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Listen: Civil Rights on the B-Side

No matter how old you are, there are things you know about the battle to give African Americans equal rights. Maybe it’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s stirring words at the Lincoln Memorial, or African American protests and the violent backlash from police. But maybe as much as anything else, we all know about the music. Songs like “We Shall Overcome,” “Wade In the Water,” and “We Shall Not Be Moved” are the soundtrack of Civil Rights, and their power has lived on, all the way down to today.

It turns out, however, that the music we all know is only the tiniest part of a giant list of songs that helped drive the Civil Rights Movement. The songs we’re familiar with today, as popular as they were, only scratch the surface. Little did we know until recently that there were hundreds of other Civil Rights songs—ones that teachers and historians knew nothing about. They were mostly performed by African American gospel groups—musical groups that usually sang about religion. But what’s only become clear recently is that these singers didn’t just have their eyes set on heaven. They were also looking, and singing about, conditions right where they lived.

There were songs about injustice, like “Alabama Bus” by Brother Wil Hairston. It talked about Black people being forced to sit in the back of the bus, with verses like:

You know they tell me that the driver began to fuss

He said, “There’s too many of the Negro race

And don’t you know you’re sitting in the wrong place.”

The driver told the man, “I know you paid your dime. 

But if you don’t move you’re gonna pay a fine.”

There also songs about the people fighting to stop the injustice, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or the Civil Rights lawyers who worked with the group called the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).  One song called “I’m Grateful To The NAACP” by the Gospel Pilgrims was typical. It went:

Well I’m grateful to the NAACP

Well I’m grateful to the NAACP

Well they helped my mother, father, sister, brother, and me.

I’m grateful to the NAACP. 

According to Dr. Dwandalyn Reece, the curator of music and performing arts at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), “I see this as an untold story that hasn’t gotten its due yet.” When she recently found out about this phenomenon, she says, “I was fascinated because the general public kind of only has one concept of what ‘Civil Rights Music’ is.” We all know the religious songs that were transformed into other songs, but, she says, “the whole idea of having a Civil Rights Movement message in a gospel record it just blew my mind.”

It is an amazing story that these songs—there are dozens and dozens of them—could just be completely lost to history and then found again fifty years later. How it happened, and why it happened, says a lot about African American culture and about the way people listened to music back when your grandparents were kids. Bob Marovich is the editor in chief of the Journal of Gospel Music. Today, he says, “you could be sitting in your living room, playing the guitar, and tomorrow you’re a superstar on iTunes.” There was nothing like that in the 1960s. Back then, he says, what you’d do instead was “You would make a record.”

There were no sound files or computers. A record was a flat piece of plastic, like what they make DVDs and Frisbees out of. Records came in two sizes. There were LPs (Long Play albums), which had a lot of songs on them. Mostly famous people recorded LPs. If you weren’t famous, then you made what was called a “45.” This kind of record was really cheap to make. Bob Darden is a professor at Baylor University in Texas where they have the largest collection of African American gospel records in the world. He says, “45s cost sometimes as little as 50 or 60 cents, usually around a dollar, and you got two songs for that.” By “two songs,” he means there was a song on the front of the record, and a song on the back. Recording a 45 could be really easy, too. If you’ve ever been to a big party, like a wedding, maybe you know about those photo booths where you sit with your friends and make funny faces? Well, they used to have machines like that to make records. Anyone could do it. In fact, Professor Darden says, “On many street corners in major American cities, there was a small little studio where you could go in with your group and sing a song, or maybe two.” When the singers were finished, Bob Marovich says, “They would be given a box of these records and then off they would go to sell them; and if they sold them all, they could come back and buy more.”

Remember, these weren’t famous or rich performers. They didn’t have publicity people supporting them. They did their own marketing. “You really had to sell your records out of the back of your trunk,” Marovich says. Or, if you really wanted people to hear your song, you could take your 45 to a radio station. Back then, Marovich says, “Radio was the iTunes, it was the YouTube, it was the social media. It was everything. If you could get your song heard on the radio in your local community, that was a bonanza.”

The thing about 45s though: They were really short. You could get maybe about 3 ½ to 4 minutes on one side. As a result, according to Dr. Birgitta Johnson, a professor in the School of Music at the University of South Carolina, “The 45s made it a format where you had to sing what you had to sing and get it out.” But “sing and get it out” is not how gospel music is performed. When performers go on at a concert, revivals, or during church service, one song can last 15 or 20 minutes with singers making lyrics up and talking in between verses. “You have parts of songs where people would ad‑lib additional verses or lyrics,” Dr. Johnson says, “and generally, particularly with these gospel groups, they encountered a lot of the racism and segregation as they moved from region to region —where they had to either enter in the back entrances or they couldn’t stay in hotels. Oftentimes, that would come up in concerts, and so, if they had a particular incident on the road, it would sometimes come up in a nightly revival in one of the verses.”

In a concert, you could sing your Civil Rights message right out. But with 45s being so short, how were you going to put it on a record? Well, remember, every 45 had two sides. As Professor Darden says, the “A-side” was the one that you gave to the radio station for them to play, while “The flip side, the ‘B-side,’ rarely ever got played unless you were a true fan at home and played both sides over and over.” So what would happen, Bob Marovich says, is “The A-side would have to be the religious message” and then, according to Robert Darden, “On the flip side, you could give a special message just for the true fans or true believers. Many of the gospel artists, we are just now discovering, used that B‑side to give a message of support and hope for the Civil Rights Movement at a time when it was very dangerous to do so.”

That danger was real. At this time, Bob Marovich reminds us, “American people were doing this to other American people only because of the color of their skin—being burned alive, being lynched, being shot in the head.” And as bad as all of that was, it wasn’t the only danger. As Dr. Johnson says, Black people who protested could also get in trouble at their jobs and they could lose their homes. “If you had a loan and people found out you were politically active,” she says, “sometimes the bank would either call for the loan to be paid in full or they would increase your rates. If they were found to be involved with the Freedom Riders or voting rights, they sometimes were evicted from their homes.” And Robert Darden says, “When teachers were seen protesting, they’d came back on Monday to find that their job had been ended.”

That’s another reason these songs ended up on the record’s B-side. If you brought your Civil Rights song to the radio station and they played it, who knows what would happen to you. So performers did sing songs about these issues, but by putting it on the B-side, they kind of kept it a secret just between them and their fans. Birgitta Johnson says that’s right in line with what gospel songs had always done. “They address things like the Good News, and about going to Heaven and salvation,” she says, “but they also talked about things that were going on in the world, not just the afterlife; usually offering a spiritual or a religious solution for those problems that people were facing back then.

That may also explain why there are different types—maybe you could say different “flavors”—of songs that you’ll find on these B-sides. Generally, there are two kinds. There are ones that say: get organized and let’s stop racism and segregation right now; and then there were also songs that suggested, “It’s hopeless to try and solve these problems on Earth.” But even that second group of song can be seen another way. Dr. Reece from the Smithsonian says that kind of double-message is something African Americans have been putting into songs all the way back to the days of slavery. “On one level, you think people are just talking about religion,” she says, “and the other side, they have a message embedded in that as well.”

An example can be heard in a spiritual (the kind of song that came before there was gospel music) called “Go Down Moses.” It includes the lyrics:

When Israel was in Egypt land

Let my people go.

Oppressed so hard

They could not stand

Let my people go.

Go down, Moses

Way down in Egypt land

Tell old Pharaoh,

“Let my people go.”

For many years, Professor Robert Darden says, “We thought the spirituals from the era of the American Civil War were strictly about God, and that their references were strictly about going to heaven.” But that wasn’t the case at all. Instead, songs like these provided a secret code. “They had two meanings,” he explains. “If you were part of the inner circle, you knew that they weren’t just about heaven; they were about freedom—about getting over the Ohio River and to the Union held territories.”

Another song like this was called “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” According to Dr. Johnson, “The drinking gourd is the Big Dipper. In the Big Dipper, you have the North Star in that constellation, and so people would sing that—they’re basically talking about actually looking at the constellations and following the North Star to freedom.” There were other spirituals like this, Dr. Johnson says, like the song “Steal Away.” That “was a message song, also,” she says. “It told people, ‘This is the time to leave.’ If they were planning on escaping, they would sing ‘Steal Away’ to let people know now is the time to go. You had people who were working in the fields away from the overseers and masters sometimes. You had people who were working towards the homes who could see the movements of the overseers and masters and be able to signal back.”

Enslaved people would sing these songs, knowing that the only people who’d understand them would be other enslaved individuals. They had their own secret code—a secret code that, Robert Darden says, was just like the one used by gospel singers during the years of Civil Rights. “There is an unbroken line with many of these spirituals that were used in the same way in the 1840s and ‘50s as they were used in the 1950s and ‘60s,” he says.

Secret messages or secret code—whether they’re sent on Twitter, spoken by drum in a cotton field, or sung on the B-side of a 45—help to light ways to freedom.