Songs from Class

Posted below are links to the songs we studied in From My People, the same ones I played for the class.  I thought I'd do so in preparation of our reading Du Bois in a couple weeks.  Song will be a major theme in The Souls of Black Folk, but it has also been a major theme throughout the course.

Frederick Douglass, of course, writes about how white Northerners visiting the South before the Civil War often misunderstood the singing of slaves.  Northerners often thought the music was evidence that the slaves were content with their lot--that, in other words, white Southerners were correct in claiming that slavery was a beneficial institution.  Douglass writes instead that the songs had complex meaning for those singing them: they were expressions of sorrow but also hope.  Additionally, songs were used to pass along coded messages about escape to the North.

Booker T. Washington alludes to this function of slaves' songs in his Up from Slavery, which we are reading now, in his discussion of the "grape-vine telegraph" of the plantation (11).

Du Bois will concentrate on other rich meanings of what he calls "the sorrow songs."  The meanings of the songs will be closely related to his focus on the "souls" of people.  We have discussed in class how songs give us access to a "deeper" and perhaps even better part of ourselves, perhaps what Lincoln had in mind when he talked in his first inaugural address of the "better angels of our nature."  When Lincoln used the phrase, however, he was still hoping for conciliation with a South that had not yet seceded.  After the Civil War, following the "better angels of our nature" meant for most who fought for equality not conciliation but struggle--sometimes, as in the case of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., linked below, in a struggle to the death.

Go Down, Moses, by Louis Armstrong:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP5EfwBWgg0

Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child, by Paul Robeson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiJx1Hbn_KM

John Brown's Body:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvRZXdWjloo

O Canaan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itt06DPjum8

Oh who will come and go with me?
I am bound for the land of Canaan.
I'm bound fair Canaan's land to see,
I'm bound for the land of Canaan.

Chorus:

Oh Canaan, sweet Canaan,
I'm bound for the land of Canaan.
Sweet Canaan, 'tis my happy home;
I am bound for the land of Canaan.

I'll join with those who've gone before,
I am bound for the land of Canaan.
Where sin and sorrow are no more,
I am bound for the land of Canaan.

(Chorus)

We Shall Overcome:

Joan Baez:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkNsEH1GD7Q&p=FE8B345FF90D90A4&index=39&playnext=2

MLK speech:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=130J-FdZDtY&p=FE8B345FF90D90A4&playnext=1&index=37

Po' Boy 'Long Way from Home:

R.L. Burnside (1984):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjGf4AkgM4Q&feature=related

Booker White, slide guitar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0jRX69mxcE&feature=related

Feel free to post your own links to songs, along with your own comments.