When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, with his famously sonorous vibrato, he was tapping into a Black musical tradition that animated the Civil Rights Movement, according to Ambre Dromgoole, assistant professor of Africana religions and music in the College of Arts and Sciences.
"The rhythm and tone of his speech, the repetition, the call-and-response, the pacing, is absolutely connected to not only Black preaching and sermonic traditions, but also to Black musical traditions, Black folk traditions, that people would have recognized as they listened to them," said Dromgoole, an expert in Black sacred music, gender and performance. "There's a world in his voice, in his speech, his tonality, that people tap into when they hear him."
That Black musical tradition included the folk spirituals that morphed into freedom songs, such as "Wade in the Water" and "We Shall Not Be Moved." Civil rights leaders leveraged those songs to inspire the solidarity and sense of purpose that made demonstrations possible.
Protestors sang freedom songs at mass meetings before marches. They sang while they were getting arrested and they sang through the bars of prisons when they were jailed.
"They are meeting. They're galvanizing. It matters that they have song and sound and a collective ethos to push them forward," she said.
Freedom songs often began as folk spirituals created and sung by enslaved people hundreds of years ago. By the 1950s and '60s, the spirituals had sunk into the culture's bones. Just as MLK did with his speeches, civil rights leaders used that cultural tradition to encourage people to join the Civil Rights Movement, Dromgoole said.
"The melodies and the rhythms of the freedom songs are familiar," she said, "and that resonates with people. That allows them to feel more connected to each other, more ready to engage in acts that might be considered dangerous, more willing to move past their fear and stick with it."
The songs' simple messaging was highly adaptable to the current political moment.
In "Wade in the Water," the lyric "God's going to trouble the water" originally meant that by agitating a body of water God would create a cover for people escaping their enslavers. Civil rights leaders understood the lyric to mean God would make conditions ripe for organizing and freedom, whether political or spiritual, Dromgoole said. "They really used that idea of wading in the water to mean, in spite of any nerves or trepidation you might feel, you must always be willing to wade into trouble in order to make change."
