Top Questions

What is the origin of “We Shall Overcome”?

How did “We Shall Overcome” become a protest song?

How did Pete Seeger contribute to “We Shall Overcome”?

What role did “We Shall Overcome” play in the civil rights movement?

Beyond the American civil rights movement, where else has “We Shall Overcome” been used as a protest song?

We Shall Overcome, protest song that became an anthem of the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s. The modern version of the song derives from the folk music of enslaved people in the United States and an early 20th-century gospel song written by minister Charles Albert Tindley. Notable performers in the mid- to late 20th century include Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bruce Springsteen. It has become a standard song for protest movements around the globe.

Origin and history

Folk artist Pete Seeger sings perhaps the best-known version of “We Shall Overcome.” The song, however, is the product of decades of adaptation and collaboration. Some of its lyrics date to as early as 1901 (some sources suggest 1903), when Black gospel composer and minister Charles Albert Tindley wrote the song’s first iteration: a Christian hymn titled “I’ll Overcome Someday.” Tindley’s song begins with “This world is one great battlefield,” and the first chorus sings, “I’ll overcome someday. / I’ll overcome someday. / If in my heart I do not yield, / I’ll overcome someday.” Lyrics in other verses include religious references to Jesus and God. Tindley, who was born into enslavement, may in turn have been inspired by a folk song sung by enslaved people working in plantation fields that chorused, “I’ll be all right.”

In the decades following Tindley’s writing, “I’ll Overcome Someday” became popular in the American South—though its melody and rhythm were transformed from Tindley’s original before the 1940s. It was first used as a protest song in 1945, when workers—mostly Black and female—striking against the American Tobacco Company in Charleston, South Carolina, performed union songs and hymns on the picket line.

One of the striking workers at that protest, a Black woman named Lucille Simmons, changed the main refrain from the singular (“I’ll overcome”) to the plural (“We will overcome”) and slowed the tempo. Simmons’s version adapted it to a pro-union context with lines such as “We’ll get higher wages,” “We’ll get shorter hours,” “We will win our rights,” and “We will organize.”

Pete Seeger’s version

Simmons’s performance of the song during the 1945 Charleston protest led to Seeger’s famous rendition. Zilphia Horton, a white community organizer, heard “We Will Overcome” on the tobacco workers’ picket line. She then began teaching it to students at Highlander Folk School (after 1961, the Highlander Research and Education Center) in Monteagle, Tennessee—an institution devoted to social justice that served Appalachian communities and trained civil rights activists. On a Highlander fundraising trip to New York City, Horton performed it for Seeger for the first time. Seeger and Horton published it together as “We Will Overcome” in 1948 in a periodical called People’s Songs.

Seeger is typically credited with changing will to shall in the song’s lyrics, though he was not the only one to have done so. Others at Highlander, including teacher and famous civil rights activist Septima Poinsette Clark, also sang the song with the verb shall independently of Seeger, which he acknowledged. In an interview with Seeger conducted by historians William Ferris and Michael Honey in 1989 (reprinted in Ferris’s 2013 book The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists), Seeger, perhaps jokingly, attributed the shift from will to shall to his (unfinished) education at Harvard University.

Seeger’s iteration of the song evolved naturally, as had prior versions, and included new instrumentation and rhythm. Musician Frank Hamilton added guitar chords, and Highlander Folk School music director Guy Carawan added a soulful triplet-feel rhythm that he had learned from some Black students at Highlander who performed the song a cappella.

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The first verse of the famous song includes the line “We shall overcome,” which became a slogan of the civil rights movement. Other verses added at various times and occasions have included lines, some of which Seeger wrote, such as “We’ll walk hand in hand,” “The truth will make us free,” “The Lord will see us through,” “We will end Jim Crow,” and “We will live in peace.” Beyond the first iconic verse, there is an inherent freedom and versatility to succeeding verses that befits a protest song that has appeared in many contexts.

First verse of “We Shall Overcome”
We shall overcome.
We shall overcome.
We shall overcome someday.
Oh, deep in my heart,
I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.

Civil rights anthem

“We Shall Overcome” was popularized as a civil rights protest song through Highlander Folk School’s network of young activists and organizers. Martin Luther King, Jr., heard Seeger perform “We Shall Overcome” at Highlander in 1957. As King left Highlander accompanied by civil rights activist and journalist Anne Braden, he expressed his appreciation for the song, although his specific wording has been recollected and quoted with slight differences. Seeger, in the 1989 interview with Ferris and Honey, said that Anne Braden told him that King remarked, “That song really sticks with you, doesn’t it?” Braden, in a short remembrance of King written after his assassination in 1968, wrote of his reaction to the song: “I recall that he hummed it as we drove that day. ‘There’s something about that song that haunts you, doesn’t it?’”

Many of the singers who popularized “We Shall Overcome” at civil rights protests nationwide were white. Some Black organizers initially resisted Seeger’s lyric change from I to we. Freedom Singers member Bernice Johnson Reagon explained her hesitation and eventual acceptance of the word “we” in a 1999 interview with Noah Adams of National Public Radio (NPR):

In the Black community, if you want to express the group, you have to say I, because if you say we, I have no idea who’s gonna be there.…There are many Black traditional collective-expression songs where it’s I, because in order for you to get a group, you have to have I’s.

We’d been singing the song all our lives, and here’s this guy who just learned the song and he’s telling us how to sing it. And you know what I said to myself? “If you need it, you got it.” What that statement [“We shall overcome”] does for me is document the presence of Black and white people in this country, fighting against injustice. And you have Black people accepting that need because they were also accepting that support and that help.

In 1963 Joan Baez performed “We Shall Overcome” at the March on Washington. When Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the 1965 Voting Rights Act, intended to overcome legal barriers that prevented Black Americans from voting, he quoted the song in his speech before the U.S. Congress: “It’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” In a later reference to the song in the same speech, Johnson reiterated, “These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are our enemies, not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too—poverty, disease, and ignorance—we shall overcome.”

Global reach

The song has spread beyond the context of the American civil rights movement to become an anthem of protest, civil rights, and democracy around the world. The song was popular among student demonstrations in the 1970s in South Korea that led up to the Gwangju Uprising in 1980 and was banned by the South Korean government in 1975, along with other American music. It was sung during the 1976 Soweto Uprising in South Africa. In Beirut, Lebanon, in 1979 a group of Black Americans headed by civil rights leader Joseph Lowery, while meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), sang it together with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. It was intoned at the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1989. It was also a rallying cry of the opposition movement in East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The song’s roots in the civil rights movement have translated its simple message of insistent perseverance, and its plaintive hopefulness, into a staple of protest repertoire.

In India “We Shall Overcome” was translated into Hindi as “Hum Honge Kamyab” by Girija Kumar Mathur for the 1983 film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. Indian versions of the song, which artists have given unique Indian musical characteristics, have been translated into multiple languages. The song “Hum Honge Kamyab” has been used both as a song of protest for various causes and as standard musical fare of Indian patriotism performed at Independence Day and Republic Day celebrations and is often taught to schoolchildren.

Legal matters and the public domain

Hamilton and Carawan (with Horton listed posthumously) filed a copyright on “We Shall Overcome” in 1960. An additional copyright for the song was filed in 1963 to cover new additional verses and added Seeger to the list of authors. Since 1966 the Highlander Research and Education Center has run the We Shall Overcome Fund, which used royalties from the commercial use of the song to fund projects for arts, activism, and preservation of civil rights materials in the American South.

In 2016 musician and filmmaker Isaias Gamboa filed a lawsuit to nullify the copyright because of documentary evidence of prior versions of the song. His lawsuit was joined by the producers of the film Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013), who had wanted to use the song in the film but found the cost charged by the copyright holders, music publishers The Richmond Organization and Ludlow Music, to be prohibitive.

A federal district court judge in New York ruled in 2018 that the copyright on the version of “We Will Overcome” that Seeger and Horton published in 1948 had expired in 1976, that the later copyrights of “We Shall Overcome” were of particular variations, and that the well-known song’s lyrics and melody, particularly the first verse, are thus in the public domain.

Meg Matthias

gospel music, genre of American Protestant music, rooted in the religious revivals of the 19th century, which developed in different directions within the white (European American) and Black (African American) communities of the United States. Over the decades both the white and Black traditions have been disseminated through song publishing, concerts, recordings, and radio and television broadcasts of religious services. In the later 20th century gospel music developed into a popular commercial genre, with artists touring worldwide.

White gospel music

White gospel music emerged from the intersection in the19th and early 20th centuries of various European American musical traditions, including Protestant Christian hymnody, revival-meeting spirituals, and assorted popular styles. This musical combination yielded a form that—despite many developments—has maintained some distinct qualities. The music is generally strophic (in verses) with a refrain, and its texts typically depict personal religious experiences and stress the importance of salvation. Most of the repertoire is set in a major key and is arranged in four-part harmony—similar in style to barbershop singing—with the melody in the top voice. Early gospel hymns had a relatively straightforward rhythmic and harmonic structure (using three basic chords: I, IV, and V), but as the tradition absorbed more influences from popular music, both its rhythmic and its harmonic vocabulary expanded.

In the first decades of the 19th century, gospel songs were transmitted through Sunday-school hymnbooks. Among the most widely used song collections during this period were those compiled by Lowell Mason, William B. Bradbury, Robert Lowry, and William Howard Doane. Fanny Crosby was the leading writer of gospel hymn texts. After the American Civil War (1861–65), the Sunday-school repertoire was appropriated and expanded to serve the Protestant revival movement, especially in urban areas. Singer and composer Phillip D. Bliss was among the most important figures in this endeavour, as were evangelist Dwight L. Moody and his musical collaborator Ira D. Sankey. Together, Moody and Sankey employed the Sunday-school hymns and new gospel compositions in their church services as major instruments of edification and conversion, thus playing a critical role in the establishment of gospel music as a legitimate means of ministry.

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Until the early 20th century, gospel hymns were generally serious in their tone, but by the 1910s and ’20s they had begun to lose some of their austerity. Largely through the work of evangelists such as Billy Sunday, working with musicians such as Charles McCallom Alexander and Homer Rodeheaver, the music acquired a more upbeat character. The organ was replaced by the piano, which in turn was joined by other instruments. (Rodeheaver’s musical presentations often included his own trombone solos.) The vocal component of the music also took on a more demonstrative, lively quality, with lyrics that conveyed a more positive message. In the 1930s and ’40s, rural musicians such as the Carter Family infused their gospel music performances with elements of local Appalachian and other country music traditions, effectively blurring the boundary between sacred and secular styles.

In the second half of the 20th century gospel hymnody again played a major role in a Protestant religious revival, becoming even more heavily influenced by popular styles and employing greater harmonic variety. In urban areas the popularized gospel music emerged as the foundation of many Protestant services—especially in Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and various fundamentalist churches. The most productive composer of this new gospel repertoire was John Willard Peterson, while Billy Graham was the most prominent—and internationally recognized—evangelist of the period.

In the rural South gospel gained a new identity as a type of popular country music, sometimes called country gospel, that was both practically and stylistically a fully secular tradition (not intended for use in church), with such exponents as the Oak Ridge Boys and the Statler Brothers. Such secularized gospel music continued to enjoy a wide audience in the 21st century, through the work of many other artists, among the most notable of whom are the Lewis Family, Sandi Patty, Pat Boone, and Dolly Parton.

Black gospel music

The tradition that came to be recognized as Black American gospel music emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries alongside ragtime, blues, and jazz. The progenitors of the tradition, however, lie in both Black and white musics of the 19th century, including, most notably, Black spirituals, songs of enslaved people, and white hymnody.

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The roots of Black gospel music can be ultimately traced to the hymnals of the early 19th century. A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors (1801) was the first hymnal intended for use in Black worship. It contained texts written mostly by 18th-century British clergymen, such as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, but also included a number of poems by Black American Richard Allen—the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church—and his parishioners. The volume contained no music, however, leaving the congregation to sing the texts to well-known hymn tunes. After the Civil War Black hymnals began to include music, but most of the arrangements employed the rhythmically and melodically straightforward, unembellished style of white hymnody.

In the last decade of the 19th century, Black hymnody experienced a stylistic shift. Colourful and allusive texts, reminiscent in many respects of the older Black spirituals, were set to melodies composed by white hymnodists. The arrangements, however, were adjusted to reflect Black American musical sensibilities. Most significantly, the hymns were syncopated—that is, they were recast rhythmically by accentuating normally weak beats. Among the first hymnals to use this modified musical style was The Harp of Zion, published in 1893 and readily adopted by many Black congregations.

The immediate impetus for the development of this new, energetic, and distinctly Black gospel music seems to have been the rise of Pentecostal churches at the end of the 19th century. Pentecostal shouting is related to speaking in tongues and to circle dances of African origin. Recordings of Pentecostal preachers’ sermons were immensely popular among Black Americans in the 1920s, and recordings of them along with their choral and instrumental accompaniment and congregational participation persisted, so that ultimately Black gospel reached the white audience as well. The voice of the Black gospel preacher was affected by Black secular performers and vice versa. Taking the scriptural direction “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord” (Psalm 150), Pentecostal churches welcomed tambourines, pianos, organs, banjos, guitars, other stringed instruments, and some brass into their services. Choirs often featured the extremes of female vocal range in call-and-response counterpoint with the preacher’s sermon. Improvised recitative passages, melismatic singing (singing of more than one pitch per syllable), and an extraordinarily expressive delivery also characterize Black gospel music.

Among prominent Black gospel music composers and practitioners have been the Rev. C.A. Tindley, composer of “I’ll Overcome Someday,” which may have served as the basis for the anthem of the American civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome”; Reverend Gary Davis, a wandering preacher and guitar soloist; Thomas A. Dorsey, a prolific and best-selling songwriter whose works included, most notably, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”; and the Reverend C.L. Franklin of Detroit (father of soul music singer Aretha Franklin), who issued more than 70 albums of his sermons and choir after World War II. Important women in the Black gospel tradition have included Roberta Martin, a gospel pianist based in Chicago with a choir and a school of gospel singing; Mahalia Jackson, who toured internationally and was often broadcast on television and radio; and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–73), whose guitar and vocal performances introduced gospel into nightclubs and concert theatres.

Virginia Gorlinski