suggested political song: You Got To Move
Gobeil-Tchen
It's rather late for this, since I've been mulling over new verses to the song "You Got to Move".
I've attached the song "You Got to Move" sung by Janie Hunter et al. from St. John Island off the coast of Charleston SC. This songs was collected by Guy and Candi Carawan, who were helping with voter registration and the required literacy education in 1963-65. So this song moved from being a church song to the civil rights movement.
You can hear samples and download the CD liner notes at:
���� http://www.folkways.si.edu/albumdetails.aspx?itemid=2060
Amazon's entry is here.
There have been
versions by Mississippi Fred McDowell (www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtlVSedpIRU),
Rev Gary Davis, The Blind Boys Of Alabama (www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2Qwi8QLBQ8),
Sam Cooke, the Rolling Stones,
Aerosmith etc.
I'd like to
suggest these modified lyrics. To help participation, I've
expanded the chorus.
I got to move, you
got to move
We got to move, they got to move
You may be rich, you may be poor,
You may be high, you may be lo--ow,
Ch: O, when the people, get ready, You got to move
My sister move, my brother move
My father move, my mother move
Ch: O, when the people, get ready, You got to move.
You may be a broker, at Goldman Sacks,
You may be a worker struggling back..
Ch: O, when the people, get ready, You got to move.
You may be a banker, at CitiBank,
You may be laid-off and on the street. ???
Ch: O, when the people, get ready, You got to move.
You may be a judge, in the high seat.
You may be occupying, in the street.
Ch: O, when the people, get ready, You got to move.
You may be an exec with stock options.
You may be eating at a soup kitchen.
Ch: O, when the people, get ready, You got to move.
You may be a evicting, for Citibank. ???
You may be blocking at your home.
Ch: O, when the people, get ready, You got to move.
Sometime I'm up, sometime I'm down
Sometime I'm almost to the ground
Ch: O, when the people, get ready, You got to
move.
*******************
Here is an extract from:
www.stanford.edu/~rickford/L73/SS.Ch5.SingersToasters.rtf
The Stones, like other bands to emerge while rock and roll
was young, got famous by borrowing black styles and black
talk, and mostly without attribution. Even the name of the
group was plucked from a song originally recorded by blues
great Muddy Waters (see "Mannish Boy" excerpt below).�
Several of the Stone's hits can be loosely traced to black
standards of the South, but a few are just plain knock-offs.
When recording "You Gotta Move" in 1971, for instance, the
band did nothing more than lay a grinding electric guitar
behind old, old lyrics:
You gotta move, you gotta move, child
Oh, when the Lord gets ready
You gotta move
The original "I Gotta Move," was sung in black churches for
years, and is likely still being performed. The song
contains many of the classic characteristics of "ring
shouts," those praise sessions of slaves who rekindled faith
and resisted misery by drawing themselves into animated
worship circles. Ring shouts tended to carry simple messages
and contain simple lyrics. It was their rendering that was
adorned. The following version of "I Gotta Move," recorded
in the 1960's during a live, a-cappella performance by a
group of Georgia Sea Island women, began at an almost
lilting pace, with booming voices, syncopated claps and
stomps on a naked floor creating, in the truest sense, an
orchestra without instruments. One woman kicked off each
line, but she was quickly accompanied by the harmonizing
wails of the others. Then, a few bars into the plaintive
melody, the plodding footfalls sped up and the clapping went
double-time. The resulting sound was layered and throbbing
and sepulchral, as if it had wafted up from a sad, sad
netherworld:
I got ta move, we
got ta move
We got ta move, we got ta move
Ch: O, when the
Lord, get ready, You got ta move.
You may be rich, you may be poor,
You may be high, you may be low,
Ch: O, when the Lord, get ready, You got ta move
My brother move, my brother move
My brother move, my brother move
Ch: O, when
the Lord, get ready, You got ta move.
Sometime I'm up, sometime I'm down
Sometime I'm almost to da groun'
Ch: O, when the
Lord, get ready, You got ta move.
There are
layers of meaning here as well as sound. You got to move
when the spirit says move, the song suggests, like when the
Holy Spirit winds you up on Sunday morning. But you've also
got to move on home to Jesus when He says it's time to rest.
And this is the great equalizer, for as is observed, the
rich and high-ups must go before Him when He gets ready,
same as the poor and low-downs. Such a profound faith in the
equal opportunity of mortality should have scraped a
slaver's spine like an icy finger. Lord knows all men were
created equal, the lyrics seem to imply. And eventually you
will too.
... Did the first soul to wail these lyrics mean to convey
that his or her brother was moving at that moment--which
would suggest that the sibling in question was still
present--or that his or her brother had already "moved," and
was, as the old folks say, "resting in the bosom of Jesus?"
Maybe both. Clearly, human capitulation to the will of the
Lord is the song's main concern. But "I gotta move" might
also be viewed as a carry-over from the African faith system
that tells us that departed kinfolk inhabit a dynamic spirit
world, a realm from which they can participate in and guide
the affairs of the living. If your brother had passed on, or
even if he had escaped or been purchased by a plantation
owner far away, you two would still have been wrapped up in
a quilt of co-dependency, a notion perhaps articulated by
the haunting phrase "we got ta move."