Let No One Turn You Around
The last thing her conservative Carolina parents wanted was to see their daughter fight for civil rights. The music made her do it anyway.
Soon after Mama settled into a skilled nursing facility, she joined a reminiscence therapy group. She enrolled, she said, because the facilitator, a psychologist, was “debonaire.” In one session, he asked participants if they had life regrets. Most people had several.
“I only got one,” Mama said. “I’m sorry I let Debbie buy that Joan Baez album. It made her a hippie radical, and she never got over it.” She told me about this group session when we had dinner the next night in the nursing home dining room. She liked to dig at me, Mama did.
Mama was referring to Joan Baez’s self-titled first solo album, released in 1960, some years before the hippie era. Most of the songs on the album are British and Appalachian folk ballads—“Wildwood Flower” and the like—not a protest song among them. I discovered the album in 1963, the summer before I turned twelve. By then, Joan had released two more albums, both of which I also bought. By late summer I had memorized the lyrics to “We Shall Overcome” as Joan sang them on her In Concert, Part 2 album, a rendition recorded in a performance in Birmingham, Alabama, on the same day police arrested dozens of civil-rights marchers across town.
Mama should have blamed not only Joan, but Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan, for my radical ideals. In summer, 1963, another protest song I love, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” was released by both Bob Dylan, who wrote it, and by Peter, Paul and Mary, within two weeks of each other. I bought the Peter, Paul and Mary version.
On November 22, 1963, I watched the assassination of President John F. Kennedy repeatedly on television in black and white.
For Christmas, I got the $25 Montgomery Ward guitar I begged for, and which I could not tune. I could play, badly, two songs: “Five Hundred Miles” and We Shall Overcome.”
The only time my father ever came into my room without knocking on the door was a winter night in 1964, soon after I turned twelve. Hearing me singing “We Shall Overcome,” he banged the door open, and stood red-faced, staring down at me as I sat cross-legged on my bed, clutching my guitar.
“Don’t you ever let me hear you sing that song again,” Daddy roared.
“Yes, sir.” I took a deep breath. “You won’t hear it, but I won’t stop singing it.”
Daddy glowered at me for another minute, then turned and stalked out. He almost slammed the door, but caught himself and closed it softly.
The deaths of those girls from Birmingham: Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, all fourteen, and Denise McNair, eleven, gave me courage to stand up to my father. If they could die for freedom, I could surely sing for it.
Song lyrics, and the people who wrote and sang them, also gave me courage to stand up to my father. Bob Dylan sings in “The Times They Are A-Changin’”:
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don't criticize what you can't understand,
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand,
For the times they are a-changin’
My father did not want times to change, nor did he consider himself racist.
“I got a Negro friend,” he said. “Earl and I fish together. He’s been in this house to fix the television.” Daddy said I should call him Mister Earl. I was never told his last name.
Mister Earl was different, of course, from the Freedom Riders, the bus boycotters, the lunch-counter sitters. To my father, they had no names and were not even people. They were a writhing, dangerous mob called “n-----s.” Mister Earl was respectable, had a vocation, shared my father’s love of fishing. Daddy could see Mister Earl in himself, and himself in Mister Earl.
My parents were frightened. They believed civil rights for Black people meant fewer rights for them. We argued every night at supper as NBC’s Chet Huntley and David Brinkley delivered news about attack dogs and fire hoses turned on protesters. Daddy saw a seething mass of violence. Mama saw Black men who raped white women. I saw people struggling for basic human dignity.
Most nights I left the table in tears as Daddy railed and Mama sat wide-eyed.
I embarrassed Mama. How could I stray so far away from “my raising?” I was a Southern teenager, who was meant to grow into a Southern lady. I hadn’t done anything—yet—except sit on my bed, sing songs, and wish I was old enough to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge arm in arm with John Lewis as the chaos and conflicts of the 1960s continued to rage.
Mama was right. Not only Joan Baez’s music, but also the music of so many others, shaped me into a “hippie radical.” My life, from that first Joan Baez album until today, has a soundtrack, and that soundtrack has dramatically influenced and supported what I believe, what I do, and who I hope I am.
I met Richard the summer I graduated high school, 1969. His long red hair blew in the breeze of his raucous fiddle playing. We fantasized moving to Haight-Ashbury or flying to the moon on Apollo 11. Richard offered me a ride to Woodstock.
“Have you lost your mind?” my father shouted when I told him I was going to Woodstock. “You don’t know this boy. I don’t know his parents. Where does he go to church? We don’t even know where Woodstock is. You’re only seventeen. No. You’re not going. Period.”
I cried. I begged. I reminded Daddy I was grown-up now, a high school graduate.
“You think so? Then go. But,” he threatened, “if you go, I will not pay for college.”
College, scheduled to start two weeks after Woodstock, and a month before my eighteenth birthday, meant real freedom, forever freedom, in a town two hours from home. I was not courageous enough to challenge my father’s threat. Once again, Huntley and Brinkley brought me the news. Joan, six months pregnant with her son, sang “Joe Hill” (about the union organizer executed in 1915) and more at Woodstock. The war in Vietnam escalated.
The soundtrack of my generation, from folk to protest songs to R&B to soul to rock ’n’ roll, expresses emotions in ways I cannot. Music guided my path through the despair of Watts and Selma, of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Music steered my course through the massacre at Kent State University.
I was a college freshman, finishing my first-year exams, on May 4, 1970, the day National Guardsmen shot four people at Kent State. The next morning, the pay phone in my dorm suite lounge rang. My father’s voice was terse.
“What’s going on there about this Ohio thing?”
“The administration has cancelled classes. A memorial service is planned for this afternoon on the library lawn.”
“What are you doing here, Daddy?” I asked the man who had supported Jesse Helms for many years. The buzz in the room quietened. Everyone turned to watch what they, and I, assumed would be a confrontation.
“Are you going?”
I knew the rest of my college career depended on my answer. I could not lie.
“I helped organize it.”
My father hung up. I replaced the receiver in the cradle, thinking I should pack my bags. As I turned to leave the room, the phone rang again.
“Hello?”
“I do not approve of what you’re doing. I do not agree with you in any way. However, I have raised you to think for yourself, and if this is what you believe you have to do.”
Daddy stopped. I could hear his sobs.
“I love you. Please call later and let me know you’re safe.”
I never told my father about the Army helicopters that circled us, dropping low to intimidate us and drown out our singing. In just a few weeks Neil Young’s “Ohio” and Stephen Stills’ “Find the Cost of Freedom” would be recorded. Joni Mitchell immortalized the phenomenon that was Woodstock in her classic song.
Music sustained me through the 1980s: through the Watergate scandal, through the Women’s Movement and Congress’s failure to enact the Equal Rights Amendment. Music could not contain my anger during the Reagan era, through losing friends to the AIDS epidemic. Music cradled my grief when John Lennon died.
Imagine. I could not, I cannot, I wish I could.
Hopeful chaos reigned at our local Democratic headquarters on the evening of Monday, November 5, 1984. We finalized last minute election day strategies, confirmed poll worker assignments, planned the victory party for Tuesday night. Beneath the anticipation, however, an undercurrent of foreboding flowed. Could moderate North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt oust long-term conservative U.S. Senator Jesse Helms from his seat? We knew chances were slim.
I was organizing poll worker rosters when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see my father standing behind me, arms at his side, his head bent.
“What are you doing here, Daddy?” I asked the man who had supported Jesse Helms for many years.
The buzz in the room quietened. Everyone turned to watch what they, and I, assumed would be a confrontation.
“I’ve come to apologize. I’ve been wrong. I’ve come to offer to help Mr. Hunt tomorrow, if you’ll have me.”
Governor Hunt lost. I wonder how the political landscape would look now if more people had voted as my father and I did the next day. From that election, until the last one in which he voted before he died, my father and I cast identical ballots. I hope I’m right about how he would vote today.
I’m still singing “We Shall Overcome,” and so is Joan Baez.
On March 23, 2023, a former student at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, opened fire on campus, killing three nine-year-olds and three adults. On March 30, more than 1,000 citizens calling for stricter gun legislation marched into the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville, and many moved into the House chamber’s mezzanine gallery. Three Democratic legislators—Justin Pearson, Gloria Johnson, and Justin Jones—took to the House floor with a bullhorn to lead them in chants.
Their action turned into a week of protests that garnered broad coverage across America, and the three legislators became known as the Tennessee Three. The protests ended only on April 6, when the Tennessee House voted to expel Jones, Pearson, and Johnson for breaking House decorum rules. The votes to expel Jones and Pearson, who are Black, carried. But Johnson, who is white, retained her seat by only one vote.
Two days later, with the conflict still dominating the news, Joan Baez appeared at Nashville’s OZ Arts Center to promote her book, Am I Pretty When I Fly?: An Album of Upside Down Drawings, in a discussion with Emmylou Harris. On her way out of town, at the Nashville International Airport, Baez ran into Reps. Jones and Johnson. A video of Baez and Jones holding hands, singing an impromptu a cappella rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” went viral.
When special elections were held in August to replace Jones, who is from Nashville, and Pearson, who is from Memphis, won back their seats handily.
Although Daddy did not know it, he symbolically sang “We Shall Overcome” with me every time he cast his ballots, beginning with the 1984 election. I believe he’s still singing it. Mama was right. I am a hippie radical. I pray I never get over it.
About the author
Deb Bowen lives and writes on a North Carolina barrier island. She is the co-author of "A Good Friend for Bad Times: Helping Others Through Grief." She has a novel and several other works in progress.
- Deb Bowenhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/deb-bowen/
- Deb Bowenhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/deb-bowen/
- Deb Bowenhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/deb-bowen/
- Deb Bowenhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/deb-bowen/
This is wonderful. For my dad, it was college. I once heard him say that if he could do it over, he’d never allow another kid of his to go to college. That radicalized me. Thank you, Salvation South.
Thank you so much for your comment Janisse! I imagine our fathers would have been friends, certainly agreeing on that the times should not be a’changing!
Wonderful story Deb! Very moving. Love the addition of the meeting between Rep Jones and Joan Baez, how amazing is that!
Heidi
Thank you so much Heidi! I’m so glad this work resonated with you and I agree – that meeting between Justin and Joan was just wonderful! I appreciate you reading my work!
Great story!
A timely reminder that our country’s freedoms have to be continually exercised in order to protect them. From innocently singing in her bedroom a song of the ‘60’s civil rights movement to years later organizing a protest against the Vietnam war on her college campus, a child becomes the parent and teaches her father (and all of us) that change, when rooted in truth and justice can happen when you least expect it.
Thank you so very much for your kind words! I loved your comment about teaching my father – I’m grateful he became a willing student. I so appreciate you reading my work and taking time to comment! Blessings, Deb
Oh Deb, what a powerful piece. You hit the touchstones that shaped you, me and our generation. I cried as I read it. Cried again as I read it to my husband. He cried as he listened. He then asked Echo to play “We Shall Overcome” by Joan Biaz. We both cried again. I closed my eyes as I listened to her beautiful voice and saw you sitting cross-legged on your bed playing “We Shall Overcome”on an out-of-tune guitar. You weren’t that twelve year old but the woman you are today bringing the power of that song into the present when we need it again.
Oh Cat, thank you for sharing the emotions my work evoked in you and your husband. I so hope the power of that song – and the work we all are doing – brings about positive change in the world. I’m honored you took the time to write this comment! Blessings, Deb
This was so real, so personal, and so pertinent, Deb. And the same music still gathers us and buoys us up when people need strength to face similar fears and outrage.
Thank you for bringing this all together.
PLEASE pardon my delay in response! I missed your comment somehow. I’m so grateful to know you resonated with my work, and feel the same way I do about how we can, in fact, come together. Music is indeed such a unifying force. Thank you so much for your thoughts and kind words!