WE SHALL OVERCOME

Album's version

One, two, three, four*

Hey we shall overcome, we shall overcome
We shall overcome someday
Darlin' here in my heart, yeah I do believe
We shall overcome someday

Well we'll walk hand in hand, we'll walk hand in hand
We'll walk hand in hand someday
Darlin' here in my heart, yeah I do believe
We'll walk hand in hand someday

Well we shall live in peace, we shall live in peace
We shall live in peace someday
Darlin' here in my heart, yeah I do believe
We shall live in peace someday

Well we are not afraid, we are not afraid
We shall overcome someday
Yeah here in my heart, I do believe
We shall overcome someday

Hey we shall overcome, we shall overcome
We shall overcome someday
Darlin' here in my heart, I do believe
We shall overcome someday
We shall overcome someday

Bruce recorded Pete Seeger's arrangement of this old folk traditional song with a group of non-E Street Band musicians at Thrill Hill Recording (Springsteen's home studio) in Colts Neck, NJ, on 02 Nov 1997, during the first of the 3 "Seeger Sessions". The song was recorded especially for the Mar 1998 tribute album, Where Have All The Flowers Gone: The Songs Of Pete Seeger (Appleseed Recordings, catalogue # APPLESEED 1024).

Bruce's WE SHALL OVERCOME also appeared on a very rare 1998 France-only 1-track single, a promotional release for the above-mentioned tribute album (catalogue # NIGHT & DAY/RED HOUSE APR 1050). Below scans are taken from the Lost In The Flood website.

The song is included on Bruce's 2006 cover album, We Shall Overcome - The Seeger Sessions. It is the same Nov 1997 recording, but the mix is slightly different.

The Seeger Sessions consist of three recording sessions (a 2-days session on 01 and 02 Nov 1997, a 1-day session in Dec 2005, and a 1-day session in Jan 2006), during which all the album's songs were cut live in the living room of Bruce's New Jersey farmhouse. The songs were not rehearsed and all arrangements were conducted as Bruce and the band played.

This song was reported to be rehearsed for the Seeger Sessions tour by Bruce Springsteen with his Seeger Sessions Band on 20 and 21 Mar and 06 and 07 Apr 2006 at the Paramount Theater, Asbury Park, NJ. Some comments from the people who listened to the rehearsals:

• "Sort of a gospel arraignment." [20 Mar]
• "Very moving version. Nice accordion throughout and the backup singers really add a lot." [07 Apr]

Played during all 4 public rehearsal shows for The Seeger Sessions tour -- 20, 24, 25, and 26 Apr 2006 at the Convention Hall, Asbury Park, NJ.

The song was also played on 30 Apr 2006 at New Orleans Fair Grounds, New Orleans, LA, when Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band closed the first weekend of the New Orelans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Bruce Springsteen's 1997 rendition of the song was used as the soundtrack to a post-9/11 video montage of terrorism and self-sacrifice in New York City assembled by NBC-TV and aired for a week on the nightly national news. NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw called Springsteen's recording "an important anthem of hope for these troubled times."

The above lyrics refer to Bruce's studio version that was released on Where Have All The Flowers Gone: The Songs Of Pete Seeger in 1998 and on We Shall Overcome - The Seeger Sessions in 2006. However, it is the remix that differs the two releases.

Pete Seeger has rearranged this traditional song and recorded it in 1963. It was released as a single (Columbia CL 2101/CS 8901) on 08 Jun 1963, and can now be found on many of Seeger releases, including his Greatest Hits.

Originally, lyrics for the song are derived from an old slavery song that field workers used to sing to give them a moral support for carrying on, but it was then sang as "I'll be alright". Then in about 1901, and as laws separating the races were being decreed, a Methodist called Charles Albert Tindley changed it to "I'll overcome someday".

The year that World War II ended, black women went on strike protesting against plant owners that controlled everything and the song was changed once more to "We will win our rights" (which was more related to the spirit of their movement then). Then after gaining the rights they were asking for, two of these women protesters went on to teach at a civil rights training school and gave the song a little more gospel sound, changing the "will" into "shall" ("We shall overcome").

Then one night state troopers deputized by the sheriff crashed and ransacked the school in order to put a scare in the students of social change. The students were told to lie flat on their stomachs in the dark, and slowly one after the other they began to sing that song to deal with their fright, when a 13 year-old girl called Jamalia Jones added her own verse to the song "we are not afraid, we are not afraid today..." As their singing became louder, the troopers gave up and left them alone once and for all.

Briefly after that incident, a music instructor called Guy Carawan, came to the school and he had long hair and a curled beard (which caused him to be called a hippie hillbilly). He took the song with him "on the road" and sang it to audiences all over the country but he speeded up the tempo a bit. However, when he sang it to a Black audience they started tugging at the words and slowing it back to its original meter.

The song also became an anthem for America's Civil Rights Movement, and that was when Pete Seeger carried the song and rhythm across the country with a black quartet called The Freedom Singers. But Seeger's most enduring fame may come from the fact that he has a vital role in the development and popularity of this racial agitators' anthem. It was his variation of the old spiritual that has become an anthem of the crusade for equality in America. He is now considered one of the lyricists of the currently known version, along with Zilphia Horton, Guy Carawan, and Frank Hamilton. [Read Seeger's notes below]

Peter Lyon wrote in the Jul 1965 issue of Holiday, "Indeed, if he had done nothing else in his forty-six years, his part in the popularization of just one song would assure him a modest immortality. The song is called We Shall Overcome, and characteristically, he and the three others who helped shape it have assigned their considerable royalties from its performances to the civil-rights movement."

Later on when Martin Luther King started his movement, people started to sing the song adding "we will walk together someday, black and white together someday".

Check out Dave Marsh's liner notes below for additional details.

The above lyrics refer to Bruce's studio version. The song is more developed; check out Mahalia Jackson's version from the benefit album God Bless America.

* This line was available on the 1998 mix, and was removed in the 2006 mix.

Liner notes by Pete Seeger on Where Have All The Flowers Gone: The Songs Of Pete Seeger:

"This song was originally one of two African American Spirituals: I'll Overcome Some Day or I'll be All Right. In 1946, several hundred employees of the American Tobacco Company in Charleston, South Carolina were on strike. They sang on the picket line to keep their spirits. Lucille Simmons started singing the song on the picket line and changed one important word from "I" to "we". Zilphia Horton learned it when a group of strikers visited the Highland Fold School, the Labor Education Center in Tennessee. She taught it to me and we published it as WE SHALL OVERCOME in our songletter, People's Songs Bulletin. in 1952, I taught it to Guy Carawan and Frank Hamilton. Guy introduced the song to the founding convention of SNCC (student non-violent Coordinating Committee) in North Carolina. It swept the country.

Dave Marsh's liner notes about WE SHALL OVERCOME:

The most important political protest song of all-time, sung around the world wherever people fight for justice and equality. It was often sung as the final song at mass meetings during the civil rights movement. It is said that every meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the most militant group in the Southern movement, ended with "We Shall Overcome," whether the meeting was among three or three hundred. It defined purpose; it spoke to fears; it brought hope; and it invoked the spirit of what the Movement called, and SNCC lived, "the beloved community." So great was the song's importance, journalist Pat Watters believed, that "in nearly every place where the song was heard in those years when it was the anthem of the movement, people... believed it originated there."

"We Shall Overcome" is probably a merger of Charles Tindley's "I'll Overcome Someday" and an older hymn called "I'll Be All Right." Tindley was the most prolific and beloved writer of African American religious music, author of, among others, "Stand By Me," "We'll Understand It Better By and By" (which contains the line "We will tell a story of how we overcome"), and "The Storm is Passing Over." He based "I'll Overcome Someday" on Galations 6:9, "And let us not be weary in well doing; for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not." He certainly took the tune from "I'll Be All Right," which is still commonly sung in the Georgia Sea Islands and was in the repertoire of gospel-blues singer Rev. Gary Davis.

The song's political history passes through the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union in Arkansas, where Rev. Claude Williams, grandfather of Lucinda Williams, according to Lee Hays of the Weavers, who worked with the STFU. From there it passed on to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, whose music leader, Zilphia Horton, had also been involved with Claude Williams.

To this point, "I Will Overcome" was an uptempo, rhythmic song, often accompanied by handclaps on the backbeat. The striking workers at a cigar warehouse in Charleston, South Carolina sang it on strike in 1945-46. The workers carried picket signs, so they didn't clap. One of them, Lucille Simmons, adapted the tune to the much slower "long meter" or Dr. Watts style, with eight syllables to each line. ""They called it surge singing. It's like the waves of the ocean.," Lee Hays told Pete Seeger.

Simmons, another of the striker, went to Highlander and taught her union's version there. Horton taught it to Pete Seeger, who changed "Will" to "Shall"--he's not sure why. Pete taught it to several people. The most important were Frank Hamilton, who went on to found Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music, and Guy Carawan, the true Johnny Appleseed of movement folk song who became the music leader at Highlander after Horton died and spent much of the movement period traveling from city to city, spreading songs and especially, teaching people "Eyes on the Prize" and "We Shall Overcome."

"We Shall Overcome" is what Pete Seeger calls a "portfolio" song--it easily accommodates new verses, including ones made up on the spot. The great verse, "We are not afraid" was made up spontaneously during a police/Ku Klux Klan raid on Highlander by 14 year old Jamilla Jones. Other verses came and went during the various localized freedom movements that made up the overall civil rights movements. This is one of the main reasons why the song travels so well to other kinds of movements. It was widely sung during the South African movement to end apartheid.

The song is now credited, for publishing purposes, to Horton, Carawan, Seeger and Hamilton. This is obviously inaccurate but the credit particularly important for two reasons: Harold Leventhal, the folk music sage who managed the Weavers and Seeger, knew the song would be claimed by some music industry sharpie if singers involved with the movement didn't step in. Also, the royalties, initially assigned to SNCC, have, since that group's demise, gone to the Highlander Center where they are distributed in small grants for cultural expression to African-American groups working in the South.

Pete Seeger's best recording of this song is from the 1963 Carnegie Hall Concert, where he performed it with the SNCC Freedom Singers, led by the now-legendary Bernie Johnson Reagon. It is the title track of We Shall Overcome: The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert.