March For Our Lives

Laz, Emily, our friend Eric Fithian and I sang at the March for Our Lives rally in Ann Arbor on March 24th. When we began playing at 11AM, it was 34 degrees. I had on six layers, my ski cap and, for the first time in my career as a musician, wore gloves while playing guitar. (Emily also wore gloves, while Laz and Eric, the tough guys of our quartet, bare knuckled it.) Oh, and though I brought it, I didn’t play my beloved Martin guitar. It was only 28 degrees an hour before we started, and Eric said, “You can’t bring that beauty out in these freezing temps!” and insisted I play his Fender Stratocaster. So, I played electric guitar for the first time in almost fifty years.

We played The Hammer Song, We Shall Not Be Moved, Come and Go with Me, Down by the Riverside, Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, This Land is Your Land, This Little Light, Forever Young and We Shall Overcome. Together with the crowd of 4,000, we all sang, clapped, and swayed along, and at times cried. I introduced Forever Young by saying, “This is for the kids who started it all.” I got choked up halfway through that sentence and could barely finish the first verse. Emily was so moved she was unable to get through much of the second verse. People Laz and my age of course knew these songs and their history in the Sixties and Seventies when they were the anthems of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War rallies. But I saw little children and young people of all ages also singing with us. The music resonated just as powerfully as it did fifty years ago.

It wasn’t until several days after the rally that I suddenly remembered when it was that Laz and I had last sung those songs at a similar event. On March 20, 1982, almost exactly 46 years before the March for Our Lives, a neo-Nazi group came to Ann Arbor to hold a rally, and that day we sang at one of the counter rallies on the Federal Building Plaza.

I recall feeling immensely grateful for these songs on that day, and did again at the March for Our Lives rally a few days ago. These songs, intertwined as they are with the history of so many people’s struggles for freedom and justice, are truly our national treasure. We are all incredibly fortunate to have them, and to be able to sing them together.