We Shall Overcome - Origins As Gospel, Folk, and Labor Song

Origins As Gospel, Folk, and Labor Song

In a 2006 interview with Beliefnet.com interviewer, Wendy Schuman; Pete Seeger responded to the following question regarding the origin of "We Shall Overcome": Wendy Schuman: "What’s the origin of “We Shall Overcome,” the hymn of the civil rights movement, which you popularized?"

Pete Seeger: '"Nobody knows exactly who wrote the original. The original was faster.' “I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright, someday….deep in my heart I do not weep, I’ll be alright someday.” Or “deep in my heart I do believe.” And other verses are “I’ll wear the crown, I’ll wear the crown,” and “I’ll be like Him, I’ll be like Him” or “I’ll overcome, I’ll overcome.”

Although some have speculated that We Shall Overcome was inspired by the song, I'll Overcome", copyrighted in 1901 by Rev. Charles Albert Tindley, Recent evidence strongly suggests that the actual source was a Gospel Hymn entitled: "If My Jesus Wills"; composed by an African American Baptist choir director named, Louise Shropshire in 1942 and copyrighted in 1954. The book, We Shall Overcome; Sacred Song on the Devil's Tongue, shows Louise Shropshire was a close friend and civil-rights ally of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

Shropshire's lyrics:

I'll Overcome, I'll Overcome, I'll Overcome Someday If My Jesus Wills, I Do Believe, I'll Overcome Someday

In addition, Shropshire's hymn features the addition verse: "Gonna Get My Crown"

"I'll Overcome Someday" was a hymn or gospel music composition by the Reverend Charles Albert Tindley of Philadelphia that appeared together with seven other songs in a hymnal published in 1901. A noted minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tindley was the author of forty-five influential gospel hymns, of which "We'll Understand It By and By" and "Stand By Me" are among the best known. The published text bore the epigraph, "Ye shall overcome if ye faint not", derived from Galatians 6:9: "And let us not be weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not." It read:

The world is one great battlefield
With forces all arrayed.
If in my heart I do not yield,
I'll overcome some day.

Tindley's songs were written in an idiom rooted in African American folk traditions, using pentatonic intervals, with ample space allowed for improvised interpolation, the addition of "blue" thirds and sevenths, and frequently featuring short refrains in which the congregation could join. Tindley's importance, however, was primarily as a lyricist and poet whose words spoke directly to the feelings of his audiences, many of whom had been freed from slavery only thirty-six years before he first published his songs, and who were often impoverished, illiterate, and newly arrived in the North. "Even today" wrote musicologist Horace Boyer in 1983, "ministers quote his texts in the midst of their sermons as if they were poems, as indeed they are."

After its first success, the popularity of "I'll Overcome" waned for a time in the gospel world. However, a letter printed on the front page of the February 1909, United Mine Workers Journal states that, " Last year at a strike, we opened every meeting with a prayer, and singing that good old song, 'We Will Overcome.'" Whether this refers to Tindley's 1902 gospel song cannot be determined, since the lyrics and tune have not come down to us. The mention is significant, however, since this is the first mention of the song's being sung in a secular context and mixed race setting. It is also (if the quotation is accurate) the first instance of the use of the first person plural pronoun "we" of a movement song instead of the singular "I" usual in the gospel and spiritual tradition. It seems reasonable to suppose that this more militant version, or its memory, persisted underground in the labor movement during the 1920s to re-emerge during its revival of the 1930s and 1940s.

Outside of the labor movement Tindley's hymn was simplified, and performances began to resemble another folk-based spiritual, "I'll Be All Right", of which many versions exist. Tindley's original refrain, "If in my heart, I do not yield", was simplified to "Deep in my heart, I do believe", and additional improvised verses were added. According to David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace, by 1945 the words and the tune had come together in a song still called by Tindley's title, "I'll Overcome Some Day", with additional words by Atron Twigg and a revised musical arrangement by Chicago composer, arranger, and publisher, Kenneth Morris. Legendary gospel singer, pianist, and composer, Roberta Martin, also based in Chicago, composed another version of "I'll Overcome", the last 12 bars of which are the same as the current version of 'We Shall Overcome.'" Thus by the end of 1945 several versions of "I Will Overcome" were current as a gospel song, while on the South Carolina picket line, Lucille Simmons and other striking tobacco workers were singing a slow version of the song as, "We Will Overcome".

Tindley's "I'll Overcome Someday" thus provides the structure for "We Shall Overcome", with both text and melody having undergone a process of alteration. The tune has been changed so that it now echoes the opening and closing melody of the powerfully resonant 19th century, "No More Auction Block For Me", also known from its refrain as, "Many Thousands Gone". This was number 35 in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's collection of Negro Spirituals that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of June, 1867, with a comment by Higginson reflecting on how such songs were composed (i.e., whether the work of a single author or through what used to be called "communal composition"):

Even of this last composition, however, we have only the approximate date and know nothing of the mode of composition. Allan Ramsay says of the Scots Songs, that, no matter who made them, they were soon attributed to the minister of the parish whence they sprang. And I always wondered, about these, whether they had always a conscious and definite origin in some leading mind, or whether they grew by gradual accretion, in an almost unconscious way. On this point I could get no information, though I asked many questions, until at last, one day when I was being rowed across from Beaufort to Ladies' Island, I found myself, with delight, on the actual trail of a song. One of the oarsmen, a brisk young fellow, not a soldier, on being asked for his theory of the matter, dropped out a coy confession. "Some good spirituals," he said, "are start jess out o' curiosity. I been a-raise a sing, myself, once."

My dream was fulfilled, and I had traced out, not the poem alone, but the poet. I implored him to proceed.

"Once we boys," he said, "went for to tote some rice, and de nigger-driver, he keep a-callin' on us; and I say, 'O, de ole nigger-driver!' Den another said, 'First thing my mammy told me was, notin' so bad as a nigger-driver.' Den I made a sing, just puttin' a word, and den another word."

Then he began singing, and the men, after listening a moment, joined in the chorus as if it were an old acquaintance, though they evidently had never heard it before. I saw how easily a new "sing" took root among them.

Coincidentally, Bob Dylan claims that he used this very same melodic motif from "No More Auction Block" for his composition, "Blowin' in the Wind." Thus similarities of melodic and rhythmic patterns imparted cultural and emotional resonance ("the same feeling") to three different, and historically very significant songs.

It has also been pointed out that the note progression of the tune has a noticeable family resemblance to the famous lay Catholic hymn "O Sanctissima" (also known as "The Sicilian Mariner's Hymn") collected (or composed) in Italy by Johann Gottfried Herder in the late 18th Century. Arguably an even closer resemblance is to Caro Mio Ben attributed to Neapolitan composer Giuseppe Giordani; this is also a late 18th century Italian song and was a staple of 19th century voice teachers.