![]() The concert will be presented more as a songwriter-in-the-round affair than as a talent showcase, with an emphasis on raising voices together in common purpose. They’re not in relief they’re one body of work.” The other is to shed light on new material. One is to honor the tradition of those older songs. Songs about civil rights from the early 1960s are just as relevant today as they were when they were written. “Most of those songs are just as true and just as relevant and today. “I think there’s sort of a misconception with Odetta and Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and the songs of the freedom riders that all that music with social commentary is a thing of the past, and it’s not,” Dossett said. The point, Dossett told me, is that these songs are as current now as they were when they were written, and the songs being written by her contemporaries today are part of the same canon. For that matter, listen to Guthrie’s 1948 protest song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” with its refrain, “Who are all these friends all scattered like dry leaves?/ The radio say they are just ‘deportees’,” and try not to experience sorrow over the damage wrought by Trump’s order to rescind DACA. Look at those old photos of Woody Guthrie, with “This machine kills fascists” scrawled on his guitar, and see if you don’t experience a thrilling jolt of vicarious revenge towards the madman who carried out the deadly car-ramming attack in Charlottesville. Listen to “Wasn’t That a Mighty Storm,” an early 20 th Century folk song covered by Odetta and Nanci Griffith that memorializes the deadliest natural disaster in American history - the 1900 hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas - and tell me if you don’t flash on the image of families wading through waist-deep water in Houston in 2017. In the exhausting final weeks of the summer in Year 1 of Trump’s America, there is sadly no shortage of tribulation, and by the same token, no shortage of material for protest singers. Not every song is a protest song, but there’s always been a tradition of speaking to labor issues, social justice or issues like saving the water.” It’s to speak to current issues and celebrate - celebration in the sense of what folk music has always been about. ![]() “It’s to raise our voices together for social justice, for the environment. “If I have to get my brothers and sisters together, I’m going to do it with purpose,” she recalled. Dossett knew that if she was going to curate a group of local voices, it had to be for something more meaningful than showcasing individual talents. When Dossett was drafted to organize the inaugural Songs of Hope & Justice concert in 2015, less than three months had passed since the murder of nine African-American parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC by white supremacist Dylann Roof.
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