No matter how old you are, there are things you know about the Civil Rights Movement. You’ve heard Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. You’ve seen the protesters getting blasted by fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama. And you know the songs — “We Shall Overcome,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “A Change Is Gonna Come.” But, it turns out, that’s only a tiny part of this music. Hundreds of other songs you’ve never heard of have been hidden for decades.
Listen to some of the songs below.
Professor Robert Darden started the Black Gospel Restoration Project at Baylor University. Many of the 25,000 recordings in Baylor’s collection are on 45s — small records with only enough room for one song on each side. While the A-sides were intended to promote hits, the B-sides were often little known songs. And that’s how Darden made his discovery. By looking at the B-sides of 45s he discovered hundreds of politically charged songs — songs such as, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” by the Salem Travelers, and “Stand Up and Be Counted,” by the Meditation Singers. “Many of the gospel artists, we are just now discovering, used that B-side to give a message of support and hope for the Civil Rights Movement,” Darden says.
Performers wanted to hide their protest music because it was dangerous in those days to be African-American and call for equal rights. Dr. Birgitta Johnson, a professor of Music at the University of South Carolina says blacks not only feared violent retaliation but “If you had a loan and people found out you were politically active, sometimes the bank would either call for the loan to be paid in full or they would increase your rates,” Johnson says. “If they were found to be involved with the Freedom Riders or voting rights, they sometimes were evicted from their homes.”
These songs were part of two venerable American traditions. One is the “message song” — the tradition of folk and country musicians singing about topical issues. The other, distinctly African American, tradition is that of hiding messages inside songs. “Gospel music and the spirituals were one of the few avenues where African-Americans had their own voice, where they could say and sing exactly what they were feeling,” Darden says. “Sometimes those words were coded to keep white people from understanding it.” These gospel artists were sending a message under cover, in a sense — hidden in plain sight, but only if you knew where to look.
This story was made possible with help from ArtsEdge, the digital learning program of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Bonus Track: “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” The Salem Travelers
Bonus Track: “Stand Up and Be Counted,” Meditation Singers