactly nothing like "We Shall Overcome," which should be no small detail in music historiography. (It sounds slightly more like "No More Auction Block For Me," but is still distinct, and was apparently sung alongside that number as a different song.)

Set to an entirely different melody, the lyrics of Tindley's pre-gospel composition do read similarly: "I'll overcome some day/I'll overcome some day/If in my heart/I do not yield/I'll overcome some day."

Given the lyrical closeness, you can understand why historians less agnostic on the question than Southern have strayed further from the obvious fact that these are simply different songs. I'd include here everyone from Taylor Branch to Seeger himself (co-writing his autobiography). One very human reason for linking "We Shall Overcome" to Tindley's "I'll Overcome Some Day" is the simple one that doing so gives the song a person and biography to credit--Charles Albert Tindley, Methodist minister from Philadelphia. Tindley, as Branch writes, "was a prime influence on Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of modern gospel music." He also wrote "Stand By Me," which Ben E. King of the Drifters adapted for popular music (see Parting the Waters; and "Song of History, Song of Freedom," Mike Hudson, The Roanoke Times, January 14, 2001).

The more likely root of the song is "I'll Be All Right," which is sometimes written as "I Will Be All Right" or spelled "Alright" rather than "All Right." (Memories of the religious lyrics similarly vary: "We will meet the lord someday," "I'll see His face, I'll be like Him, I shall overcome some day.") According to Fuld, and to David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace's 1975 book The People's Almanac, the opening bars of the melody appear to derive from a hymn first published in 1794, "O Sanctissima," a European Christmas carol sung in Latin that in turn lifted its melody from "Prayer of the Sicilian Mariners" (or "The Sicilian Mariner's Hymn to the Virgin," or "Sicilian Mariner's Prayer"). One listen to "O Sanctissima" will confirm the match to "We Shall Overcome."

(folk music fan Johann Gottfried von Herder)

Johann Gottfried von Herder--the German philosopher, theologian, and international folk music champion--seems to have brought the "Sicilian Mariner" tune to Germany in 1788 after a trip to Italy, and the song gained a second life there as a popular Christmas hymn ("O du Frohliche," sung today in English as "O How Joyfully"), after Johannes Daniel Falk gave it German lyrics in 1816. The following year, Beethoven arranged "O Sanctissima" for strings (see The People's Almanac, by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace, Doubleday, 1975, reproduced here; and this page at www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com).

The melody, or a modern version of it, was adapted to new lyrics as "I'll Be All Right" in the days of American slavery, before its likely author could have laid legal claim to much of anything, least of all songwriting credit. Yet this hymn, which reportedly became popular in Southern black Baptist and Methodist churches in the early part of the 20th Century, eventually came to contain the lines "Deep in my heart, I do believe/I'll overcome some day" (see How Can I Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger, as cited by Wikipedia). Dr. Bernice Johnson-Reagon, director of the black American culture program at the National Museum of American History (and one of the founding members of the Freedom Singers), believes that by the time "I'll Be All Right" reached the American Tobacco strike of 1945-'46, it was being called "I Will Overcome" or "I'll Overcome" in some parts of the country. This jibes with The Book of World-Famous Music, which reports that "I'll Overcome Someday," with its contemporary, non-Tindley melody, was published on May 1, 1945 by Martin and Morris Music Studio in Chicago, with original words credited to Atron Twigg, and revised music and lyrics credited to Kenneth Morris.

(See The Book of World-Famous Music, cited here; "The Rise Of the Rights Anthem; 'We Shall Overcome': The Song, the History"; and "The History of 'We Shall Overcome'" All Things Considered, January 15, 1999.)

(1946 Lucky Strike advertisement)

(Roi-Tan, "The cigar that breathes")

After black women took up the song as "I'll Overcome" on a Charleston, South Carolina, picket line in 1946, the story becomes clearer and verifiable. The modern chapter of "We Shall Overcome" began in October, 1945, when workers walked out of the American Tobacco plant in Charleston as part of the CIO-affiliated Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Allied Workers Union. These were the folks who replaced the "I" with "we" in the final line of "I'll Be All Right," changing "I will overcome some day" to "We will overcome someday."

At American Tobacco, workers rolled, wrapped, and boxed Roi-Tans on segregated factory floors. "The jobs were so numbingly repetitive that a few workers in the plant had the reputation of being able to doze off and keep at it," writes Bo Petersen in the Post and Courier of Charleston (see "'We Shall Overcome': Civil rights anthem rose to prominence in Charleston strike," September 21, 2003). The reporter interviewed Lillie Mae Marsh Doster, whose job was to label boxes, turn them over, put them in a machine, and ring a bell.

The workers had been asking for 30 cents an hour. "Negotiations had raised the wage from 10 cents to 15 cents," writes Petersen. "Labor unions were on the rise. But for black workers, in a place and time when lynching still loomed as a threat, a strike took a lot of daring. The plant employed more than 2,000. After rounds of 'sit down' work stoppages and negotiations, the majority walked out in late October..."

(National Urban League "We Shall Overcome" Pamphlet, 1963)

"I'll Overcome" (which Petersen identifies, probably incorrectly, as Tindley's "I'll Overcome Some Day") was a favorite of American Tobacco employee Lucille Simmons, a black woman who sang in the choir at Jerusalem Baptist Church, which supported the strikers.

"Simmons began singing the song to break up the picket line at the end of each day," writes Petersen. "Her voice turned heads. 'She had a beautiful alto voice, and she would holler that song out,' [Delphine] Brown said..."

Simmons sang a slow "long meter style" version of the song, and called it "We'll Overcome" (see Pete Seeger and Peter Blood, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: A Singer's Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies, Independent Publications Group, Sing Out Publications, 1993, as cited by Wikipedia; and "Guy Carawan uses music for recording social change," Hugh Boulware, Chicago Tribune, January 19, 1990.)

Seeger also specifically credits Simmons with changing the "I" to "We," though this reaches back into a period before his direct experience. In any case, others strikers were soon joining in, singing, "Down in our hearts/I do believe/We'll overcome some day."

"You think about that, it's almost like a prayer of relief," Doster told Petersen. "We didn't make up the song. We just started singing it as a struggle song."

As the picketing continued, the lyrics evolved into other variations: "We will organize"; "We will win our rights," and "We will win this fight." "The Lord will see us through" became "The union will see us through," and "We're on to victory" (see the 1988 documentary We Shall Overcome, cited in "We Shall Overcome," Walter Goodman, New York Times, December 6, 1988; and "Employing Music in the Cause of Social Justice: Ruth Crawford Seeger and Zilphia Horton," by Julia Schmidt-Pirro and Karen M. McCurdy, Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore, Spring-Summer, 2005).

When the strike ended in April 1946, four of every five workers had already gone back to work. Protesters wound up settling for the money they'd been offered in the beginning. "But the cigar factory strike spurred a voter registration drive that made the workers the main source of new black voters in Charleston in the next few years," writes Petersen. And with this new movement went the song.

(Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan in Greenwood, Mississippi, July 6, 1963)

(Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the Freedom Singers, Pete Seeger, and Theodore Bikel photographed on July 26, 1963, by John Byrne Cooke at the Newport Folk Festival, singing "We Shall Overcome" with a standing audience of 13,000 joining in.)

(Record of Joan Baez singing "We Shall Overcome" at the August 28, 1963 March on Washington)

In 1947, a couple of the workers involved in the American Tobacco strike were invited to Highlander folk school, founded 15 years earlier on a farm in Monteagle, Tennessee--a coal-mining town near Chattanooga. One of the few integrated institutions in the South, Highlander had trained union organizers since it opened, working with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and offering a scholarship in Eleanor Roosevelt's name while supporting farmers, textile workers, and coal miners across racial lines. "In the early days, the policy was to welcome anybody who could help build the CIO," said founder Myles Horton. "They didn't care whether you were Communist or reactionary or Catholic or the AFL."

Located in one of the poorest counties in America, Highlander practiced pedagogy of the oppressed long before the activity had the name. "We made it clear that we weren't bringing people together to tell them what to do," said Horton. "We had confidence in their ability to share their experiences and learn from each other and learn to trust their own judgment." A key part of the process was culture. "The school mixed classes on politics and economics with square dances and local lore," wrote Kristina Lindgren in the Los Angeles Times (see "Myles Horton, 84, Founder of Early Civil Rights Center," January 21, 1990).

(Woody Guthrie photographed in June, 1940 at the Highlander Folk School.)

Arriving at Highlander in 1935, union activist Zilphia Johnson took over the school's cultural program and married Myles Horton in the same year. "She had a beautiful alto voice, an unpretentious rare voice, but not the showoff kind," remembered Pete Seeger, who had begun visiting Highlander and playing there with Woody Guthrie before the war. "She brought out the talents of her audience and their enthusiastic participation. Her approach resembled more that of a Black singer and the Black church" (see "Employing Music in the Cause of Social Justice").

Always listening for new songs, Zilphia learned "We'll Overcome" from the visiting American Tobacco workers--who reportedly arrived with separate groups of black and white, and on different occasions, to avoid arousing attention from authorities. Soon, she began singing the song "slower than anybody had heard it," according to Seeger. Zilphia taught the tune to her students, and published "Overcome" in the Highlander Songbook, which was distributed to other union organizers. By 1950, Joe Glazer and the Elm City Four had recorded and released "We Will Overcome" through the CIO Department of Education and Research.

Zilphia also taught the tune to Seeger. "It's the genius of simplicity," he said of the song. "Any damn fool can get complicated. I like to compare it to the backboard in basketball. You bounce your life experiences off it and they come back with new meaning" (see "The Rise Of the Rights Anthem; 'We Shall Overcome': The Song, the History" by Caryle Murphy, Washington Post, January 17, 1988).

Before taking the song back to New York, and on the road to California, Seeger added new verses: "We'll walk hand in hand" and "The whole wide world around." He eventually made another alteration as well. "I changed it to 'We shall,'" he said. "Toshi [Seeger, his wife] kids me that it was my Harvard grammar, but I think I liked a more open sound; 'We will' has alliteration to it, but 'We shall' opens the mouth wider; the 'i' in 'will' is not an easy vowel to sing well" (see Susanne's Folksong-Notizen, linked by the Wikipedia entry for "We Shall Overcome").

Septima Clark with students.

(Septima Clark, by Erin Currier)

Seeger later questioned his memory, wondering whether the "shall" came from Septima Clark (more here), the Highlander organizer who launched the Citizenship Schools project on South Carolina's Sea Islands in 1956. With the Hortons, Clark had helped teach tens of thousands of poor Southern blacks to read and write, thus enabling them to vote for the first time under Segregationist law (see "Myles Horton, Civil Rights Leader and Teacher, Dead at 84," by Rob Wells, Associated Press, January 20, 1990).

Whoever made the change, "We Shall Overcome" took root at Highlander just when the school was shifting in emphasis from union organizing to what's now thought of as the Civil Rights movement. Seamstress Rosa Parks attended a workshop at Highlander in 1955 before sparking the Montgomery bus boycott (see "Unconventional Folk School Marks 50th Year," Tom Eblen, Associated Press, October 24, 1982). The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. visited the school on September 2, 1957, delivering a keynote speech at the 25th anniversary celebration, where Seeger sang "We Shall Overcome" and played banjo. On the drive to Louisville later that day, King kept humming the tune, then remembered its name. "There's something about that song that haunts you," he said to others in the car (see Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, David J. Garrow, Vintage Books, 1986).

(Martin Luther King, Peter Seeger, Charis Horton, Rosa Parks, and Ralph Abernathy at Highlander's 25th anniversary celebration, Monteagle, TN, 1957)

(1960 propaganda postcard of Martin Luther King Jr., photographed in 1957 during Highlander's 25th anniversary celebration, with Daily Worker correspondent Abner Berry in the foreground with glasses, identified by the FBI as the only known Communist Party member in the photo. To the left of King, going from right to left: Highlander funder Aubrey Williams, founder Myles Horton, unidentified woman, and Rosa Parks. Far left: Pete Seeger's elbow.)

(AFL-CIO button)

Highlander had been under attack from the reactionary right since it first opened, but the school's literacy program brought down the inflamed wrath of segregationists. The few hours King spent at the school on September 2 entered far-right mythology as part of a smear campaign against Highlander, King, and the movement. Photographer Ed Friend had come to the Labor Day Weekend celebration and asked Myles Horton permission to snap photos, and Horton agreed, offering to buy the pictures later. "As the weekend progressed, Horton thought it odd that Friend appeared uninterested in photographing or filming the speeches or meetings and more interested in the interracial socializing, the folk-dancing and swimming," writes Judith Blackburn Bechtel in her online biography of Maurice McCrackin, Building the Beloved Community. "And [Friend] always seemed to be trying to get Abner Berry into photographs."

Berry, unbeknownst to most participants at the conference, was a reporter for the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party USA (the publication folded the following year). Yet if Berry was quiet about his affiliation, Friend acted purely as a spy for the Georgia Education Commission, established in 1953 for the explicit purpose of preventing school desegregation. (Friend later conned another attendee into copying conference audiotapes for him, and testified against Highlander in a committee hearing of the Tennessee state legislature in Nashville as part of an "investigation" into the school. Read this paper, Bechtel's book, and this book for a fuller account. Note, too, that the prima facie evidence offered for Highlander's Communism was its policy of integration, and the social ease demonstrated between men and women across race lines--inevitably, the hearings focused on charges of interracial sex.)

The Highlander photos were published and distributed by the Georgia Education Commission, and have so thoroughly passed into reactionary lore that they are circulated online to this day.

"They put one of those pictures on billboards all over the South, captioned Highlander... 'Communist Training School,'" remembered Myles Horton. "The John Birch Society and the Governor's Committee of the State of Georgia put them out. They claimed that they spent over a million dollars on billboards. The picture had Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Aubrey Williams, and Septima Clark and me and other people in the front row. And Pete Seeger's elbow. Pete said he came within an elbow's distance of being in the famous picture."

One key piece of recorded evidence was curiously never put into play. "What is so amazing to me," said historian Taylor Branch in 1990, "is that in all this investigation, nobody, insofar as I can find, including the Georgia investigators who took the picture and the FBI agents who interviewed and questioned all the people who were there, recorded what King actually said at the 25th anniversary luncheon."

The tapes were available; they just weren't very helpful. The most salient King passage, as Branch suggested, was the following:

Men hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can't communicate with each other; they can't communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.

Read the transcript of King's speech here.

During this period, "We Shall Overcome" gained two new verses: "We shall end Jim Crow" and "We shall live in peace." White supremacists viewed these sentiments as contradictory, and, looking at Martin Luther King, saw only fantastic projections of themselves. Captioning the "Communist Training School" photo, the Georgia Commission on Education wrote, "These 'four horsemen' of racial agitation have brought tension, disturbance, strife and violence in their advancement of the Communist doctrine of 'racial nationalism.'" When, of course, it was the Klansmen who rode horseback, and brought down terror in the name of racial nationhood.

One fearful night in July of 1959, a raid on Highlander spurred a new verse for "We Shall Overcome." As Myles Horton recalled,

a group of young people, a youth choir from Reverend Seay's church in Montgomery, was at Highlander. He thought it would be good for them to know there were white people that they could deal with as equals. They were looking at a movie called Face of the South. It was dark. Suddenly, raiders came in with flashlights. They must have been vigilantes and some police officers, but they weren't in uniform. They demanded the lights be turned on, but they couldn't get anybody at Highlander to do it. They were furious, you know, running around with flashlights. In the meantime, the kids started to sing "We Shall Overcome." It made them feel good. The raiders yelled, "Shut up and turn on the lights!" Then some kid said, "We're not afraid." Then they started singing, "We are not afraid. We are not afraid." That's when that verse was born.

(Another account names 13-year-old Jamalia Jones as the "kid," and reports the year as 1957, and still another account credits a different student, future Freedom Singer Mary Ethel Dozier, and puts the year back at 1959. See "Song of History, Song of Freedom," Mike Hudson, The Roanoke Times, January 14, 2001; and "'People Get Ready': Music and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s," by Brian Ward, www.historynow.org, June, 2006.)

"We Shall Overcome" would not become the Civil Rights anthem, however, until it was sung by a white, South Carolina-born proto-hippie from Los Angeles, who learned the tune from Seeger via fellow Californian folkie Frank Hamilton and others. Guy Carawan came to Highlander in 1959 already loving the song, and when he performed it at Septima Clark's and Ella Baker's workshops in 1960, as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was taking shape, an official movement song was born. Taken up by black youth, the tune sped up again. "The song was different than in union days," one SNCC organizer remembered. "We put more soul in, a sort of rocking quality, to stir one's inner feeling. When you got through singing it, you could walk over a bed of hot coals, and you wouldn't notice" (see Susanne's Folksong-Notizen).

(Here's a musical transcription of "We Shall Overcome" based on a recording of SNCC Freedom Singers with Pete Seeger.)

Carawan took over Zilphia Horton's post as music director, left vacant since her untimely death in 1956. With his wife Candie Carawan, Guy began looking into the roots of "We Shall Overcome" and other folk songs collected by the school, later traveling around the South with a large Ampex tape recorder documenting them. The Carawans were particularly interested in Gullah-rooted Sea Island folk classics such as "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore," and eventually compiled 1967's Ain't You Got A Right To The Tree of Life, an oral history of Gullah descendents on Johns Island. "We were moved at how rich the culture was there," said Candie Carawan. "The fact that it fed some of that richness into the civil rights movement is a pretty incredible story" (see "Guy Carawan uses music for recording social change," Hugh Boulware, Chicago Tribune, January 19, 1990).

(1963 songbook, We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement, Oak Publications)

(1965 sheet music)

By the summer of 1960, "We Shall Overcome" had a soul beat and vocal depth. "The song didn't begin to spread until harmony and rhythm were added," said Carawan (see "Song of History, Song of Freedom"). And as the years marched forward, "We Shall Overcome" became a sort of movement ritual, with singers standing, crossing arms, and swaying in unison. During the 1963 March on Washington, hundreds of thousands led by Joan Baez sang the anthem before the Lincoln Memorial. But the tune slowed down again with the weight of numbers, and grew desperate as racist violence worsened.

Mourners sang "We Shall Overcome" after the corpses of four little girls were pulled from the bombed-out church in Birmingham. Movement activist Viola Gregg Liuzzo reportedly sang it as she lay dying of gunshot wounds. John Lewis found comfort in the song after his skull was fractured on Bloody Sunday, 1965. "It gave you a sense of faith, a sense of strength," he said (see "Song of History, Song of Freedom"; and this sermon).

Demonstrators sang "We will walk together" and "Black and white together" directly at President Lyndon B. Johnson on the streets of Washington, D.C., and when he addressed the nation in 1965 with a promise of a new voting rights law, he closed with the words, "And we shall overcome." (King, whose assistants had never seen him cry, became teary-eyed watching the speech on TV.)

Yet the anthem's moment was nearly overcome. In 1966, when Martin Luther King and others continued James Meredith's "March Against Fear" in Mississippi (the day after he was shot on June 6) the walk down the highway in the sweltering heat produced loose and angry talk, which King himself recorded:

"I'm not for that nonviolence stuff anymore," shouted one of the younger activists.

"If one of those damn white Mississippi crackers touches me, I'm gonna knock the hell out him," shouted another.

Later on a discussion of the composition of the march came up.

"This should be an all-black march," said one marcher. "We don't need any more white phonies and liberals invading our movement. This is our march."

Once during the afternoon we stopped to sing, "We Shall Overcome." The voices rang out with all the traditional fervor, the glad thunders and the gentle strength that had always characterized the singing of this noble song. But when we came to the stanza which speaks of "black and white together," the voices of a few of the marchers were muted. I asked them later why they refused to sing that verse. The retort was, "This is a new day, we don't sing those words anymore. In fact the whole song should be discarded. Not 'We Shall Overcome,' but 'We Shall Overrun.'"

As I listened to all these comments, the words fell on my ears like strange music from a foreign land. My hearing was not attuned to the sound of such bitterness. I guess I should not have been surprised. I should have known that in an atmosphere where false promises are daily realities, where deferred dreams are nightly facts, where acts of unpunished violence toward Negroes are a way of life, nonviolence would eventually be seriously questioned. I should have been reminded that disappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness, and that the one thing certain about bitterness is its blindness.

(See The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson, Warner Books, 1998.)

(Protester at the 1966 James Meredith March remembers Jimmy Lee Jackson, killed February 1965 in Alabama while demonstrating for voter registration, photographed by Jo Freeman.)

Seeger remembered young people on the march following up "We Shall Overcome" with a call-and-response chant of "What do we want?" "Freedom!" "When do we want it?" "Now!"

"A few years later, even this was not enough to take away the milky taste of 'someday,'" Seeger wrote in his 1972 book The Incompleat Folksinger (with editor Jo Metcalf Schwartz, Simon and Schuster). "In 1972, I occasionally find myself humming it at work when I feel low and pessimistic about the human species."

Songwriter Julius Lester captured the darkened mood perfectly. "Those northern protest rallies where Freedom songs were sung... began to look more and more like moral exercises. 'See, my hands are clean.' Now it is over: the days of singing freedom songs and the days of combating bullets and billy clubs with love" (see Susanne's Folksong-Notizen).

Yet the movement was a moral exercise. And "We Shall Overcome" merely showed how shaky that excercise becomes when the people joining together behind that "we" are still divided by inequality themselves. Sticking to his guns, so to speak, Martin Luther King sang the song into Memphis in 1968, and after he failed to come out alive, mourners sang it again at his funeral. Yet the America that exploded in riots after his assassination was rejecting more than a song of nonviolence. If there was a history of black and white, urban and hillbilly, religious and secular music behind the stolid old tune, that backstory represented a left-wing politics many were ready to jettison for the "now" song. Besides addressing the emotional life of culture directly, Black Power and the armed white revolutionary left were the ultimate triumph of pop over folk. They replaced boring old activist labor with iconography and big gestures, organizers with stars.

"We Shall Overcome" was dead to this sensibility, even as the song was cheating mortality elsewhere, sung on the gallows of Pretoria Central Prison by South African freedom fighter John Harris, and among U.S. farm workers (in Spanish) during the strikes and grape boycotts of the late 1960s. It was taken up by students and workers in Tiananmen Square, Northern Ireland, South Korea, Lebanon, and pre-fall-of-Communism Eastern Europe. In India, the song's literal translation in Hindi became a patriotic anthem in the '80s, "Hum Honge Kaamyaab," which endures today.

If "we" was the most troubling word in "We Shall Overcome" by the late 1960s, it also became the most malleable--and hopeful. "I confess that for me the most important word in this song is 'we,'" Seeger wrote in Carry It On! (1988, Simon and Schuster). "When I sing it, I think of the whole human race, which must stick together if we are going to solve the problems of war and peace, of poverty, ignorance, [and] fear."
_____________________________

More "We Shall Overcome" links:

Thanks for the link, Mark Woods.

John Hammond, the link between Seeger, Springsteen, and Dylan.

More sources here.

Wonderful site about movement veterans:
http://www.crmvet.org/

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at June 9, 2006 7:41 AM | Comments (4)

 

It's not what you earn that make you a man

Lots more links and text in my Desmond Dekker tribute below than there were last week (I have to confess, I didn't know Chris Blackwell's mom was Ian Fleming's lover, or that Edward Seaga worked with Folkways in the 1950s), so re-read the whole thing, or just skip to the end for audio and video links, including a video at Youtube for 1980's "Please Don't Bend" (click the image to play), and a video for a recent dancehall remake of "Israelites" with Dekker and Apache Indian. If anyone wants to share their own Dekker memories, please post them here or below.

More Desmond Dekker links:

There were a few too many more links in the story, I guess, forcing the computer to cut off links at the bottom. So here are some of the lost links, beginning with (by way of thanks and further reading) the pages linking that post: Rockcriticsdaily, Jeff Chang, Christopher Porter, Dance Crasher, Ochblog (currently down), Wikipedia's Dekker page (where I made a couple basic corrections in the "early days" section, such as his birthplace), and Ghost Roads. Also, check out all this Dekker audio, Mshairi's tribute, my sidebar on "The Mystery of Edward Seaga," donations here in Dekker's memory, Skinhead Nation on Dekker's popularity, an ILM thread, Desmond Dekker at emusic, more on "rude boy music" in my London Calling appreciation, Desmond Dekker interviews at Rock's Back Pages, Complicated Fun Jamaican music links (still in progress), London Independent obituary, Jamaica Gleaner obituary, Jamaica Observer obituary, Jamaica Observer, "Remembering Dekker", New York Times obituary, Rolling Stone obituary, an audio tribute at Hotshitrecords, and my initial cpculture.com post.

Recently posted elsewhere:

No more "no homo": Tori Fixx won't be trapped in the hip-hop closet (citypages.com 5/24/06), Weekend video: Atmosphere on Conan O'Brien (cpculture.com 5/27/06), Desmond Dekker R.I.P. (cpculture.com 5/27/06), First Avenue can't burn down (cpculture.com 6/5/06), National Review in 1977: Punk as Conservative Uprising (cpculture.com 6/6/06), A Starduster's Guide to Roadside Attractions (cpculture.com 6/6/06), a few blurbs in the summer concert guide (citypages.com 6/7/06), Brightblack Morning Light playing tonight, Ol' Yeller CD release on Friday, Prof and Rahzwell CD release on Saturday, Escape from Summer Camp Scavenger Hunt on Saturday! (cpculture.com 6/9/06)

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at June 7, 2006 8:53 PM | Comments (1)

 

Desmond Dekker Came First

(Click above for full image.) Desmond Dekker publicity photo for Stiff Records, 1980.

British issue of Dekker's first single, 1963.

(Listen to 1966's "007 (Shanty Town)", 1968's "Israelites" at Ochblog, or 1969's "Reggae Recipe" at getupedina for a soundtrack to this article.)