We shall Overcome? Bob Dylan, Complicity, and the March on Washington 1963

摘要

Contemporary reports had been surprisingly quiet about the sounds and soundtrack of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 27 August 1963 where Martin Luther King, Jr. held his famous “I have a dream” speech. When journalist Lerone Bennett Jr. from the influential magazine for the African-American market, EBONY, reported on the March on Washington, music was more or less absent. As the most significant effect of the march, LIFE magazine emphasized the “Negroes’s orderly demonstration of their potential as a moral force” (20). The New York Times zoomed in on the political speeches emphasizing particularly Martin Luther King’s speech, which “touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else” (1). There is hardly any mention of the power of music, which permeated the event. This silence of the contemporary press begs the following question: Is there a musical signature that can be connected to the March on Washington?The music of the March of Washington cannot be seen exclusively from the perspective of the African American struggle for freedom but also needs to be understood by drawing attention to the connection between youth, ethnicity and the folk revival in the early 1960s. While white teenagers in the mid-1950s turned to musical styles such as a rock’n’roll to distance themselves from their parents’ generation, the tensions over civil rights and second class citizenship of African Americans, especially in the South, increased the conflicts between emerging baby boomers and their parents. During the Kennedy presidency, a large number of white college students began to turn to folk music in order to re-signify the political heritage of the 1930s folk music towards an expression of political dissent. The folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s emerged from the songs of the folk and blues musician Lead Belly and John and Alan Lomax ethnomusicological work of archiving folk music. Figures such as Pete and Mike Seeger, as well as Phil Ochs, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan offered some of the most influential contributions to the folk movement. Folk music repertories often have a specific function in order to “motivate the formation and dissolution of groups,” as Philip Bohlman points out (288). During the civil rights movement, folk music functioned as a sounding board to give expression to resistance regarding discrimination on racial grounds. Contemporary reports had been surprisingly quiet about the sounds and soundtrack of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 27 August 1963 where Martin Luther King, Jr. held his famous “I have a dream” speech. When journalist Lerone Bennett Jr. from the influential magazine for the African-American market, EBONY, reported on the March on Washington, music was more or less absent. As the most significant effect of the march, LIFE magazine emphasized the “Negroes’s orderly demonstration of their potential as a moral force” (20). The New York Times zoomed in on the political speeches emphasizing particularly Martin Luther King’s speech, which “touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else” (1). There is hardly any mention of the power of music, which permeated the event. This silence of the contemporary press begs the following question: Is there a musical signature that can be connected to the March on Washington?The music of the March of Washington cannot be seen exclusively from the perspective of the African American struggle for freedom but also needs to be understood by drawing attention to the connection between youth, ethnicity and the folk revival in the early 1960s. While white teenagers in the mid-1950s turned to musical styles such as a rock’n’roll to distance themselves from their parents’ generation, the tensions over civil rights and second class citizenship of African Americans, especially in the South, increased the conflicts between emerging baby boomers and their parents. During the Kennedy presidency, a large number of white college students began to turn to folk music in order to re-signify the political heritage of the 1930s folk music towards an expression of political dissent. The folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s emerged from the songs of the folk and blues musician Lead Belly and John and Alan Lomax ethnomusicological work of archiving folk music. Figures such as Pete and Mike Seeger, as well as Phil Ochs, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan offered some of the most influential contributions to the folk movement. Folk music repertories often have a specific function in order to “motivate the formation and dissolution of groups,” as Philip Bohlman points out (288). During the civil rights movement, folk music functioned as a sounding board to give expression to resistance regarding discrimination on racial grounds.