Page "We Shall Overcome" Paragraph 12

Tindley's " I'll Overcome Someday " thus provides the structure for " We Shall Overcome ", with both text and melody having undergone a process of alteration.

The tune has been changed so that it now echoes the opening and closing melody of the powerfully resonant 19th century, " No More Auction Block For Me ", also known from its refrain as, " Many Thousands Gone ".

This was number 35 in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's collection of Negro Spirituals that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of June, 1867, with a comment by Higginson reflecting on how such songs were composed ( i. e., whether the work of a single author or through what used to be called " communal composition "): Even of this last composition, however, we have only the approximate date and know nothing of the mode of composition.

Allan Ramsay says of the Scots Songs, that, no matter who made them, they were soon attributed to the minister of the parish whence they sprang.

And I always wondered, about these, whether they had always a conscious and definite origin in some leading mind, or whether they grew by gradual accretion, in an almost unconscious way.

On this point I could get no information, though I asked many questions, until at last, one day when I was being rowed across from Beaufort to Ladies ' Island, I found myself, with delight, on the actual trail of a song.

One of the oarsmen, a brisk young fellow, not a soldier, on being asked for his theory of the matter, dropped out a coy confession.

" Some good spirituals ," he said, " are start jess out o ' curiosity.

I been a-raise a sing, myself, once.

" My dream was fulfilled, and I had traced out, not the poem alone, but the poet.

I implored him to proceed.

" Once we boys ," he said, " went for to tote some rice, and de nigger-driver, he keep a-callin ' on us ; and I say, ' O, de ole nigger-driver!

' Den another said, ' First thing my mammy told me was, notin ' so bad as a nigger-driver.

' Den I made a sing, just puttin ' a word, and den another word.

" Then he began singing, and the men, after listening a moment, joined in the chorus as if it were an old acquaintance, though they evidently had never heard it before.

I saw how easily a new " sing " took root among them.