[MUSIC] Storytelling is the key to Southern culture. People in the South are telling stories every moment they're awake. And we've seen preacher tales, we've seen auctioneers, we've seen preaching we've seen the dozens in toasts The story as we will see is a key to all of the American South, including the art, the painting, the photography, the literature, and music. We can see for example, how out of the rich traditions of Southern spirituals and religious music, Pete Seeger, was inspired to compose the great anthem of civil rights in the South, We Shall Overcome. >> The song We Shall Overcome, is now known worldwide. How it got to be what it is, is a long story. 1903, Reverend Charles Tindley of Philadelphia, great man, had a big church in Philadelphia. He wrote a song. [INAUDIBLE] sheet music copyrighted. [MUSIC] I'll overcome some day. I'll overcome some day. If in my heart, I do not yield. I'll overcome some day. He put out a book called Gospel Pearls that started off the use of the word gospel music. And some of his students, like Lucy Campbell, went on to become other great gospel songwriters. And somewhere along the line between 1903, 1945, I'll Overcome got a quite different melody and a quite different rhythm. [MUSIC] Better known, it was better known as I'll Be All Right. It was the most favorite verse. I'll be all right, I'll be all right, I'll be all right, someday. So on. I'll be like him. It was a well-known gospel song, still is, in this fast version throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, I don't know where else. But in 1945 or 46, some 300 tobacco workers, mostly black, mostly women. Were on strike in Charleston, South Carolina. And a long, bitter strike, and people took turns on the picket line, and a music-loving people is always going to sing. They were singing hymns most of the time on the picket line. Once in a while, they'd sing a union song, but mostly they were singing hymns. And Lucille Simmons loved to sing, I'll Overcome. But she changed it to We Will Overcome. We, and she loved to sing it the slow way, you know, I Need Him can be sung, so any, any hymn can be sung long meter or short meter. You can sing Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Or you can sing Amazing Grace, that's long meter. But Lucille Simmons liked to sing We Will Overcome long meter. She had a beautiful voice, and they said oh here's Lucille, we're going to hear that long, slow song. And she would sing it. We will overcome, we will overcome. We'll get higher wages, we'll get shorter hours. Sylvia Horton, a white woman, was one of the organizers from the Highlander Folk School, they called it then. She comes down to help, and she's completely captivated by this song, starts singing it. Sylvia also had a lovely alto voice, and an accordion. We will overcome. We will overcome. Well, she taught it to me on one of her fundraising trips up north and I liked it but I couldn't, I don't have a voice that could sing that way so I found myself singing it. And teaching it to audiences. [MUSIC] And I added some verses. We shall live in peace, the whole wide world around. We'll walk hand in hand. And I traveled around the country East, West. Out in Los Angeles I meet a young fella named Guy Carolan, teach it to him. Guy Carolan's family come from North Carolina. He wanted to get acquainted with the South too as I had. And he goes there, next thing you know he's helping the Highlander Folk School, School with some workshops. And they had in 1960, an all-South workshop in, in the use of music in the freedom movement. And Guy teaches them this song. I wasn't there but I suspect that they said, Guy, you've got a good song but you don't have the rhythm quite right. And they gave it the motown beat, the famous soul beat. And so instead of going, we shall overcome, somewhere along the line, I changed the will to shall. Me and my Harvard education. We shall, and it opens up the mouth better. So, [COUGH] they just changed that rhythm. We shall overcome, we shall overcome. Put their arms around each other across the. And, and in this form, it now, within one month, spread through the South. It, it, it was the favorite song of the founding convention of SNCC, three weeks later at Raleigh, North Carolina. Where again, people were from all through the South. Curiously enough, Dr. King had heard me sing the song three, four years before. He came to the Highlander Folk School. And Sylvia Horton had died, and Miles says, Pete won't you come down and lead some songs? We can't have a gathering here without music. And I was singing We Shall Overcome. And Braiden tells me that she drove Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy up to Kentucky the next day to a speaking engagement. She remembers King in the back seat saying, We Shall Overcome. That songs really sticks with you, doesn't it?
