“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” is a freedom song based on the spiritual “Don’t You Let Nobody Turn You Round” and became an American civil rights era anthem. It was sung during demonstrations for civil rights in the United States including during the Memphis sanitation worker strike in 1967. The song’s lyrics are adaptable to situations and locations. The published version of the original spiritual includes the following chorus:
Don’t you let nobody turn you round,
Turn you round, turn you round;
Don’t you let nobody turn you round,
Keep the straight and the narrow way.
The 1962 adaptation changes the perspective of the song. Rather than not letting anyone turn “you” around, it is now about not turning “me” around. This was particularly useful for encouraging perseverance and patience during the protests, clashes with police and counter protesters, and incarceration that characterized the era.
According to activists and folksingers Guy and Candie Carawan, Ralph Abernathy introduced the song in 1962 at a meeting at the Mount Zion Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, during a time of mass arrests and demonstrations. The song’s popularity is partially owed to the fact that it lends itself to adaptation. For example, in Albany it was tailored to the local situation by referring to the chief of police, Laurie Pritchett, who worked to suppress the Civil Rights Movement. This Albany version was televised nationally, and a wide audience heard the lyrics “ain’t gonna let Chief Pritchett turn me ’round.” The song caught on quickly and became widely used in other demonstrations.
Scholar P. Kimberleigh Jordan has noted that African Americans have called upon spirituals for four centuries to help them connect with one another. She writes, “Spirituals materialize the historic and continuing power and possibility of black existence through sound, movement, communal and spiritual formation, in the face of long histories of racialized oppressions that have violated black bodies, minds, and spirits.”
“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody” embodied a sense of unity throughout Civil Rights Movement and continues to do so today. The lyrics were recently updated to include the line “ain’t gonna let no Ferguson turn me ’round” in response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer in 2014.
It is wonderful to see the diversity of the children in this final clip of the Boston Children’s Choir, when you consider where the journey of this song began. Another World Is Possible!
