“Without the songs of the movement, personally I believe that there wouldn't have been a movement,” says Rutha Mae Harris, one of the original Freedom Singers, who performed at the momentous civil rights’ March on Washington of 1963. Many, many legendary songs have bolstered, consoled and inspired the fight for equality over the decades, reaching back to well before the recording era. Displaced Africans would make illicit music by night after punishing days in the field, black Civil War-era soldiers formed bands which famously developed into jazz, and so the beats go on, and on, all the way through to today’s hip hop.

Here we curate a line-up – by no means definitive, perhaps not entirely unbiased – of unforgettable songs originating from the US with the essence of the Black Lives Matter movement at their heart.

These songs also kick off Nataal’s Spotify channel. Turn on, tune in, turn up…

Fisk Jubilee Singers - Swing Low Sweet Chariot (1909)

The redoubtable Fisk Jubilee Singers were nine students – all but two of them former slaves, most still in their teens – who set out from Nashville in 1871 to raise desperately needed funds to save their college, Fisk University, which was established just after the end of the Civil War to provide education for all. After an unpromising start, they embarked on an extensive national tour, wowed audiences across Europe and performed before Queen Victoria, bringing the ‘secret’ music African-Americans had sung for innumerable generations to audiences that now paid to hear them. Every year the college celebrates the original ensemble by singing by their gravesites on 6 October, the date the group set out to – unwittingly – make performance history.

HT Burleigh - Deep River (1917)

This renowned concert soloist, composer, arranger and popular composer of American art song hailed from humble beginnings: his father was a civil war veteran, his mother a janitor who struggled to find work as a teacher – despite being highly educated (and fluent in French and Greek). HT Burleigh supported himself with odd jobs and bagged a hard-won scholarship to the National Conservatory of Music in New York, where its director, one Antonín Dvořák, later acknowledged his vital influence on his classic ‘Symphony for the New World’. Burleigh’s setting of ‘Deep River’ is one of the earliest so-called ‘concert’ spirituals, a genre the composer observed was created “by no one in particular and everyone in general.”

Fats Waller - What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue (1929)

Written by Fats Waller, the pianist and entertainer whose style had a seismic influence on modern jazz piano, ‘What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue’ was commissioned by a white New York gangster for a musical comedy that was intended to be performed to a white audience – with the joke on the black people onstage. The song was later popularised by Louis Armstrong in 1956, whose recording literally turned the tables by transforming it into a commentary of the trials of being black in a white society ¬– a notably subversive shift in meaning and context that’s common to some of the very best protest music.

Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit (1939)

Time called it “the song of the century” and for Angela Davis, Billie Holiday’s unforgettable indictment “almost single-handedly changed the politics of American popular culture”. Audiences would either applaud or walk out in disgust, but in response to nervous promoters who demanded she cut ‘Strange Fruit’ from her set, Holiday would produce a contract. She, and only she, would decide whether to sing it or not; the waiters would stop serving drinks before she began; lights would be extinguished save for a single spotlight trained directly on her, it would always be the last song, no encore. She said it reminded her of her father, who died of a lung disorder at 39 after being turned away from hospital because he was black: “Twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South.”

Mahalia Jackson - Move On Up A Little Higher (1948)

Despite being brought up in a devout Christian family who profaned the ‘ungodly’ sounds of the blues, Mahalia Jackson was magnetically drawn to the sound and performance styles of singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Martin Luther King Jr said “a voice like hers comes along once in a millennium” and she sang before an audience of 250,000 at the March on Washington in 1963 – as well as at King’s funeral in 1968. ‘Move On Up A Little Higher’ sold eight million copies and made a gospel superstar of Jackson, a towering, passionate presence who evoked ecstasies in her audiences. “Gospel songs are the songs of hope,” she said. “When you sing gospel you have the feeling there is a cure for what’s wrong.”

Anonymous - We Shall Overcome (1950s)

‘We Shall Overcome’ has been sung everywhere from Selma to Soweto, Beirut to Beijing, but it began life, like many other of its ilk, as part of America’s folk-song culture. It wasn’t published until 1901, when the pioneering African-American Methodist minister and activist Rev Charles Albert Tindley, who led a church in Philadelphia, committed it to paper. The popular Georgia congressman John Lewis, currently serving his 17th term in the House, was just 15 when he joined the civil rights movement in 1955. In his autobiography he recalls how demonstrators would sing it: “It gave you a sense of strength, to continue to struggle, to continue to push on. And you would lose your sense of fear. You were prepared to march into hell’s fire.”

Nina Simone - Mississippi Goddam (1964)

Nina Simone became the official organist in her family church at the age of six, and musically, it was all uphill from there. In her autobiography the high priestess of soul recalled: “I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of [civil rights activist] Medgar Evers stopped that argument, and with ‘Mississippi Goddam’, I realised there was no turning back.” If there’s a searing musical equivalent to the phrase ‘enough is enough’, ‘Mississippi Goddam’ is it.

Gil Scott-Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1971)

Originally a spoken word piece, ‘The Revolution Will Not be Televised’ features a swathe of cultural references including Coca-Cola, NBC and Jackie Onassis. In an interview in 2010 its restless creator, the brilliant poet, musical polymath and activist Gil Scott-Heron elaborated on how its soul-searching lyrics highlight change starts in the mind. “I think that black Americans have been the only real die-hard Americans here. We’re the only ones who have carried the process through the process. And being born American didn’t seem to matter, because we were born American, but we still had to fight for what we were looking for…”

Public Enemy - Fight the Power (1989)

‘Fight the Power’ was the defining theme of Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee’s film about racial tension bubbling over against the backdrop of a heat wave in a Brooklyn neighbourhood. Public Enemy’s frontman Chuck D muses: “It was written as an anthem, and it was written at a particular time that needed an anthem.” Released at the tail end of an incendiary decade in New York, during which Michael Griffith, Willie Turk and Yusef Hawkins were set upon and murdered by white mobs, Chuck D also observed, “It was the first time every word in a rap song was being scrutinised, word for word, line for line.”

KRS-One - Sound of da Police (1993)

The LA riots in 1992 were sparked by the police assault on Rodney King in 1991, whose viscerally clear brutality was shocking in spite of – because of – the tremulous, blurry video footage. When the four officers were acquitted the following year, it marked yet another tragic chapter in America’s inability to come to terms with its past. ‘Sound of Da Police’ was released in the aftermath of the riots, and is notable for its chaotic mash-up and badass delivery – as well as KRS-One’s mercurial slickness in half-rhyming ‘overseer’ with ‘officer’. In a footnote, the song notoriously enjoyed a second spell in the limelight in 2014, when two irreverent British police officers faced disciplinary action after a recording emerged of them blasting it from their patrol car.

Lil Wayne - Georgia… Bush (2006)

In Lil Wayne’s hands ‘Georgia’, Ray Charles’ hit 1960 love song to his state, morphed into a searing denouncement of President George Bush and the federal government’s handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – the largest storm ever to hit the US, flooding 80 per cent of the city, killing nearly 2,000 and displacing a million, many of whom were reliant on help that was promised but never arrived. The powers that be were subsequently mauled by media criticism for its lack of preparedness – and that was before the New Orleans-born rapper weighed in with ‘Georgia… Bush’. Thankfully that was a different time, pre-Obama, and nowadays there’s no way a racist president could ever… Oh. Hang on…

Kendrick Lamar - Alright (2015)

The Compton-born rapper claims his smash ‘Alright’ was inspired by an eye-opening trip to South Africa in 2014. Produced by Pharrell Williams, its slow-burn creation belied the speed with which it would be picked up on its release. Williams had perfected the addictive beat six long months before Lamar added the lyrics, and kept hounding him to finish it. Lamar explained: “The beat sounded fun, but it was something else inside of them chords that Pharrell put down. It feels like it could be more of a statement.” When it was finally released, it was swiftly taken up at Black Lives Matter – and other – protests across the world. For the multi-award-winning rapper, its appeal is simple: “It’s one of those records that makes you feel good no matter what the times are.”

Run the Jewels – Walking in the Snow (2020)

Rap duo Killer Mike and El-P’s fourth album RTJ4 dropped just a few days after the murder of George Floyd. On it, the prescient track ‘Walking in the Snow’ – about the death of Eric Garner in 2014 – soon became an anthem of the protests. The lyrics read:

“And every day on evening news they feed you fear for free
And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me
And ’til my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, ‘I can’t breathe’”

Beyond music, Mike has made several impassioned statements in recent weeks, once following the violent uprising on the streets of Atlanta, and again after Rayshard Brooks was shot dead by the city’s police. As the son of an Atlanta policeman, the rapper speaks from a place of authority and empathy.

Words Karen Chung

Published on 20/06/2020