[Mb-hair] MUST READ: 'We Shall Overcome' - The comeback of protest songs - The Boston Globe - May 6, 2006

[William Swiggard]

  'We Shall Overcome'


  The comback of protest songs

By Robert Kuttner  |  May 6, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

NEW ORLEANS

''THIS IS our first gig," said Bruce Springsteen. ''I hope it goes OK."

With that, The Boss and his 18-piece Seeger Sessions Band opened their 
set with a rocking rendition of ''Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep." As an act 
of solidarity with this doubly ravaged city, Springsteen began his 
homage to Pete Seeger tour here, at ground zero of everything ruinous 
about the people who now run our country.

The 37th annual Jazz and Heritage Festival was playing to a smaller, 
whiter crowd than usual in half-abandoned New Orleans. It would be hard 
to imagine a more poignant or uplifting marriage of musician, impulse, 
venue, and moment.

Lately, musicians as diverse as Neil Young, Pearl Jam, Green Day, Paul 
Simon, and Ani di Franco have followed the same impulse. This is surely 
the time and the place.

Commentators solemnly billed Hurricane Katrina as the flood that laid 
bare awkward truths of class and race in America. It did -- for a vivid 
week, and then we turned away.

By a fine accident of timing, I came here for a conference on what 
Katrina revealed -- and found plenty of surprises. Downtown and the 
tourist French Quarter, which got priority federal attention, look as if 
Katrina had never happened. But the outlying scale of devastation is far 
more extensive, and the federal default of government more staggering, 
than one could imagine.

Of 485,000 people who lived here before Katrina, only about 165,000 
remain. New Orleans had high rates of black home ownership. But tens of 
thousands of homeowners are trapped in a horrific Catch-22 because of 
cascading federal failures.

In huge swaths of the city, basic public services are unrestored, so 
people can't return to viable houses. Mountains of stinking rubbish -- 
once the stuff of homes and lives -- lie uncollected on front yards. 
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, decided to clear 
inhabited areas first. It just never returned to pick up the rest.

Tens of thousands of homes could be renovated and reoccupied. But 
instead of making emergency rehab grants or loans, FEMA spends $90,000 
per trailer, often parked in front yards, while black mold relentlessly 
ruins structurally sound houses.

FEMA was slow to revise federal flood insurance guidelines. Without 
federal flood coverage, no private insurance flows and people can't get 
bank loans. So extensive salvageable areas remain unoccupied. Meanwhile, 
the 2006 hurricane season arrives June 1, but the levees are restored 
only to withstand a mild category 2 storm.

Filling some of the vacuum left by the Bush default, heroic work is 
being done by volunteers, from Habitat for Humanity, ACORN, and several 
churches and trade unions. Many live in a tent city -- which FEMA now 
plans to tear down June 1.

Springsteen toured all this, appalled. He composed two new stanzas to 
the 1929 song, ''How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" 
including, ''[Bush] gave a little pep talk, said I'm with you, then he 
took a walk." Springsteen elicited loud cheers when he deplored the 
government's ''criminal irresponsibility." A small plane circled, towing 
an ''Impeach Bush" banner.

New Orleans heroically pulled itself together to bring off this Fest. 
Held on a racetrack grounds, the fair has nine simultaneous performance 
spaces going all day, a crafts section, kids' tent, and a food midway 
where New Orleans's finest chefs serve such specialties as artichoke and 
oyster soup and gourmet jambalaya ladled from murky oil drums at $5 a bowl.

As the field dried out from a drenching rain, I gloriously wandered from 
Willis Prudhomme and the Zydeco Express to the gospel tent to a medley 
of everything from brass bands, Dixieland funeral music, back to more 
zydeco, to blues.

By 5:30, when Springsteen strode onto the main stage, following New 
Orleans legend Allen Toussaint, the sun was shining. Like Seeger's, the 
Springsteen repertoire included not just political songs such as ''Keep 
Your Eyes on the Prize," but the whimsical bits of Americana that Seeger 
loved, like ''(Get Out of the Way,) Old Dan Tucker." And when 
Springsteen began ''We Shall Overcome," the crowd, both the '60s 
generation and youngsters who had seen it only on TV joined uplifted 
hands, swayed, and sang along, without irony.

If anyone can reintroduce songs of protest to a new mass audience, 
making that much-reworked tradition fresh, it is the sunny, exuberant 
Springsteen. Folk music was, of course, the original popular culture. 
Sometimes, the borrowings of commercial pop from folk music are cheesy 
and opportunistic (say, the Byrds' version of Seeger). Other times, the 
result is a powerful, authentic synthesis, as in the work of Ry Cooder, 
Bob Dylan, and John Lennon at their best, New Orleans's own Randy 
Newman, who wrote the original flood anthem three decades ago, 
''Louisiana: They're trying to wash us away," and now Springsteen.

Like protest music, you never know when protest itself will recur. As 
Springsteen packed up and our conference began, millions not ''Born In 
The USA" were assembling across America to declare their dignity as 
working people and human beings. They also sang.

America today is depressing, but music adds energy and spirit to the 
protest imperative. Song is an inherently collective ritual that reminds 
us that we are not alone. You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not 
the only one.


http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/05/06/we_shall_overcome/
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