Last week, I received yet another invitation to play piano for a show tune sing-along. This one came from the academics who teach peace studies and convene annually to share scholarly papers with one another.
What’s going on? After all, these aren’t exactly joyful times.
It’s true that many know sing-alongs to be a favorite recreation of mine. When I was a teenager, I fell In love with the American Broadway tradition and learned to play for singers. Later in life — but still decades ago — I found myself compiling over 30 pages of show tune lyrics into a handy “song sheet” to give singers lots of choices.
It amazes me to see those song sheets still getting an exceptional workout. Lately, it seems whenever a group asks me to speak about the present day crisis, they also say “and please bring your show tune song sheets — we have a piano!”
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Why movements need to start singing againLogically, it seems a very long distance from discussing Trump’s version of the American empire to singing “I could have danced all night!” But it appears that activists are, above all, people. Human beings need more than rationality to get through a hard time.
As a young activist I was shaped by the civil rights movement. When in jail with Black activists in the 1963 nonviolent campaign in Chester, Pennsylvania, I learned to keep my spirits up by joining them in their freedom songs, singing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “Oh, Freedom” and “We Shall Overcome.”
Soon after, in 1964, I joined the trainers who prepared nearly a thousand students from the North to go to Mississippi — and that lesson sank in more deeply. For a week we gave our nonviolent training to half the students, then watched them board buses taking them to the South. After a brief rest we welcomed the other half of the students, but on the second day our training was interrupted by news from Mississippi that a couple of the students in the previous week’s training had been killed by the Ku Klux Klan.
I assumed that nearly all the newly-arrived students, upon learning this news, would leave for their homes by nightfall. However, the training staff led small group processing sessions plus story-telling, praying and a lot of singing. Nearly everyone got on the buses headed for Mississippi.
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DonateThat experience added new meaning for me to the old gospel song “How can I keep from singing?”
I don’t expect the present political moment to get rosier anytime soon. Like the ‘60s students who went to Mississippi, we’ll be finding within ourselves new levels of courage. Coalitions form, experimental actions multiply and movements grow toward critical mass. It’s time to reach for song collections like “Rise Up Singing” — or whatever works in your circle, Maybe you even want to create new songs. And if you need a piano player, well…