Penny Stone
When the world is in such a turbulent state, it can seem hopeless to ‘just’ sing songs.
I am a great believer in music and action working together, but it is also true that simply singing songs can help to change ideas and perceptions (for better or for worse!).
Music is powerful – if singing songs wasn’t a powerful human act, then governments and dictators wouldn’t bother to ban them.
To give a few of examples, Edwin Starr’s ‘War – yeah, u-huh, what is it good for?!…
Describing itself as a ‘wondering-about-the-state-of-the-nation album’, this CD does more than just wonder.
Untied Kingdom poses questions to us all, while offering a strong sense of community and camaraderie with which to explore them.
The album opens with the sound of voices arriving to sing together; background chat that makes you feel that you have arrived in the room and are part of it.
Every song has the beautiful, strong Yorkshire voice you would expect…
Currrently one of the major challenges for those of us who sing as part of our social protest is that we can’t safely sing together.
Nothing can replace the feeling of singing in harmony together, it’s a physiological and emotional experience that often helps us to channel our anger at social injustices towards a positive outcome, to feel connected to each other in our outrage and if we’re lucky communicate with people who wouldn’t otherwise engage with issues we sing about.
…
As we watch (and hopefully join with!) the world rising in protest to topple unjust and unequal political systems, of course there are songs being sung.
In Chile and in the Chilean diaspora community in recent weeks there have been literally thousands of renditions of Victor Jara’s beautiful ‘El Derecho De Vivir En Paz’ (‘The Right to Live in Peace’).
Originally written in solidarity with the North Vietnamese in 1971 and dedicated to Ho Chi Minh, the final verse sings…
This weekend, we found ourselves in the unexpected position of having to demonstrate in the streets to try and preserve parliamentary democracy in our own country.
As a system, it’s far from perfect, but I’m sure most of us agree it’s a lot better than a potential Brexit dictatorship with Johnson at the helm.
Thousands of people gathered in the streets all over the UK to witness their opposition to the closing down of the Westminster parliament.
In Edinburgh, I met a…
This year has seen some of the most widespread actions against the demonisation and mistreatment of migrants in the USA. As institutional treatment of human beings gets worse, more and more people are singing out their opposition.
At the end of June, 36 people were arrested in New Jersey for blocking the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre, crying out at the unacceptable conditions children are being held in.
The beginning of July saw another mass…
Over the May Day weekend in Edinburgh, I sang 200 Pete Seeger songs with friends old and new. I hosted a singathon to celebrate what would have been Pete’s 100th birthday. It was brilliant.
People came and went, sang along, played along, laughed and listened. We sang songs sharing over 100 years’ worth of stories of people’s everyday lives and political engagement in the United States and around the world.
In many ways, the most enjoyable element of the weekend was the sense of…
If I asked you to think of a radical European song, there are any number of songs that might spring to mind. One of the top three would almost certainly be ‘The Internationale’. It is perhaps the most obvious place to start – translated into most European languages (with varying degrees of poetic success!) the song is an anthem for change and socialist possibility.
‘Arise ye workers from your slumbers, Arise ye prisoners of want… So comrades, come rally, And the last fight let us…
I must start this review with a statement of interest: I am a singer in the street choir / campaign choir movement. In many ways this makes me a more critical reader of this book, which collates the oral histories of over 40 voices from street choirs across the UK. It really matters to me that these stories are collected and made available, both to document the often unwritten history of ordinary people resisting social injustice, and to inspire others to become active!
The book…
On 24 October 1975, 90 percent of Iceland’s female population participated in a full day strike. Paid and unpaid work was not done.
At the time, women who worked outside of the home earned less than 60 percent of what men earned.
Many industries shut down for the day as a result. There was no telephone service and newspapers were not printed since the typesetters were all women. Theatres shut down for the day as actresses refused to work.
The majority of teachers were…
The first time I sang as part of a flashmob in Barclays bank was a couple of years ago in Edinburgh with Protest in Harmony choir.
Barclays had just opened a new branch on Princes Street with a great big high ceiling and hard walls, a church-like acoustic. Churches are great to sing in so, of course, we couldn’t resist!
There is currently a targeted campaign trying to get Barclays to divest from Israeli companies as part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to end…
Hamish Henderson (Scotland), and Victor Jara (Chile), were both singers, songwriters and traditional-song-collectors in the mid-20th Century. They were both social activists working towards a more just society for all people, recognising the marginalisation of the working people of their respective countries.
The collecting and sharing of traditional songs was a political act for both singers, taking the time to listen to songs that might otherwise have been lost in time, and…
On International Women’s Day this year, I was singing: ‘Sister, my sister, she’s walking with me, walking for equality, she’s walking with me…’, a song that was sung in the 1970s women’s liberation movement in the USA.
This song is a zipper song – just a word or phrase is changed to create a new verse, making it really useful for singing on marches and enabling people to join in. We added our own verses, singing to…
A couple of years ago, I went to an international peace gathering in Sarajevo. Because of the place, there was a much greater proportion of people able to attend from Eastern Europe and from further east than is often the case in gatherings held further west in Europe. This was a great learning opportunity for me because I am used to being in ‘international’ spaces that are still dominated by Western culture.
When I am choosing songs to help bring many voices together in concert or…
In February and March, there was a strike for pension rights organised by the University and College Union (UCU). Put very simply, extortionately high wages are being paid to small numbers of people at the very top of the university tree, while it’s being proposed that pensions (delayed salary pay) for the majority of workers be significantly cut. The UCU voted for strike action to prevent this from happening.
The pickets have been extraordinarily strong in Edinburgh, and my…
