Mable Hillery with Emma Lee Ramsey - "Marching on the Mississippi Line" [Sampler]

Listen to Mable Hillery perform "Marching on the Mississippi Line" with Emma Lee Ramsey, from their album 'The Complete Friends of Old Time Music Concert.' Mable Hillery was a noted civil rights activist and frequent marcher who helped guide freedom song teach-ins throughout the South in the early 1960s. In what seems to be the only recording of “Marching on the Mississippi Line,” Hillery brings together the language and sounds of Black spirituals with contemporary politics, name-checking figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Governor George Wallace. Her introduction to the song is a rallying cry: “If I can’t march, I can sing.”

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Bessie Jones, John Davis, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers gained wide renown during the 1960s and ‘70s for their powerful performances of traditional songs from the African American Gullah Geechee community on St. Simons Island, Georgia. Most in the group were born and raised on St. Simons, and could trace their ancestry to the enslaved West and Central Africans who worked on the island’s cotton plantations. Throughout the ‘60s, the Georgia Sea Island Singers were prominent voices in the civil rights movement, bringing hundreds of years of Black musical tradition to bear on a pivotal time in American history. This previously unheard recording captures their complete Friends of Old Time Music concert of April 1965, at which they were joined by legendary bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell, cane fife player Ed Young, and folklorist Alan Lomax, who acted as emcee. The album showcases a variety of traditional music from the Island and beyond, including stirring work songs, emotionally charged spirituals, jubilant songs for children, and revelatory renditions of Mississippi blues.

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