This concert took place a pivotal time, a month before "Freedom Summer." The civil rights movement was growing in power, and challenging racist segregation in the South. The plan was that civil rights activists from all over the U.S. would converge on Mississippi from June until August, and help Black people there register to vote, despite restrictive Jim Crow laws. Here's a Wikipedia entry about Freedom Summer:
This concert was part of three days of workshops and concerts. All these events were arranged by the Highlander Center, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). These organizations and participants, especially the SNCC, were also very involved in Freedom Summer.
I found a Folkways album that has some songs from this very concert, so I was able to learn some about it. These concerts and workshops were designed to help civil rights activists get on the same page musically, because protest songs were a big part of motivating people in the movement. Basically, there was an older group of people, mostly Black, who were raised on spirituals, many of them addressing the issue of slavery. But there also was a younger generation, many of them white, who were most interested in recently written folk music, best exemplified by the songs of Bob Dylan. So the concerts allowed different crowds to learn key folk songs, many of which would be sung during Freedom Summer events. In fact, a booklet was later made and distributed containing the lyrics to about 50 songs performed during these events, so people would be better able to sing them together that summer.
I have to admit that, being a non-religious person, I wasn't interested in the gospel groups singing almost entirely gospel songs in this concert. And there were a handful of those groups. So I focused on the sets by the younger generation, consisting of singer-songwriters and their new songs. Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton are pretty well known, and I've posted albums by both of them, so I won't say more about them here.
Len Chandler was an interesting figure. He was a rare example of a Black man in the highly influential folk music scene in Greenwich Village in New York City in the early 1960s. He didn't release his first solo album until 1966. But the songs he wrote were influential before then. For instance, he sang with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the famous 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech. King also quoted Chandler's lyrics to his song "Keep On Keepin' On" in a different speech. (That song is included here.) The Serendipity Singers had a Top 40 hit in the U.S. with his song "Beans in My Ears."
Dylan fans will be interested to learn that Chandler was very influential on Dylan, practically from the moment Dylan arrived in New York City for the first time. Dylan later wrote this about him in "Chronicles: Volume One," his 2004 memoir: "One thing about Chandler was that he was fearless. He didn’t suffer fools and no one could get in his way. He was powerfully built … brilliant and full of good will, one of those guys who believed that all of society could be affected by one solitary life."
Here's his Wikipedia entry:
But this is a better link, in my opinion, an obituary for him in the Guardian, after he died in 2023:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/oct/22/len-chandler-obituary
The final main performer featured here is Theodore Bikel. He too had a prominent role in the music of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. But, born in 1924, he had a long career as an entertainer before that movement even began. He began a very successful career as an actor in the early 1940s. He appeared in hundreds of movies and TV shows, often in minor character actor roles, but sometimes in major roles. Then, in 1955, he released the first of a couple dozen studio albums. He could sing in over 20 different languages, and had a role in popularizing songs from different parts of the world.
Bikel also had an influential role in Dylan's life. He was the first person besides Dylan to sing "Blowin' in the Wind" in public, and he generally championed his music when few did. In 1963, he convinced Dylan to accompany him to a civil rights rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. This trip helped inspire Dylan to write some of his most strident political songs from that era. Also, in 1965, when Dylan famously "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival, Bikel was the one to calm Pete Seeger down and prevent him from rushing the stage to try to stop the performance. He reportedly told Seeger, "Peter, this band, these rebels - they are us. They are what we were 20 years ago. Remember?" Apparently, that was enough to cause Seeger to pause and rethink.
That just scratches the surface of Bikel's long and varied career. Here's his Wikipedia page if you want to know more:
I had to guess about the order of the performers. It's obvious that Bikel was the last one (as you can hear if you listen to the last song especially). I had to guess on the others. The Tom Paxton set included one song by the Georgia Sea Island Singers. I'm not sure, but it's possible that Paxton played guitar on that song. I didn't include their set, because it was almost entirely gospel songs that I don't enjoy. But I decided to keep this one, since it was more of an overt civil rights song.
I mentioned above that there's an official Folkways album about the three days of music that this concert was a part of. It's called "Sing for Freedom: Lest We Forget, Vol. 3." Only one of the songs performed here made it on that album, "Do What I Have to Do," by Phil Ochs. The rest generally are the gospel-type songs I'm not so keen on.
I found this bootleg on a pretty obscure corner of the Internet. I had to split the audio streams into mp3s. I don't think any music from this concert has been shared in the usual bootleg sharing sites until now.
This album is an hour and seven minutes long.
01 talk by emcee (Phil Ochs)
02 talk (Phil Ochs)
03 Do What I Have to Do [False Start] (Phil Ochs)
04 Do What I Have to Do (Phil Ochs)
05 talk (Phil Ochs)
06 Talking Birmingham Jam (Phil Ochs)
07 talk (Phil Ochs)
08 Links on a Chain (Phil Ochs)
09 Keep On Keepin' On (Len Chandler)
10 talk (Len Chandler)
11 Oklahoma Talking Blues (Len Chandler)
12 talk (Len Chandler)
13 Time of the Tiger (Len Chandler)
14 talk (Len Chandler)
15 I'm Going to Get My Baby Out of Jail (Len Chandler)
16 talk by emcee (Tom Paxton)
17 talk (Tom Paxton)
18 A Rumblin' in the Land (Tom Paxton)
19 talk (Tom Paxton)
20 The Dogs of Alabama (Tom Paxton)
21 talk (Tom Paxton)
22 Bottle of Wine (Tom Paxton)
23 talk (Tom Paxton)
24 This Land Is Your Land (Tom Paxton)
25 talk by emcee (Georgia Sea Island Singers)
26 Which Side Are You On (Georgia Sea Island Singers)
27 talk by emcee (Theodore Bikel)
28 talk (Theodore Bikel)
29 Mangwane Mpulele (Theodore Bikel)
30 talk (Theodore Bikel)
31 Michael, Row the Boat Ashore (Theodore Bikel)
32 talk (Theodore Bikel)
33 Come Away Melinda (Theodore Bikel)
34 talk (Theodore Bikel)
35 We Shall Overcome (Theodore Bikel)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/eG9zMfaN
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/bCkS4Tr2iBtQVPt/file
The cover image shows Tom Paxton (in a checkered shirt) with Phil Ochs. Since I couldn't find any photo from this exact concert, I went looking for photos of the main performers here. I found this one, with Paxton, Ochs, and Eric Andersen at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. Andersen was sitting down. I removed him, using Photoshop, then moved Paxton and Ochs closer together. Also, the original was in black and white, but I colorized it.
