Sing It So Loudly The Long History of “Birmingham Sunday”

• Published in: Southern cultures Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 62 - 75
• Main Author: Cox, Julia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press 01.10.2018; The University of North Carolina Press
• Subjects: African Americans; Baez, Joan; Baptist churches; Black Power movement; Bombings; Brooks, Gwendolyn (1917-2000); Civil rights movements; Criticism and interpretation; Deaths; Dylan, Bob (1941- ); ESSAY; Folk music; Folk singers; Folklore; Giddens, Rhiannon; Lyricists; Music; Political activism; Politics; Protest songs; Singing; Traditions; Violence; Works; Alabama; New York; United States > US
• ISSN: 1068-8218; 1534-1488; 1534-1488
• DOI: 10.1353/scu.2018.0032

Reflecting on her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, folk icon Joan Baez was underwhelmed by the resurgence of protest music. “There needs to be more. It’s terribly important, because that’s what keeps the spirit,” she told Rolling Stone. “Carping and shouting, as much as it gets stuff off your chest in front of 100,000, you really need something uplifting . . . The problem right now is we have no anthem.” Baez’s definition of useful music—something uplifting, preferably an anthem—summarizes her own canon of protest music and history with activist movements. Baez famously marched hand in hand with Martin Luther King Jr. and Bob Dylan, singing “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 March on Washington, in this spirit of optimistic uplift, and churned out topical songs that provided rallying cries against the Vietnam War and racial injustice.1 On what was reported to be her final album, Whistle Down the Wind (2018), Baez recorded a moving cover of Zoe Mulford’s “The President Sang Amazing Grace,” about the 2015 Charleston church massacre, further ensuring that activism would be entwined with her musical career. Baez’s extensive repertoire includes another significant anthem about violence in a black church: a song that turned the deaths of four black girls into powerful symbols of the Civil Rights Movement and mobilized an interracial audience to understand the moral necessity of racial justice. This particular song is essential for understanding Baez’s legacy of interracial activism, as well as the complicated racial and musical politics of the American folk revival—all of which provide critical prehistories to the rebirth of protest movements we witness today.