Soundtrack still on civil rights highway

In the midst of the stirring “Glory,” the musical centerpiece of the Oscar-nominated movie “Selma,” Chicago rapper Common delivers a terse summation of how words, melody and a protest merged during the civil-rights movement.

“We sing, our music is the cuts that we bleed through,” he raps.

The blood of dozens of African Americans was spilled in the first of three attempted voting-rights marches to the Alabama capital of Montgomery from Selma 50 years ago, on March 7, 1965. But as “Glory” suggests, the legacy of Selma is hardly in the past.

“The movement is a rhythm to us, freedom is like religion to us,” Common raps in “Glory.” Then he draws a connection between the ’50s civil-rights pioneer Rosa Parks and last year’s protests in Ferguson, Mo., over the police slaying of an unarmed African American resident, Michael Brown:

“That’s why Rosa sat on the bus, that’s why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up.”

In the months after the outrage stirred by the deaths of Brown and another unarmed African American, Eric Garner, in New York, singer D’Angelo released his first album in more than a decade, “Black Messiah,” which included references both glancing and startlingly direct to the chain of events between Selma and Ferguson. “All we wanted was a chance to talk,” he sings in “Charade, “‘stead we only got outlined in chalk.”

It is the most recent evidence that the soundtrack for the civil-rights movement continues to be written. As Newsweek said in 1964, “History has never known a protest movement so rich in song.”

Freedom songs

In its original incarnation during the ’60s, African-American “freedom songs” aimed to motivate protesters to march into harm’s way and, on a broader scale, spread news of the struggle to a mainstream audience. The gospel music of black churches spoke to a better life in the hereafter, but soul, R&B and jazz secularized that message and speeded up the timetable so that the good life — or at least an equal opportunity to live it — could be experienced now. As preachers and ministers such as Martin Luther King articulated the movement’s goals, artists such as Chicago’s Curtis Mayfield, Sam Cooke and the Staple Singers crafted a musical counterpoint rooted in gospel but speaking the language of popular culture.

Mayfield wrote and sang on a string of message-oriented Impressions singles, including “Keep on Pushing” and “People Get Ready.” Cooke delivered the yearning “A Change is Gonna Come,” and there was also Little Milton’s “We’re Gonna Make It,” Oscar Brown Jr.’s searing “Driva Man” with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” and the defiant, repurposed spirituals and folk songs of the Freedom Singers.

All this creativity was inspired by pain, struggle and bloodshed. The three Selma marches in 1965 aimed to draw attention to the struggle for black voting rights and proved to be a turning point in the struggle, as police turned tear gas, dogs and clubs on the unarmed protesters, walking arm and arm across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, with a ferocity that shook even the occupants of the White House.

Call to action

Pops Staples, patriarch of the acclaimed Chicago gospel group the Staple Singers, was touring when he saw media coverage of the event, and was horrified. He had become friends with King and he and his family had been appearing at rallies with him and on behalf of his civil-rights agenda. What he saw and experienced in the company of King politicized him. “If he can preach it, we can sing it,” he told the members of his group — daughters Mavis and Cleotha and son Pervis. After Selma, Pops wrote one of the signature songs of the movement, “Freedom Highway,” and debuted it only a few weeks later in a concert at the New Nazareth Church on Chicago’s South Side.

The concert was documented on album, also called “Freedom Highway,” originally issued on Epic Records in 1965. It had since gone out of print, but is finally being reissued in an expanded edition next month that secures its place as one of the great concert recordings ever — an historic merger of time and place, music and message, singers and community.

The newly mastered recording puts the listener in the front pew. After a stately version of “We Shall Overcome,” Pops Staples pauses to introduce his new song. “From that march, word was revealed and a song was composed,” he says, and his opening guitar riff sounds like a trumpet calling citizens to action. Mavis, Cleo and Pervis clap hands in intricate three-part polyrhythms atop Al Duncan’s drums and Phil Upchurch’s driving bass line, and then Mavis sings Pops’ lyrics with fierce determination.

Pops bore witness until his last days, as his final recording attests. “Don’t Lose This” (Anti-), released this week, was recorded with his children in the years before his death in 2000. It includes the last performances of the final Staple Singers lineup — Pops, Mavis, Yvonne and Cleo, who died in 2013.

On “Sweet Home,” Pops and Mavis duet over a treble-soaked guitar, as if taking stock.