Songs of Conscience:
Piercing the Veil
Songs penetrate our defenses. They make things personal.
A Blues singer is chased by the law. They are rounding up blacks for a pressgang to lay sandbags on the levee. Across the barriers of time, class, experience, and perhaps, skin color – we live with him for a minute or two. It is the Spring of 1927 and the Mississippi is rising. It’s been raining all winter and is raining, still. When that levee fails, every man on it – the poor white deputies and the great mass of black men gathered under their guns – will die. We feel the danger, the injustice. We feel the fear and the rising futile courage of his resistance. Journeying in song, we are in his shoes. Our conscience and our compassion awakes. This is one of the primary functions of music, of history, and of art: the development of compassion.
Travel with Blues singer and guitarist Scott Ainslie from the Underground Railroad through the Civil Rights era; from the labor struggles of the early 1900s to the mill closings of the 1990s, as he examines the role of music in society and presents the history and songs of the struggles for civil rights, for peace and for economic justice.