Song & Music in the Movement
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Transcript: Song & Music in the Movement A Conversation with Candie Carawan, Charles Cobb, Bettie Mae Fikes, Worth Long, Charles Neblett, and Hollis Watkins, September 19 – 20, 2017. Tuesday, September 19, 2017 Song_2017.09.19_01TASCAM Charlie Cobb: [00:41] So the recorders are on and the levels are okay. Okay. This is a fairly simple process here and informal. What I want to get, as you all know, is conversation about music and the Movement. And what I'm going to do—I'm not giving elaborate introductions. I'm going to go around the table and name who's here for the record, for the recorded record. Beyond that, I will depend on each one of you in your first, in this first round of comments to introduce yourselves however you wish. To the extent that I feel it necessary, I will prod you if I feel you've left something out that I think is important, which is one of the prerogatives of the moderator. [Laughs] Other than that, it's pretty loose going around the table—and this will be the order in which we'll also speak—Chuck Neblett, Hollis Watkins, Worth Long, Candie Carawan, Bettie Mae Fikes. I could say things like, from Carbondale, Illinois and Mississippi and Worth Long: Atlanta. Cobb: Durham, North Carolina. Tennessee and Alabama, I'm not gonna do all of that. You all can give whatever geographical description of yourself within the context of discussing the music. What I do want in this first round is, since all of you are important voices in terms of music and culture in the Movement—to talk about how you made your way to the Freedom Singers and freedom singing. Although Worth was not "a freedom singer," there's nobody in SNCC that's a more definitive authority on the culture of the Movement, and in fact, Black culture than Worth Long. So Chuck, starting with you and I guess starting in Carbondale where you were a student—Carbondale, Illinois—get us from Carbondale, Illinois. You were involved with the Cairo Movement, Southwest Georgia, and in 1962, the formation of the Freedom Singers. Chuck Neblett: That's right. Cobb: Talk about those things. Chuck Neblett: [3:16] My name's Charles Neblett, and I got started—well really, the thing that got me started in the Movement was Emmett Till. We were the same age, and when he got killed and it was devastating. I saw it as me. And I was just sick. And it so happened—it was like in September, but in December, I think, I saw Dr. King and Rosa Parks on tv, and I saw Black people standing up. And I got relaxed knowing that it won't be long before I get in it too. So we started in Carbondale, when I moved to Carbondale, we started there, we got involved in the Movement in Cairo. John O'Neal and myself, we got started there. First time I'd ever gone to jail— Cobb: What year was that? Neblett: That was in '62. '61. I didn't know, I got in jail. My family heard about me being in jail. My mother, my sisters, they got a lot of their friends who would come and break me out of jail. [Laughter] I called them and told them, and said, "Okay." They were really upset. Cobb: They were in Carbondale? Neblett: They were in Carbondale. They were really upset, and so I got out of there. And I went to that jail so many times that they didn't search me anymore. They had searched me, and I decided I'd get me a Texas fifth of liquor, tie a string around it, put it down my back under my coat, take it to jail. So we took it to jail, and he just brushed me like this. And I held my elbows back, and he didn't search my back or nothing. It was just hanging down there. So I got in jail—me and a bunch of guys—we got drunk. Cobb: In Cairo? Neblett: In Cairo. We got drunk. [5:22] And we throwed the bottle out and broke it. And the guy came up and threatened us all. We said, "What? You sold it to us." [Laughter] Our story's going to be you sold it to us. So how the hell else we got it in here. "You sold it to us." And there he didn't know what to do. Cobb: Now were you a student at Southern Illinois during all of this. Neblett: Yes, yes, I was a student. Well anyway, we got out of that one. But it was—Cairo, Illinois was a vicious little place. It was a mean little town. People think Illinois, you think of Chicago. But you get down below Chicago, you got all white towns. One town called Anna, we asked them was there any Black people there? They said, "We don't have any Jews here!" And I said, "Well..." But it was just like the South. It was just like any other place in the South. And I left there, I went to southeast Missouri because they said, you better not come down here. That was right across the river, not too far from Cairo. They said, "You better not come over here." They come over and tell us we'd better not come over there. So Charles Dunlap and myself, we decided we'd go, and we started organizing there. Cobb: As SNCC? Neblett: No. That's before I got in SNCC. And there, in Charleston, Missouri, where James Forman, Ruby Doris Smith, came by and wanted me to join SNCC. But before then, Jim Forman and a lot of more people in SNCC had come to Cairo. I knew Cordell and all of them. We sang together and stuff like that. So anyway, in Charleston, Missouri's where Jim Forman and them came through. They said, we—they were recruiting all young leaders, student leaders, and they wanted me to join SNCC and come to a thing they called "A Gospel for Freedom" in Chicago. I don't know if you remember that. Cobb: When was that? Neblett: That was in '63? Long: '3. Cobb: What was "The Gospel for Freedom"? Neblett: That was a fundraiser for SNCC. [7:46] Long: Gospel singing for freedom. Neblett: Yeah. It was a fundraiser for SNCC. A guy named Paul Brooks was supposed to be heading it up. And that's when I first met a lot of SNCC people when I got there. And they were singing freedom songs, but all of them sang them different. Mississippi sang them different from Georgia, and Georgia sang them different—and all these people up here singing these songs. It was a mess! [Laughter] What we had to do was establish a baseline. The rhythm, and we got together some guys and myself, and we came back and we started it off together and people started singing it right. And I left there, and I went to Mississippi. And while I was in Mississippi, Pete Seeger and Jim Forman, Cordell, some more people, talking about forming a group called the Freedom Singers to act like the Jubilee Singers—to do the same thing that the Jubilee Singers did for Fisk University. And I didn't want to go. And Bob Moses told me it's just as important that you do that. That's an important thing to do in this Movement, and he thought I should. And we went and formed a group called the Freedom Singers. Bernice Reagon, myself— Cobb: In Mississippi? Neblett: No. Cobb: In Southwest Georgia. Neblett: No. We were in Atlanta. Cobb: The details are important. Neblett: We were in Atlanta where we got together. We rehearsed. It was Cordell, Bernice, myself, and Bertha Gober. [9:33] And we rehearsed for about a week or so, and we got ready to hit the road as the Freedom Singers. And they needed a group named—they named us, we're the Freedom Singers. Put us together and put us on the road, and we traveled all over the place. All over the north. We went to let people know what was happening in the South, and we told them through song and commentary. And people got it—they got the spirit of that Movement through the music. We sang for nine months with that group, steady traveling, steady traveling, steady singing. High schools. Grade schools. Colleges. House parties. Anywhere we got, we'd go. And that the first time that I saw how powerful the music was. Other than, I'd taken it for granted because I was raised with music. My family was musicians and so forth, so I'd been singing and playing instruments all my life. But that was the first time I'd seen how important it was. That people really got the Movement. They got it when we were singing about it because all the songs that we sang was about the Movement. [11:02] See, I say, the song that we sang, they came out of the Movement. People sang about the Movement, but the music that we sang came out of the Movement, see. I thought that was very interesting. Cobb: Okay. I'll come back to you on a couple of points, but I'll get around to Hollis. Now you're in that little bitty place down there in Southwest Mississippi, named for an AME church no less.