Teaching Resources
Craig Werner
“Meeting Over Yonder”: Using
Music to Teach the Movement in
the North
I
n February 1966, Martin
Yonder,” a version of a song he
Luther King, Jr., moved his
remembered from the storefront
family into a tenement in a
church his grandmother pastored
blasted neighborhood on Chicago’s
on the West Side, not far from
West Side. Situated just outside the
where King had taken up resihotbed of modern gospel, soul, and
dence. Updating a strategy that
electric blues in “Bronzeville,” the
went back to slavery times, the
city’s long-established South Side,
recorded version of the song
King sought to draw attention to
sounded like a cousin to Sam
the plight of those who had gained
Cooke’s “Having a Party” or
little from the civil rights move“Amen,” The Impressions’ hit
ment’s success in the courts, Conversion of the gospel song which
gress, and the battlefields of the
appeared on the soundtrack to
South. As they had in Birmingham
Lilies of the Field (1963). Capitalizand Selma, the “foot soldiers” of
ing on the success of the feel-good
the Chicago movement, also
integrationist film, which propelled
known, tellingly, as the “Open
Sidney Poitier to stardom, “MeetHousing Movement,” turned to
ing Over Yonder” snuck onto popmusic for inspiration, embedding
ular radio—at the time highly
it in their organizational strategies.
resistant to any mention of religion
A mimeographed songbook circuor politics—mostly because it felt
lated to supporters at black
apolitical and safe. In the hands of
churches, for example, included
Chicago organizers, the song
movement standards such as
became a direct call to action.
“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Figure 1. Left to right, Curtis Mayfield, Sam Gooden, and Fred Cash pose as The “There’s a meeting at Grant Park.”
‘Round,” “Woke Up This Morning Impressions during a 1960 photo-shoot. Founded as The Roosters in 1958, a “Dr. King’s gonna be over yonder.”
with My Mind Set on Freedom,” doo-wop group led by Gooden and brothers Richard and Arthur Brooks, this
Like the music that inspired
Chicago-based vocal assemblage combined soul, gospel, and a heightened
and “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,”
and empowered the movement in
social consciousness to deliver popular hits such as “Keep on Pushing,” “People
adapted from Mahalia Jackson’s Get Ready,” and “Meeting Over Yonder.” More or less overtly, these songs the South, the music in the Chicago
gospel hit “Keep Your Hand on the embraced the spirit of the black freedom struggle both North and South. (Cour- songbook was much more than
Plow,” itself a version of a song tesy of Getty Images)
background or a soundtrack. It was
sung in black churches for decades.
an active part of the movement,
No doubt seeking to reach
providing the marchers who folyoung northerners, the songbook also included R&B hits, lyrics adapted
lowed King from Soldier Field to City Hall on July 10, 1966, with a
to serve the needs of the moment, including several songs by The
unified sense of purpose. It was a source of information and a way of
Impressions, a Chicago group headed by Curtis Mayfield, who’d grown
transmitting the movement’s vision to potential supporters, especially
up in the Cabrini-Green housing projects (Figure 1). Well aware of the
young whites who encountered the songs primarily via radio and
harsh realities of black life in his native city, Mayfield was a committed
records. On one level, this marks an extension of patterns historians
supporter of the civil rights movement. He and his business partner
including Brian Ward, Marc Anthony Neal, and Peter Guralnick have
Eddie Thomas accepted invitations to play at movement benefits and
firmly established in relation to the South (1). As they demonstrate,
took pride in the fact that activists referred to “Keep on Pushing” and
even the ostensibly “apolitical” music of the post–World War II years
“People Get Ready” as the “soundtrack of the movement.” One of
was intended and understood as a contribution to the transformation of
Mayfield’s compositions included in the songbook was “Meeting Over
American race relations.
OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 41–45
doi: 10.1093/oahmag/oar056
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
On another, however, the story
Lawrence Levine, Sterling Stuckey,
which began with marchers sereand Henry-Louis Gates, Jr., masking
nading Mayor Richard Daley (who,
is the practice of presenting a
despite welcoming King to Chicago,
seemingly simple and reassuring
had left the city on the day of the
appearance to a hostile or indiffermarch) illuminates the larger and
ent audience while simultaneously
less inspirational story of what
communicating subversive (often
happened when the movement
political) messages to audiences
shifted attention to the North. The
who understand the codes (2). An
evolution of Mayfield’s music in the
oft-invoked example is the spiritual
years following King’s foray into
“Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” During
Chicago is a case in point. In the
slavery, white listeners could, and
immediate wake of King’s depardid, hear it as a charming, childture from Chicago—he claimed a
like expression of the longing for
victory most historians have judged
salvation in the next world. The
as pyrrhic—Mayfield attempted to
slaves themselves could, and did,
maintain the energy with “We’re a
hear the songs as coded expresWinner,” which despite a good deal
sions of the desire for freedom on
of national success was banned
the other side of the River Jordan
on Chicago’s most popular radio
(Ohio).
stations because the city’s powersOne of the first goals in the
that-be feared it would inspire black
music-centered classroom is to
militant attitudes and acts. When
make students aware of masking
Mayfield set out on a solo career,
by playing the popular music of a
his first single was “Don’t Worry
historical moment and asking stu(If There’s a Hell Below We’re All
dents to identify potential coded
Gonna Go,” a blistering catalog of
messages. What emerges is usuFigure 2. Performing here for a Dutch television audience in 1972, Curtis Mayfield
the problems that had only wors- (1942–1999) enjoyed a successful solo career after his time with The Impressions. ally a lively discussion ranging
ened for residents of the West In 1970, he founded the independent record label, Curtom Records, where he from enthusiastic “overreaching” to
Side: housing, employment, police recorded and produced hit albums, including for his former group. As a solo adamant insistence that the politibrutality, and, less than a decade artist, Mayfield’s social commentary defined most of his lyrics, regularly making cal messages are make-believe,
after King’s “I Have a Dream” references to problems he experienced growing up in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green impositions of individuals pushspeech, a racial divide growing housing projects. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
ing their own agendas. The point
larger by the day (Figure 2). In both
isn’t to find the “right” meaning,
respects, music can serve as a key element in teaching about the black
but to demonstrate the potential of masking—it is fine, preferable in
freedom struggle in the North.
fact, if resistant listeners deny the political dimensions. In the course
of the discussion, it is crucial to establish that the presence of masked
Music and Masking
meanings does not replace or invalidate the surface meanings. Even
The story of the movement in the North is just beginning to be heard
the gospel singers most committed to the movement—Mahalia Jackson,
in classrooms. Students raised on deeply deceptive images of the moveClara Ward, Dorothy Love Coates—saw the religious meanings of their
ment as the key moment in America’s triumphal march to a post-racial
songs as central. Soul songs like The Temptations’ “Get Ready” or “It’s
society typically enter classrooms thinking of it as something that
Growing,” both of which can be heard as celebrations of the movehappened long ago and far away. While the specifics vary with class
ment’s increasing energy, are at the same time dance music and love
level, geography, and the racial mix in the classroom, some degree of
songs. “Dancing in the Streets” both invites listeners to participate in a
resistance—usually high—almost always greets the suggestion that
literal street party and, despite Martha Reeves’s insistence that she had
the movement happened everywhere in the United States and that,
no political intent, celebrates a new spirit of militancy; black Detroiters
especially in the North, the important battles were if not precisely lost,
blasted the song out their windows in the riot/insurrection of 1967.
certainly not won.
Aretha’s “Respect” is an uncompromising statement from a woman to
Music can help tell that story in ways students can hear while introa man (or vice versa, in Otis Redding’s original) and a Black Power
ducing them to African American cultural practices which were themanthem (Figure 3).
selves central to the movement. From this angle, music is not merely
subject, but the focal point of pedagogical practice. Approaching the
Teaching the Politics of a Song
movement via music allows students to enter its history from the
In his pioneering book Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963),
human, emotional, existential dimensions of experience as opposed
Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) identified five basic characteristics of
to the ideological, intellectual, theoretical levels. This represents a
African American music: functionality, which refers both to music’s
pedagogical version of the tradition of “masking,” a key element of the
ability to carry explicit messages and, more importantly, to the embedmusical tradition, the rejection of which would define the trajectory of
dedness of music in everyday black life; improvisation; polyrhythm;
the movement in the North. Theorized by scholars, artists, and historivocalization; and, crucially for music-based pedagogical practice, call
ans from W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sterling Brown to
and response (3). In A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of
42 OAH Magazine of History • January 2012
Figure 3. The “Queen of Soul,” Aretha Franklin (1942–) is shown here at a news conference on March 26, 1973. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Franklin spent her formative years in the city of Detroit, a vital center for the development and popularity of soul music in the 1960s. A feminist symbol after recording a version of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” Franklin also conveyed a heightened sense of black pride in the decades of the northern freedom struggle. (Courtesy of AP Images)
America (2006), which uses music to trace the history of race in America
from the 1950s to the start of the new millennium, I defined call and
response as both an aesthetic and a political practice
The basic structure of call and response is straightforward.
An individual voice, frequently a preacher or a singer, calls out
in a way that asks for a response. The response can be verbal,
musical, physical—anything that communicates with the
leader or the rest of the group. The response can affirm, argue,
redirect the dialog, raise a new question. Any response that
gains attention and elicits a response of its own becomes a
new call. Usually the individual who issued the first call
remains the focal point of the dialogue. But it doesn’t have to
be that way. During the movement, Charles Mingus, fascinated with the political and spiritual implications of call and
response, explored ideas of community based on the constant
redefinition of the relationship between group and leader (4).
An African American voicing of praxis as developed by Paolo Freiere
and Stuart Hall, call and response can be embedded in classroom practice (5). Typically, I structure my classes around a sequence of songs
which reflect on the content of the day’s readings, usually ones which
were popular at the time of key events. In my “Soul Music and the Civil
Rights Movement” seminar, I assigned articles from the Library of
America’s Reporting Civil Rights; in my “Music and the Movement in
the North seminar, I’m developing thematic units keyed to the chapters
in Thomas Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil
Rights in the North (2009).While I’ll provide some suggestions below in
Further Resources, a more complete list of songs which were popular
at particular moments can be found in Joel Whitburn’s The Billboard
Book of Top 40 R&B and Hip-Hop Hits (2010) and Dave Marsh’s indispensable The Heart of Rock and Soul (1999), by far the best source of
information for teachers seeking insight into the content and
context of specific songs.
The first step is to ask students to consider the song as a response
to the political moment, which includes African American awareness
of how that moment relates to previous historical moments. Sometimes, the connections are readily visible and specific as in the case of
Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues,” James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m
Black and I’m Proud)” or Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” (Figure 4).
Sometimes, connections which aren’t absolutely clear become readily
visible when teachers introduce background information: “Meeting
OAH Magazine of History • January 2012 43
Over Yonder,” for example, or
implicit in the driving rhythm
Aretha Franklin’s “Think,” which
of James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a
was written in the immediate afterBrand New Bag” or the unresolved
math of the assassination of her
yearning in The Supremes’ “Somefriend Martin Luther King, Jr.
day We’ll Be Together.” As at every
Often, however, a song’s response
stage in pedagogical practice, howto history is less direct, a matter of
ever, it’s necessary to remind stutone rather than content: Ruby and
dents that differences in awareness
the Romantics’ “Our Day Will
of calls and responses are not
Come,” Little Eva’s “Locomotion,”
racially determined. The aesthetic,
and the Marvin Gaye–Kim Weston
and the pedagogy, are cultural, not
duet “It Takes Two.” None of these
essentialist. A few whites heard the
contains any specifically political
masked meanings; many blacks, for
content, but capture the energy of
whom music was primarily a form
the movement at a moment when
of entertainment or a way of workmany believed its promise would
ing through personal issues, didn’t.
be realized. Over the course of a
semester, students come to hear
Conclusion
the changing tone of the moveGoing over the soundtrack of the
ment as it moves from “Come See
movement can help students
About Me” to Sly and the Family
understand the various interpreStone’s “Family Affair.” Of course,
tations ascribed to the black
sorrow and joy exist at every
struggle in the North. While at
moment, but even a cursory glance
times, the political thrust of
at the changing content of the
blacks’ collective actions was
most popular songs from year to
silenced or ignored, at others,
year—Whitburn provides lists—
audiences overreached in their
makes the basic point clear even
interpretations of black activism
to students who have grown up Figure 4. With endless energy, James Brown (1933–2006), “the hardest working as being criminally subversive
thinking of the movement as a man in show business,” captivated audiences with his pioneering brand of soulful and threatening. The most imporfunk as shown in this 1973 photograph of a concert in Hamburg, Germany.
single moment in the past.
tant thing about music as pedaAfter investigating a song’s Brown made a political as well as musical impact. Songs like “Say It Loud (I’m gogical resource is that it offers an
connection with contemporary his- Black and I’m Proud)” became spirited movement anthems. (Photograph by entry into the internal conversatory, I ask students to expand their Heinrich Klaffs; Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
tions of the African American
focus and speculate on how differcommunity and an opportunity
ent groups of listeners might have heard the song as call. What kinds
for students to explore and compare the differences in their own
of actions or attitudes might it have suggested? How would the sense
responses.
of the call have differed depending on individual or community experience? Race is only one of several variables that come into play at this
Further Resources
stage; while it’s important to acknowledge the patterns of difference
In what follows, I’ll provide a quick outline of how the pedagogical
between “white” and “black” hearing, age is an almost equally imporapproach described above might be applied to the specific case of the
tant variable. When the political emphasis shifts from “Civil Rights” to
movement in the North. Using Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty as my
“Black Power” (a distinction the newer generation of civil rights histotouchstone, I’ll outline a sequence of units focused on specific themes
rians have rightly called into question), clear differences in response
accompanied with brief lists of artists and songs. I’ve found it particuemerge between younger northern-born blacks and the older generalarly useful to focus on the biographies of key figures, showing how their
tions with direct experience of the South (6).
calls are both distinctly individual and tied to the broader patterns of
Similarly, young whites who grew up listening to the interracial
African American life. For information and analysis of the songs—and
rock ‘n’ roll of Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard accepted the
much more inclusive playlists–see Marsh’s The Heart of Rock and Soul;
sound of movement-related soul much more readily than their parents.
Ward’s Just My Soul Responding; Neal’s What the Music Said; and my
The message transmitted by an early Motown single to white teenagers
A Change Is Gonna Come. Once an artist has been introduced, I typically
(and their eavesdropping parents) may well amount to “black people
keep them in the story, charting their work as it develops, for example,
aren’t scary so it’s okay to buy me,” a process that provided Berry
following Ray Charles from his explosive R&B and cool jazz to country
Gordy with the capital to record albums such as “The Great March to
and western; or The Temptations from upbeat pop to “psychedelic soul.”
Freedom” (documenting the movement in Detroit and including the
pre-Washington version of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech) and later
I. The Long Civil Rights Movement in the North
founding the Black Forum label which released spoken word albums by
Reading: Sugrue, chapters 1–3
Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka, and Elaine Brown. Black audiences
Central themes: The Great Migration and the North as “promised
trained in and attuned to the aesthetic practices of masking and call
land”; continuity of Southern and Northern African American music;
and response were much more likely to hear the political energy
the persistence of the blues; the diversity of cities.
44 OAH Magazine of History • January 2012
Featured artists: Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Charlie Parker.
Playlist: “Harlem Airshaft” (Ellington); “Strange Fruit” (Holiday);
“Keep Your Hands on the Plow,” “Walk in Jerusalem,” “Move On Up a
Little Higher” (Jackson); “Ornithology” (Parker); “Ain’t Nobody Here
But Us Chickens” (Louis Jordan); “Blood Done Sign My Name” (Radio
Four); “How I Got Over” (Swam Silvertones, Clara Ward.)
II. Troubles in the Promised Land
Reading: Sugrue, chapters 4–5
Central themes: Masking as commercial and survival strategy; education and the role of individual pioneers (Jackie Robinson); the limits of
political and economic power in the urban North; the entertainment
industry as focus of desegregation.
Featured artists: Sam Cooke, Dinah Washington, Charles Mingus, Ray
Charles
Playlist: “The Great Pretender” (The Platters); “Come and Go
to that Land,” “Pilgrim of Sorrow” (Cooke with the Soul Stirrers);
“Wonderful World,” “A Change Is Gonna Come” (Cooke); “This Bitter
Earth” (Washington); “Haitian Fight Song” (Mingus); “What’d I Say”
(Charles); “Whatcha Gonna Do” (Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters)
“Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” (Ruth Brown).
III. Interracial Dialogues and Crossover Dreams
Reading: Sugrue, chapters 6–9
Central themes: the relative optimism of the early 1960s; African
Americans in the boom economy; music and cultural desegregation;
growing frustration in black cities.
Featured artists: Chuck Berry, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Aretha
Franklin
Playlist: “Nadine,” “The Promised Land” (Berry); “Keep on Pushing,”
“People Get Ready,” “Meeting Over Yonder,” “We’re a Winner” (The
Impressions); “Don’t Worry” (Mayfield); “Get Ready,” “It’s Growing” (The
Temptations); “Come See About Me” (The Supremes); I Second That
Emotion” (Smokey Robinson and the Miracles); “I Was Made to Love
Her,” “Heaven Help Us All,” “Living for the City,” “You Haven’t Done
Nothing” (Wonder); “Respect,” “Chain of Fools,” “Think,” “The Thrill
Is Gone” (Aretha).
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Marc Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black
Public Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999); Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul
Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (New York:
HarperCollins Publisher, 1986).
See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk” in Writings (New York: The
Library of America, 1984), especially chapter XIV, “The Sorrow Songs,”
536–47; the introduction to Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men in The
Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 1032–34; Sterling
Brown, Negro Poetry and Drama (Cambridge, MA: Athenaeum, 1969);
Lawrence Levin, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory
and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988); and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African
American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Leroi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Harper,
1989, originally published 1963), especially Chapter 3, “African Slaves/
American Slaves: Their Music.”
Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America,
revised & updated (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 11.
For Freiere’s basic approach to praxis, see Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New
York: Continuum, 1970). Hall applies the concept to diasporic cultural
traditions in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Theorizing Diaspora, eds.
Jana. Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006),
233–46.
Numerous historians have complicated the simplistic distinction between a
“non-violent interracial” civil rights movement and a “militant nationalist”
Black Power movement, preferring to think in terms of a “long Civil Rights
Movement” or an “African American Freedom movement.” See Timothy
Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Barbara Ransby,
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and Daniel
McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance—
A New History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Knopf, 2010).
Craig Werner is professor of Afro-American studies, English, and Integrated
Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is a Senior
Fellow in Race, Ethnicity & Indigeneity at the Institute for Research in the
Humanities. He is the author of A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race
& the Soul of America, rev. ed. (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and
Higher Ground: Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, and
the Rise & Fall of American Soul (Crown Publishers, 2004).
IV. No More Masks: Disillusionment and the Rise of Black Power
Reading: Sugrue, chapters 10–14
Central themes: the emergence of “Black Power”; rejection of masking;
connections and tension between Black Power and the white counterculture; impact of Vietnam; black capitalism; white backlash; decay of
sense of unity within African American communities.
Featured artists: Marvin Gaye, Gil Scott-Heron, Nina Simone, Sly and
the Family Stone
Playlist: “It Takes Two” (Gaye with Kim Weston); “The End of
Our Road,” “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Inner City Blues”
(Gaye); “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “Whitey’s on the
Moon” (Scott-Heron); “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead),” “I Wish That
I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”
(Simone); “Everyday People,” “Family Affair” (Sly); “Smiling Faces
Sometimes” (Undisputed Truth); “The Ghetto” (Donny Hathaway)
“Where Is the Love?” (Hathaway and Roberta Flack). q
Endnotes
1. Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness
and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
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