Far from being bounded by the timeframe of the 1960s, freedom song continues to evolve as a tool both of historical memory and of present activism. Stephen Stacks looks at how post-1968 freedom song helps us negotiate our present relationship to the era while at the same time sustaining the contemporary struggle inspired by it.

Stacks's analysis shifts the focus of attention from genre—freedom song—to process and practice—freedom singing. As he shows, freedom singing after 1968 generates multilayered meanings. It can reinforce, or resist, consensus memories or dominant narratives. Stacks illuminates freedom singing's diversity by examining it in three contexts: performance, protest, and within documentary sound recording/film.

Insightful and vividly detailed, The Resounding Revolution examines sixty years of Black music to challenge and reshape the entrenched story of the Civil Rights Movement.

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Introduction: Freedom Song after 1968

Chapter 1. Memory, History, and Freedom Song

Chapter 2. From Freedom Song to Freedom Singing

Chapter 3. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Freedom Singing, and Musical Coalition Politics

Chapter 4. Warren County, Environmental Justice, and Freedom Singing in Protest

Chapter 5. Documentary Media, Freedom Singing, and the Construction of Sonic Blackness

Conclusion: Freedom Singing into the Future

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

|"The Resounding Revolution posits the freedom song as an expressive form of political empowerment. Stacks expertly draws from African American studies, environmental studies, and other fields to pry open the deeper levels of political work that freedom song has accomplished in the past five decades."—David F. Garcia, Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
|Stephen Stacks is an assistant professor of music at North Carolina Central University.