Songs for the Resistance

This is area provides a place to share with each other movement songs and strategies for using songs in our political struggles.  

Poor Peoples Campaign Songbook. This great new resource just got published (fall 2020). It's availalbe as a free e-book chocked with internal links and is organized both by title and by the specific movement uses you can put individual songs to. https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/SON001_Songbook_2019_V2-LR.pdf

Songs on specific themes. We are creating lists of great songs related to specific social justice topics many of us are working on today. Songs on a number of topics including:  

• Climate & earthcare
• Hope & resilience
• Immigrant solidarity
• LGBTQ+
• Labor unions & struggles
• Peace
• Racial justice (U.S. Civil Rights Movement and South African anti-apartheid movement, Black Lives Matter) 
• Rich & poor (on wealth, poverty & economic justice)
• Struggle
• Women

Songs to Rally the People. Here is a list than can help fire up participants at rallies, conferences, worship services, or any place where people are working to build community and hope in these challenging times: www.riseupandsing.org/songs/hope

Curated Lists - 3 great recently curated collections from Melanie DeMore & Lisa Littlebird. These online albums each include more than 15 new songs of justice-oriented songs from the community singing tradition. Sliding scale pricing based on ability to pay:

• Boots on the Ground, Skin on the Line
• Reach for Life: Songs for Holistically Resisting

Rally Lyrics. George Carvill is a singer-acitvist from Brattleboro VT, part of a group called Song and Solidarity. He has put together a terrific set of lyrics you print out and carry with you to marches and demonstrations. Most are "zipper songs" so everyone can pick up the leader's lyrics easily without having a songbook.  George's rally lyrics

A great general resource is the Occupella website. Occupella is the great singing group (still leads singing at rallies, etc.!) in the Bay Area that grew out of Occupy movement. Hali Hammer, Betsy Rose, Nancy Schimmel, Bonnie Lockhart, and Leslie Hassberg. They sang at our Berkeley Rise Again release concert in September 2015. Betsy, Nancy & Bonnie all have songs in Rise Again. The Occupella site has tons of new topical lyrics to old songs grouped by Black lives matter, ecojustice, parodies, etc.

• New lyrics to old songs - about fracking, climate change, women's issues, Black Lives Matter (the way labor activists put new lyrics to gospel songs - and then freedom movement activists put new lyrics to those songs in the '50s and '60s.)
• Lists of songs that you've found work best at rallies and on marches.
• Strategies for convincing meeting organizers to let you lead songs to energize a meeting or conference session. (Have you been told "We don't have time to sing a song - our agenda is just too full." ?!)

Send us any of the above and more to info@riseupandsing.org

(Thanks to all those who already have sent in songs and ideas! We'll post them soon...)