refresh from Bob Wolpert who manages the Pete Seeger FB website -

“Participation - that's what's gonna save the human race.” – Pete Seeger “Get people to sing together and they’ll act together too.” – Pete Seeger March is Women's History Month - an annual declared month that highlights the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society and corresponds with International Women's Day on March 8th.

With this in mind, let’s celebrate two people who got folks to sing together – Bernice Johnson Reagon and Jean Ritchie!

Bernice Johnson Reagon is a song leader, composer, scholar, and social activist, who in the early 1960s was a founding member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) Freedom Singers in the Albany Movement in Georgia. In 1973, she founded the all-black female a cappella ensemble “Sweet Honey in the Rock”, based in Washington, D.C. Bernice Johnson Reagon realized the power of collective singing to unify the disparate groups who began to work together in the 1964 Freedom Summer protests in the South. “After a song, the differences between us were not so great. Somehow, making a song required an expression of that which was common to us all . . .

This music was like an instrument, like holding a tool in your hand.” - Bernice Johnson Reagon

The Albany Singing Movement became a vital catalyst for change through music in the early 1960s protests of the Civil Rights era. Bernice Johnson Reagon has devoted her life to social justice through music via recordings, activism, community singing, and scholarship.

Jean Ritchie was an American folk music singer, songwriter, and Appalachian dulcimer player. Her career formed a kind of bridge between the traditional and modern forms of folk music: in her youth she learned folk songs in the traditional way (orally, from her family and members of her community); and in adulthood she became a successful modern folksinger, promulgating songs in public through concerts and recordings. She has been called by many the "Mother of Folk". After graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in social work from the University of Kentucky in 1946, Jean got a job as a social worker at the Henry Street Settlement, where she taught music to children. There, she befriended Alan Lomax, who recorded her extensively for the Library of Congress. Jean joined the New York folk song scene and met Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and Oscar Brand. In 1948, she shared the stage with Woody Guthrie and The Weavers at the Spring Fever Hootenanny and by October 1949, she was a regular guest on Oscar Brand's Folksong Festival radio show on WNYC. In 1949 and 1950, Jean recorded several hours of songs, stories, and oral history for Alan Lomax in New York City. Elektra records signed her and released three albums: “Jean Ritchie Sings” (1952), “Songs of Her Kentucky Mountain Family” (1957) and “A Time for Singing” (1962).

"A good song reminds us what we’re fighting for." - Pete Seeger In the mid-1960s, Pete Seeger, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Jean Ritchie performed a good song on “Rainbow Quest”. "O Mary Don't You Weep" is a Negro spiritual that originates from before the American Civil War. Musical scholars have called it a "slave song", a label that describes its origins among the enslaved. "O Mary Don't You Weep" contains coded messages of hope and resistance. The song tells the Biblical story of Mary of Bethany and her distraught pleas to Jesus to raise her brother Lazarus from the dead. Other narratives relate to The Exodus and the Passage of the Red Sea, with the chorus proclaiming "Pharaoh's army got drown-ded!", and to God's rainbow covenant to Noah after the Great Flood. With liberation one of its themes, the song again become popular during the Civil Rights Movement.

"Songs kept them going and going. They didn't realize the millions of seeds they were sowing. They were singing in marches, even singing in jail. Songs gave them the courage to believe they would not fail." - Pete Seeger

The first recording of "O Mary Don't You Weep" was by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1915. The vocal gospel group, "The Swan Silvertones" recorded the song in 1959. Lead singer Claude Jeter's interpolation "I'll be a bridge over deep water if you trust in my name" served as Paul Simon's inspiration to write his 1970 song "Bridge over Troubled Water". The spiritual's lyric "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water the fire next time" inspired the title for "The Fire Next Time", James Baldwin's 1963 account of race relations in America. Pete Seeger gave "O Mary Don't You Weep" additional folk music visibility by performing it at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Pete played the song many times throughout his career, adapting the lyrics and stating the song's relevance as an American song, not just a spiritual.

In addition, "If You Miss Me from the Back of the Bus", a song that explicitly chronicles the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, was sung to this tune and became one of the most well-known songs of that movement.