We Shall Overcome: A Song History

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The sources consulted here name no single author for “We Shall Overcome,” which emerged from African American oral tradition.[1] A Library of Congress account ties its words to “I'll Overcome Some Day,” written in 1903 by Charles Tindley, a Methodist preacher in Philadelphia, and its melody to a traditional African American gospel song, “I'll Be All Right.”[2][1] The hymnologist Carlton Young found that Tindley's song shares wording with the later song but not its meter or tune, and other researchers have proposed different ancestors, among them Louise Shropshire's gospel song “If My Jesus Wills,” composed in the 1930s, and the old hymn tune SICILIAN MARINERS.[1] Pete Seeger pointed to a 1909 letter in the United Mine Workers Journal describing strikers who opened their meetings with the song, and he took it as a sign that a union version probably dated to the late nineteenth century.[1]

Old photograph of a tall wooden coal breaker building and sheds beside a slag-covered yard

Thomas H. Johnson, Gibson's Breaker, Rushdale, Pennsylvania, albumen silver print, ca. 1865. A Pennsylvania coal breaker of about 1865, shown for the 1909 United Mine Workers Journal letter that Pete Seeger cited; the photograph has no connection to the song.

Its modern form took shape on a picket line. In 1946 Zilphia Horton of Tennessee's Highlander Folk School heard striking tobacco workers sing it in Charleston, South Carolina, where the picketer Lucille Simmons is credited with turning “I” into “we.”[2] Horton passed it on to Seeger, and it was printed in his People's Songs bulletin in the late 1940s, though the sources consulted here differ on whether that was 1947 or 1948.[2][1] Seeger changed “will” to “shall” and added verses; on a 1957 return to Highlander, where he met Martin Luther King Jr., he worked out an accompaniment, and Guy Carawan and Frank Hamilton later reshaped its rhythm.[2] Carawan taught it to student activists in 1960, who drew strength from it during the sit-ins; it became the anthem of the civil rights struggle, and folk singers such as Joan Baez took it up in the early 1960s.[2][1] On March 15, 1965, a week after peaceful protesters were violently attacked in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon B. Johnson echoed the title phrase in a special address to Congress on voting rights.[3]

Seeger, Carawan and Hamilton registered a copyright on their version in 1960 and directed its royalties to the We Shall Overcome Fund, which still makes grants for grassroots arts and activism.[2] In September 2017, in a copyright suit over the song, federal judge Denise Cote ruled the famous first verse to be in the public domain, finding that the shift from “will” to “shall” lacked originality.[4][1] The song is No. 533 in The United Methodist Hymnal, and protesters far from the American South have adopted it, from Northern Ireland in 1968 to Kerala, India, in the 1970s.[1] Bing Futch includes it, set in DAD tuning, in All Over The Map, a 75-page download from J.O.B. Entertainment that gathers tablature for his own compositions alongside folk classics and comes with MP3 recordings of each tune as written.[5]

Our book that contains the song "We Shall Overcome"

Sources

  1. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: We Shall Overcome".
  2. Library of Congress, Folklife Today: "Tracing the Long Journey of We Shall Overcome".
  3. PBS American Experience: "Address to Congress: We Shall Overcome, 1965".
  4. NPR: "Federal Judge Rules First Verse Of We Shall Overcome Public Domain".
  5. J.O.B. Entertainment: "Bing Futch, All Over The Map".
  6. Image: Thomas H. Johnson, Gibson's Breaker, Rushdale, Pennsylvania, albumen silver print, ca. 1865. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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