◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Keep Singing I want to talk to you about a banjo. Not as a metaphor. An actual five-string banjo that I carried for seventy years to union halls and church basements and civil rights marches and the banks of a dying river and the steps where young people were camping because they had figured out that the system was broken and they wanted to say so. A banjo is a loud instrument. That is not an accident. In 1955 I was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. They wanted to know who I associated with, what I believed, whether I was a Communist. I did not take the Fifth Amendment. I took the First. I said: you don't have the right to ask me what I believe or who I associate with or what songs I sing. That question is itself the weapon. The answer is to refuse it — to stand up in the room and say: no. This is not a question I will answer because it is not a question you have the right to ask. They cited me for contempt. I went home and kept singing. I want to tell you about the word shall. We Shall Overcome. Not we will overcome. Will is a prediction. Shall is a covenant — a moral declaration made before witnesses, a statement not about what will happen but about what you are obligated to make happen. I changed one word and the whole thing changed. That is what a word can do when it is the right word in the right mouth at the right moment. I watched McCarthy rise and fall. I watched Vietnam begin and end. I watched the Hudson River go from a dead thing — so polluted you could not swim in it, the fish gone — to a living river swum in by children who do not know what it used to be. We built a boat. We sailed up and down the river singing about it, teaching people what had been done to it and what could bring it back. It came back. Not because of a law, though laws helped. Because people decided this river was theirs and they were going to take it back. That is always how it happens. That is the only way it happens. I know what I am watching now. I have seen it before. Not the specific man. The specific pattern. The fear made into policy. The question that is itself a weapon. The loyalty oath. The list of names. The room where you are asked what you believe and whether your beliefs are acceptable to the people who have decided they get to decide. I know how this ends if people keep singing. I know how it ends if they stop. The machine always thinks it has finally silenced the song. It has not. The song is older than the machine. The song will be here when the machine is rust. I am asking you to sing. Not as a metaphor. As a literal instruction. Find other people. Get in a room with them. Open your mouths. Make the sound together. It does not matter if you think you cannot sing. Everyone can sing. The inability to sing is something you were taught. When you sing together something happens that cannot happen any other way. You are no longer an audience. You are a chorus. And a chorus knows something an audience never learns — that the sound belongs to everyone making it. That no one can take it away. That this land is your land. Not the land of the people who put their name on the buildings. Your land. The land in the shadow of the steeple. The land of the relief office. The land where the no trespassing sign has another side. I am asking you to sing about that side now. They asked me what I believed. I believe in the chorus. I believe that the human voice raised with other human voices is the most powerful thing on the face of this earth. I believe in the long game. The river came back. Keep singing.