"A song can change your condition” freedom songs as a matter of agglutinations and tensions around the meanings of blackness in african american politics. United States 1955-1971

Abstract

This article aims to expose the ways in which freedom songs, an African American musical genre characteristic of the struggle processes of the Sixties of the Twentieth Century, were produced and circulated, and understand in which ways the assessments, conflicts and tensions that were generated around them indicate ambivalences and complexities, not only in the relations between black and political music but in the discourses of blackness in the United States. Based on testimonies from referents and activists of the most relevant political organizations of the period (whether from the Civil Rights Movement or the Black Power) and from protagonists of the experiences of musical production (from singer groups to bands) linked differently to those organizations, we will explore the hypothesis, alternative to certain consolidated perspectives, that freedom songs were not automatically translated, or accepted without discussion, as an African American political resource and that, when they were used, their meanings were not unique. The fact that freedom songs were not considered in the same way by their producers and by political organizations allows us to think of an articulation between politics, music and racialized identities less homogeneous than what certain political and historiographic narratives provide in relation to the links between blackness and black music during the Sixties in the United States.