Markin comment:
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
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Barbara Dane's Speech To GI Movement Revisited: Part 5
Current mood: thoughtful
Category: Music
In her speech to the GI Movement of the Vietnam War Era (whose text can be found in the booklet that's included in Paredon Records' FTA! Songs of the GI Resistance vinyl album of 1970), Barbara Dane said the following:
"I started my own nightclub in San Francisco, so I'd have more freedom to sing when I wanted to and under conditions I could control. SUGAR HILL was an immediate success. I brought in Mose Allison, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Lightnin' Hoopkins, Jimmy Rushing, Mama Yancey, T-Bone Walker, Jesse Fuller, Mance Lipscomb, and others and together we built the "home of the blues." But the sixties had come, and a whole new deal. JFK was in the White House, Joe McCarthy was dead, the Cubans had won their revolution, and a group of black students had decided it was time to stop being humiliated in silence. They staged the first sit-ins at a Woolworth store lunch counter. Support movements sprang up around the country, and I started singing on the streets again, and at benefits. From their inspiration, other student movements began, like the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, where I lived.
"One of the most thrilling things I did in Berkeley was one of the last before I moved away. I led songs from the top of a police car which was swamped in the middle of thousands of students sitting down to demonstrate and using the car itself as a Free-Speech platform! That was the University of California campus where only a few years before hundreds of teachers signed "loyalty oaths" rather than be thrown out of their jobs, and where a handful of others had conducted a fight for their right to teach as they saw fit, with their loyalty to be defined by their own conscience alone...and where thousands of students had kept their mouths shut to avoid trouble."
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=4#ixzz0xwjPz1wu
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