Some brief thoughts about “This Little Light of Mine,” and voting

Life has brought me to Asheville for many reasons, I suppose. Chief among them, at least to my conscious mind, is the odd compulsion to research the life and career of Zilphia Horton, mainly to write a book about her. But, publishing being what it is these days, I don’t doubt this project could soon wind up a social network or some other conglomerated new media resource about women in the history of labor movement music. Or something. Or nothing.

Or just a book. Which will be fine.

Horton was from Arkansas, and conducted much of her work in eastern Tennessee, but I couldn’t bring myself to set up life in either of those places (just yet), so I went to the nearest progressive enclave. Apparently my psyche needs a certain amount of yoga studios and gay-owned bookstores in the immediate environs in order to feel right with the world. So here I am.

There’s a lot of research to be done, and no doubt it’ll leak into my blog on this and other sites. Now that I’m reading Pete Seeger’s biography, I’m sure I’ll write about it sometime soon.

The web of connections goes something like this: Seeger was part of the Almanac Singers – a collective of singers and whatnot based in New York City during the first quarter of the 20th Century – who made a habit of entertaining labor unions and picket lines. This was a habit they shared with Zilphia Horton, who was doing the same down in Tennessee. Horton, meanwhile, found out about songs like “I Will Be Alright,” which she liked to sing at meetings. Eventually she’d evolve that little number into the great anthem of the Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.” That song is usually attributed to Pete Seeger in most folks’ minds, but he learned it from Horton, and shares the copyright with her, Frank Hamilton, and Guy Carawan, and the song publisher TRO.

However, the way certain folk songs became copyrighted at all is kind of a sloppy, circuitous, and confusing thing in itself, and perhaps the topic for a future blog post.

As a sidenote, the nice thing about “We Shall Overcome” is that the Highlander School made sure all proceeds from the song would go right back to “nurture grassroots efforts within the African American communities, to use art and activism against injustice.” They set up a fund for that purpose in 1966, and it persists to this day.

But I digress.

The reason I started writing this, sharing with you the obsession of my current and future research, was to note that another song has been on my mind. It’s another song Horton gets the credit for passing on, called “This Little Light of Mine.” It’s perhaps one of the simplest songs I’ve ever known or learned in my life, and I daresay more powerful and persistent than Horton’s far more lauded discovery.

Everywhere I go, I’m gonna let it shine
Everywhere I go, I’m gonna let it shine
Everywhere I go, I’m gonna let it shine
Let it shine, let it shine
Let it shine

There’s no mistaking the song’s spiritual origins. Indeed it was written to be a gospel song for children sometime around 1920, and found its way to the rest of us via a sort of “Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten” way of thinking.

What’s powerful about it is not only the sheer repetition of it all, but the statement itself – that we’re all essentially little bits of light, and that even the smallest light can break the largest, thickest darkness. There’s an implication that joining our little bits of light together in a community can only make the light grow and, in turn, shrink the darkness.

It’s awfully simple, if you consider it. So simple, you could almost write it off as a fairy tale or a naivete, or “too good to be true.” Except that, if you’ve ever joined a room full of people in singing this song (as in that video above, with Odetta, or the one below), you know it doesn’t feel like naivete. You know that vibration in your chest is the truth. Horton, Seeger, and countless others in the history of topical song, understood that singing a song is one thing – singing it together is quite another. In fact, it’s this very same sentiment about which Seeger continues to sing now at the age of 91 (his latest album opens with a song whose chorus simply states, “We sing loud so our voices will be heard”).

This song has been on my mind because it’s almost time to vote again, and as a writer I’d feel silly if I didn’t use my words to encourage participation. After all, I write to understand things, yes, but mainly to stir up conversation. What good is a conversation that doesn’t lead to some type of action? Whether that action is that you go home and put on a record you haven’t heard in some time (perhaps an Odetta album; perhaps Seeger), or whether that action is that you remember you get to make a difference in your government every other year…I’m fine with either outcome, really.

The things we do – all the things – ripple out to somewhere eventually.

Sitting at home alone, remembering the glorious power of Odetta’s voice can change the direction of your day, can remind you to be a little kinder, a little more articulate, perhaps even consider the way groups of people can and should work together for the betterment of us all.

Far as I’m concerned, that’s the most important thing to consider when staring at a ballot, trying to decide which little bubble to color in: am I filling in a bubble next to someone who wants to work with their neighbor toward something that’s good for all of us? Or am I filling in the circle next to the name of someone who’s just fed up and has their own agenda, disinterested in working with others who might not agree with them? After all, our representatives don’t just have to represent us; they also have to work together toward something. In the current political climate, they need to work together toward a number of somethings. Accomplishing something concrete is, in fact, the very definition of progress.

Lucky for us, we all get a chance to help steer that wheel.