“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 […]
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is a satirical poem and song by Gil Scott Heron. Scott-Heron first recorded it for his 1970 album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, on which he recited the lyrics, accompanied by congas and bongo drums. A re-recorded version, with a full band, was the B-side to Scott-Heron’s first […]
Election Day
Today I have chosen a selection of songs to set you on your way to your polling station. If you are one of the many whose vote has already been cast via a postal ballot, I hope it will remind you of the choice that you have made. We begin with a song from the […]
People Get Ready
“People Get Ready” is a 1965 single by The Impressions, and the title track from the People Get Ready album. The single is the group’s best-known hit, reaching number three on the Billboard R&B chart and number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. The gospel-influenced track was a Curtis Mayfield composition that displayed the growing […]
The Partisan
“The Partisan” is an anti-fascist anthem about the French Resistance in World War II. The song was composed in 1943 by Russian-born Anna Marly, with lyrics by French Resistance leader Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, and originally titled “La Complainte du partisan” (English: “The Lament of the Partisan”). Marly performed it and other songs on […]
Grace Petrie
Grace Petrie is an English folk singer-songwriter and guitarist from Leicester, England. She was hailed in The Guardian as “a powerful new songwriting voice” in 2011. She began performing in 2006 as a solo vocalist and acoustic guitarist, and self-released an eponymous album that year, followed in 2007 by second album Feeling Better. In 2010, […]
Union Maid
“Union Maid” is a union song, with lyrics written by Woody Guthrie in response to a request for a union song from a female point of view. The melody is the 1907 standard “Red Wing” by Kerry Mills, which was in turn adapted from Robert Schumann’s piano composition “The Happy Farmer, Returning From Work” in […]
Dorothy Porter Wesley
Dorothy Louise Porter Wesley was a librarian, bibliographer and curator, who built the Moorland-Spingarn Research Centre at Howard University into a world-class research collection. She was born Dorothy Louise Burnett in 1905 in Warrenton, Virginia, the first of four children of Doctor and Mrs. Hayes J. Burnett. They encouraged their children to become educated and […]
Ethel Smyth
Dame Ethel Mary Smyth was an English composer and a member of the women’s suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas. Smyth tended to be marginalised as a “woman composer” as though her work could not be accepted as mainstream. Yet when she produced more […]
Kombinat Choir
Kombinat, also called Kombinatke, is a female choir that sings revolutionary tunes from all over the world in original languages. It was founded on the day of the uprising, April 27, 2008, when a group of girls gathered at the founding assembly in Ljubljana’s Rog and decided that we would sing songs of the uprising […]