Preamble: Margaret Walters has been going to peace rallies as long as she’s been going to folk clubs (50+ years), and has amassed a large archive of peace songs.  She wants to see the singing of peace songs revitalised in the way sea shanties have been.  Contact her.

A friend on the west coast of the US sent me a link to this article by Paul Engler of Oregon about efforts to strengthen social change through song. I’ve selected sections to shorten the 10-page article to 3 leaving out some US-centric material. (I’ve retained the American spelling.)

A group called Momentum Training founded by Paul Engler, which educates hundreds of activists each year in the principles of momentum-driven mobilization has, added a module on Song Culture which was not included at the start, but has since become indispensable.

They have found that “Music is a powerful tool that we have too often neglected in our organizing — and members of our movements are hungry to bring it back.”

“Collective singing was a key aspect of many movements, including both the U.S. civil rights struggle and the international mobilization against apartheid in South Africa” and they’ve realised their role in Momentum “is to get people to remember the importance of singing, to remember how strong it can make us.”

“Once we began incorporating singing into our work, we discovered that there was a great appetite among activists for reviving song culture. But it did take some work to create an environment where people feel comfortable embracing music-making.”

“We live in a consumer-capitalist society that trains us to be purchasers and observers, rather than active participants, with regard to the production of art, music and other forms of culture. This is a departure from the norms of almost all ancient cultures, which relied on people to produce their own music and art. The shift has negative effects on social movements, and on democratic society as a whole.”

“More than a century ago, the composer John Philip Sousa had expressed concern that new technologies of recorded music would lead to the decline of singing in public life. In a statement for a Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C. in 1906, he argued, “When I was a boy … in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left.”

Sousa feared that we would go from a society in which everyone made art and music on a regular basis to one in which creative output was converted into commodities — products to be purchased by consumers who did not, and increasingly could not, make meaningful contributions to a common culture. In a 2007 talk calling for a revival of creative participation, law professor Lawrence Lessig cited Sousa’s warnings that this would cause people to become isolated from their own capacities to create and recreate culture, shutting down organic avenues for human communication and connection.

Movements require unique and meaningful art, history and stories. They need people capable of creating and sharing forms of expression that strengthen subcultures not represented in the mainstream. We can’t rely on the centralized corporations in Hollywood and Nashville that churn out pop commodities to sustain the types of culture needed to further struggle and change.

Trainers “stress the importance of group participation. They emphasize a distinction Harding drew between “songs of performance” and “songs of power.” Harding argued that songs of performance are ones sung by someone onstage or behind a microphone. Such performances can be beautiful and moving, of course; but they lend themselves to commodification — suggesting that music is something to be left to highly trained professionals. By contrast, songs of power are sung together by a group; they are used to strengthen bonds among people who have come together for a common purpose. As Stephen explained, “​​Songs of power are about decentralizing the performer and centralizing the people and the needs of the moment.”

The beauty of group singing is that no one person has to be particularly good; people just have to be willing to open their mouths and sing. In a movement, there is no need to demonstrate virtuosity, and so the training encourages people to “turn down their diva” and look for opportunities to encourage everyone to join in.

One teacher said: “I want people to experience singing together and feel what that does and how that changes the room,” he added. “And that’s one of the main things the training does. You see people move from whatever states they are in to having a feeling of unity. They’ve gone through something together. You can feel that, and that’s what tells me it’s working.”

The module teaches how to bring more music to our movements by breaking down common barriers like self-consciousness, discomfort with vulnerability and lack of a shared repertoire.

Over the years, four key benefits of song culture emerged

The first benefit is that songs allow us to connect with history — both on political and personal levels. In terms of political history, singing connects us with previous movements that have adopted song culture as a means of strengthening their resistance. In labor history, the Wobblies were famous in the early 1900s for adapting songs already in the folk tradition and turning them into pro-worker anthems — just as in the 1960s, activists in the civil rights movement converted Gospel hymns into the “freedom songs” that famously powered their actions.

There is a caricature that singing activists of the past were hippies who naïvely imagined a world of peace and harmony. But in fact, the use of song could reflect a hard-headed realism, recognizing that cultural expression is essential in helping movement participants form the strong bonds needed to organize in challenging and sometimes dangerous situations.

“Whenever somebody jokes about ‘Kumbaya,’” Harding said, “my mind goes back to the Mississippi summer experience where the movement folks in Mississippi were inviting coworkers to come from all over the country, especially student types, to come and help with the process of voter registration and Freedom School teaching, and taking great risks on behalf of that state and of this nation.”

While the songs we sing today can be new and different — reflecting cultural lineages that are always evolving — the very act of participating in movement song culture ties us to those who have advanced the struggle for freedom and justice in previous generations. “When we sing a song and we learn the history behind it, it’s like a connective tissue to those who came before us,” Stephen said. “We’re locating the struggle that the song came out of, and then we’re adding to that story. We’re finding ourselves in that lineage.”

Rediscovering songs sung by their grandparents and reviving them in the present can be a powerful way of honoring cultural traditions from which we have become estranged…. Singing together can help restore our connection to that shared history.

A second key benefit of group singing is that it allows us to resonate with one another as a community: physically, emotionally and spiritually. As the term implies, social movements are a social experience. They require interacting with others and coming together in joint purpose. A great deal of a movement’s effectiveness is based on how well the people in it can connect with one another. In this context, singing is a singularly effective piece of movement technology. When we speak, and even more when we sing, our bodies emit vibrations. By singing we can express and channel the emotions of the moment more profoundly and lastingly than we can through speech alone. By producing the same sounds and vibrations at the same time, groups of people literally can get on the same wavelength with one another, creating a profound collective experience.

People who have studied the way that music works in religious communities have observed that activities such as chanting magnify a group’s power by concentrating its voice into one chord and one breath.

Singing allows people to shift emotional states, and it does it very quickly,” Stephen said. “If you watch a movie, it might take two hours to deliberately shift through emotional states. A book can do that a few times, but it takes a few hundred pages. A song can do it in 90 seconds. It can do it when just a few people are together, or for thousands of people

Third, songs can be a powerful and succinct form of messaging — allowing movements to convey ideology, slogans, ideas and demands in a particularly memorable way. As an elevated form of chanting, songs can evoke strong emotions, including feelings of solidarity, freedom, pleasure and joy, much more quickly than pamphlets or speeches. Joining with others to sing out loud and in public is a radical assertion of purpose, humanity and will. It’s a way of saying, “We are here, and we know what’s at stake and what we stand to gain — or lose.” It’s also a way of audibly demonstrating that we are in this struggle together.

A fourth power of singing as a movement technology is that it lends energy and spirit to protests that might otherwise seem lifeless and repetitive…. A lot of demonstrations might have decent turnout — they might even draw a big crowd — and yet they feel dull and uninspired. Singing together changes the emotional depth and power of an action, helping to make them into fun and joyful events. In tense and emotionally fraught moments, it reinforces the group’s common purpose. And, by reinforcing our shared humanity, it reminds us that many voices are more powerful than one.

For some [activist organisations], group singing has been a hallmark of their direct actions. As writer Emily Witt explained in the New Yorker in 2018, “Part of what makes the Sunrise Movement’s activists seem so optimistic is that they conduct most of their protests while singing.”

So how can more movements get their songs back?

“Just do it!” … Once you get in the habit of doing it again, you realize that you never really forgot.

One important practice is always having the words to each song written up in a format that’s easy to access and distribute. Another is having people share information about a song’s origins — where it comes from or what it means to them — when they teach it to others, which can serve both to show respect for forebears and inspire a deeper connection to the music. During group singing, leaders can assign roles to facilitate participation, having some people guide the melody, others focus on keeping the beat, and still others nurture group energy. Finally, it can sometimes be powerful to invite people to enter into a moment of silence afterwards, to let the song land and give participants an opportunity to feel its impact.

Over time, groups develop a repertoire of songs they can draw from, and having favorites that can be repeated provides a great foundation for a movement’s song culture. These do not have to be the freedom songs of old. While many people are intimidated by the idea of coming up with entirely new tunes, remixing popular songs [and hymn tunes] is a way of drawing on our common cultural heritage and connecting people with something familiar. “People say, ‘Well, I’m not a brilliant songwriter.’ [But] ‘You don’t have to be, because so many of the songs from movements in the past have been popular songs that were repurposed. I talk to people about how we can do that now and how easy it is,” …. “We’re taking something that’s in the culture and adapting the meaning, so that it represents us.’”

When you start looking, it becomes clear that there are many such songs to choose from: choruses and catchy hooks that originated in songs of performance can become songs of power when adapted by movements. Once people are given a chance to make lyrics of their own in an environment that’s fun and supportive, the creativity flows.

The work of reviving song culture is not just about bringing music back to activist spaces. It is only one part of a broader effort to reinvigorate a type of communal culture that can sustain social movements over the long haul. But revitalizing singing is a critical and, for many, a natural place to start. Most people have memories of singing with others at home, in school, or in a place of worship — they have experienced how meaningful it can be as part of a social or spiritual community. By restoring a culture of song, movements can give their members a chance to fulfill this common human desire, and to become stronger and more cohesive in the process.