We Shall Overcome

[This page is part of a series of radical song links connected with these articles.

To see an index of other song pages, click here.]

Mural honouring Louise Shropshire, who wrote ‘If My Jesus Wills’, which has recently been recognised as the song from which We Shall Overcome was derived.

There are many articles that discuss the origins of this iconic civil rights anthem from the USA, and I’ve just collated a few of them here for you to peruse, and I’ll put together some videos of different singers below as well. The short story is that the song was derived from various sources, the strongest of which Pete Seeger cited as ‘I’ll overcome someday’ by Rev. Dr. Charles Albert Tindley. A different song with similar words was recognised as the source by the courts in 2018 as ‘If My Jesus Wills’ by Louise Shropshire, a music minister in Cincinnati. Either way, the change that turned the song into a civil rights anthem it became was turning ‘I’ to ‘We’.

Pete Seeger, Zilphia Horton, Guy Carawan, and Frank Hamilton went on to make ‘protective copyright’ of the song as a derivative song, and all the royalties went to support African American arts and education through the Highlander Center in Tennessee. (https://highlandercenter.org/programs/we-shall-overcome-fund/)