Nobody told a story the way Pete Seeger did! Pete always lifted people up. “Lift up your hearts!” he seemed to say, and then he would dance and play. The whole world was his communion table. The child in him never faded. He still calls up the child in us.
Congressional leaders are singing off key, inviting a national food fight. They want us to believe they’re soul-singers. But the sound is wooden. No heart. No soul. Instead we hear only of sequestration, protestation, damnation, remonstration, and gyration, but no gestation, no universal gun registration. Only sequestration.
Bring in Beyoncé! “Swing low, sweet chariot, coming fo’ to carry me home. I looked over Jordan and what did I see? A band of angels comin’ after me, comin’ fo’ to carry me home.”
If you agree that Congress is acting like the prisoners before Beyoncé came to their rescue, send this link to your Congressional Representatives. Tell ’em Paul Robeson, Johnny Cash, Etta James, and Beyoncé told you to. 🙂
“And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, [the wise men] departed for their own country by another way.” – Gospel of Matthew 2:12
Pete Seeger and song-writer Tom Paxton get the last word on this Friday.
Like Nelson Mandella, like Desmond Tut, like Martin Luther King, Jr., like Sojourner Truth…there is only one Miriam Makeba.
“Mama Africa” won a Grammy Award for “the Click song” (a Xhosa wedding song), so unique to western ears, that made her famous in the United States. But in South Africa she was more than a performer. She was a Civil Rights activist, a national hero, who paid a high price in the movement to end Apartheid and bring majority rule to her South African homeland. Her passport was cancelled. Her music was banned from being played or bought in South Africa. She was in exile for 30 years. There is nothing more dangerous than a human voice, and the South African regime knew it. Like Pete Seeger, whose “God’s Countin’ on Me” was posted here yesterday, Miriam was a voice of hope in the struggle for racial justice all over the world. She died at the age of 76 while performing in Italy on November 10, 2008.
Thank you, Miriam Makeba. “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Rest in Peace.
Listen to the spiritual that soothed the mind and heart of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was rebuked and scorned. Sit back and feel the music sung by Odetta.
George Matheson wrote this hymn. Matheson (1842-1906) was one of Scotland’s great preachers. Most people didn’t know that he was blind. When the sister on whom he had depended to be his eyes and his companion was married, he was left alone to fend for himself. He wrote “O love that wilt not let me go” the night he had “celebrated” the joy of her new life. The rendition in the video captures the emotion and the faith of the hymn-writer, whose faith and poetry still encourage later generations in times of personal loss and loneliness.
Views from the Edge 