use your music

the song of the short. she wrote that she sat down at her piano and came out an hour later with it. this take was recorded in new york on 4 april 1964.

recorded in the studio on 18 november 1963, two months after the bombing. asked about the title, coltrane said it was “something that i saw down there translated into music from inside me.”

about the murder of medgar evers that june. dylan sang it on 6 july 1963 at a voter-registration rally on a farm near greenwood, mississippi, and again at the march on washington.

her brother-in-law, richard fariña, wrote it about the four girls. spike lee opened his film 4 little girls (1997) with this recording.

from my people, ellington’s show in chicago, august 1963: a play on “joshua fit the battle of jericho” for bull connor’s dogs and fire hoses in birmingham that spring.

a mississippi bluesman on the violence in alabama, recorded in chicago on 5 may 1965 for a german promoter. in 1954 his “eisenhower blues” had been pulled and remade without the president’s name.

recorded the same day as her “mississippi goddam”: brecht and weill’s song, in marc blitzstein’s english, of a maid in a “crummy southern town” who dreams of a ship that will shell it.

written for band in 1982, in memory of the four girls; the title points to picasso’s guernica. hailstork said the idea of an interrupted church service called the bombing to mind.

recorded in hollywood on 30 january 1964. hearing dylan’s “blowin’ in the wind”, cooke had told j.w. alexander he was almost ashamed not to have written something like it.

pops staples wrote it for the march from selma to montgomery in march 1965; the family recorded it live weeks later at new nazareth church in chicago.

billy taylor wrote it for his daughter, kim, and recorded it as an instrumental in november 1963; the words came with dick dallas. simone sang it on silk & soul in 1967.