Emma's Revolution — peace, salaam, shalom...
by Sue Barrett
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Emma's Revolution
pix by Irene Young |
“We’ve had support in some unlikely towns…And we find, even in places others think of as completely conservative or completely reactionary, that there are people who care about issues the way we do.” — Sandy O
“Sometimes songs are as difficult to sing as they were to write or to hear about. We sobbed through the writing of ‘If I Give Your Name’, but for us it was harder to contain those stories than to put the words and lives of those people into a song.” — Pat Humphries
A cassette tape played a part in American singer-songwriters Pat Humphries and Sandy O meeting each other. And radical activist Emma Goldman played a part in them adopting “emma’s revolution” as their performing name.
Pat Humphries was born in Ohio and grew up in the Cleveland area.
“Music was part of my life before I could even speak. I have five sisters and my four older sisters, who sang in choruses and in the theatre and in school, always sang to me when I was little. They would laugh and marvel at the fact that I could sing all the words to songs on the radio before I could really form much of a sentence speaking on my own. And my dad always would sing around the house — he would actually sing a harmony line to whatever was on the radio.
“I sang with my friends and for my friends growing up. I sang in the children’s chorus to the Cleveland Orchestra for two seasons from when I was 12. Then I sang with a semi-professional chorus around Cleveland, began performing professionally in a duo when I was a junior in high school and played in various configurations in college.”
Sandy O grew up on Long Island, New York.
“I also come from a musical family. My parents both play piano — actually my dad can pretty much play any musical instrument (cornet, guitar, violin). We always sang songs, made up songs, sang in the car. I never got to sing harmony when I was a kid ’cause I was the only one who could remember the words. By the time I got to high school and college, I refused to sing the lead! And that’s one of the great things when Pat and I go around and teach harmony — I can tell people that you can really learn to do it.
“I started writing songs when I was in college. At the time, I was studying the lute and playing Renaissance music. And although I loved the sound of Renaissance music, the words were completely awful! So I started writing my own songs — mostly about things like reproductive rights issues, women’s work issues. I lived in London for almost a year and started working with the International Wages for Housework Campaign.”
Music provided Pat with career options outside the fairly narrow opportunities that she saw being taken up by women in Cleveland.
“I was determined that I would either be a musician or be a visual artist and it started to become apparent around the end of high school that there were some possibilities for me to be a professional musician. I wrote a little bit when I was nine or ten, then I didn’t write again until I was out of college and when I went to a Si Kahn song writing workshop at the Omega Institute in upstate New York in 1984, where I wrote ‘Never Turning Back/Keep on Moving Forward’ and, with Australian performer Judy Small, ‘Walls and Windows’.”
For Sandy, music career options were around from the time she was in college.
“Since the time that I was studying the lute in college, I had this idea that it was possible to be a full time musician. It was a pretty small world — that early music and lute crowd — so the people that I was interacting with were making a living playing music or teaching early music. But when I went back to writing my own stuff and playing folk music, I had a regular job and played on the weekends. It really wasn’t until Pat and I got together that I started doing performing full-time. Right before we got together I was living in New York City and teaching music for very young kids — like four months old to five years old — and I was going to do some more music with children down in the DC area. But after September 11th, everything changed and our work as activist musicians really took off and we’ve been touring non-stop since then.”
Pat Humphries and Sandy O first became acquainted around 15 years ago.
“Pat and I met through music. I had a friend who played me one of Pat’s songs, ‘Swimming to the Other Side’. I can’t quite remember if I just loved the song or if I just really loved this postage stamp-sized photo of Pat which was on the cassette cover! I decided to send Pat a copy of the music that I was doing in a duo [Petronella] with my friend from college. I asked Pat whether she wanted to come on a tour with us that I was organising called WomenFolk — which was women singers going to women’s colleges. And she came on that tour. After that we kinda did a few shows every now and then. I was living in New York City and Pat was living in upstate New York. When she came down to the city, we would do some shows together and sometimes she would invite us up to do a show with her. We were friends for eight years, playing on and off together, then we realised that there was more than friendship! And we’ve been together for seven years.”
For Pat and Sandy, September 11th had a profound impact — both personally and professionally.
“Sandy and I got married September 2nd 2001 in New York state, in the Hudson Valley. Then nine days later, September 11th happened. I think that, for both of us, the way we process things is often through songs. Sometimes I don’t know how I’m feeling about something before I write it down and put it into a song. On September 11th, we were in Maryland, just outside the DC area, in the process of moving there. We were there for a festival and planning to go back to New York to pick up the rest of our stuff. I was watching the endless television coverage and being really swept into that sense of helplessness and hopelessness when the words ‘peace, salaam, shalom’ came to mind and Sandy and I just kinda started chanting those words in our heads. Those words really pulled us out of that sense of hopelessness and gave us back some of the energy that fuels the justice work that we do, the type of energy that is required to do that kind of work.”
Shortly after September 11th, Pat Humphries and Sandy O returned to New York City.
“About four or five days after September 11th, Pat and I went up to New York City to sing ‘Peace, Salaam, Shalom’ on a progressive radio station. And while we were doing that program, we heard testimony from family members of the undocumented community in New York City who were telling stories of trying to locate their missing family members. From the time when the towers came down on Tuesday, people started putting up photos all around New York City — this is my son, he worked on the 98th floor; this is my wife, she worked on the 75th floor, have you seen her? — that kind of stuff. New York City quickly became this memorial and visual of all the people who were missing. But what was not there were the pictures of undocumented workers — because although the City was being respectful about the fact that this was not a time to come down on people without paperwork, the Federal Government was seizing people’s papers. So a whole community of people stopped publicly talking about their missing folks in the Trade Center and publicly stopped asking for assistance. We were shocked and horrified and haunted by the stories and when we were driving away from New York City to do a show upstate in Ithaca, I started singing a couple of lines and Pat filled in the next line of the song that became ‘If I Give Your Name’.”
Sandy sees the personal and professional relationship between Pat and her as mutually rewarding, despite the stresses of life as a touring musician.
“[When you work with your life partner], you really have to like the person! We spend twenty four and a half hours a day together — almost right next to each other. We’re in the car a lot driving, we’re working on our computers together, we’re singing together, we’re standing on stage together. It’s a very, very intertwined and intimate life. Our family and friends are amazed by it. But we are very, very, very well suited. We really respect each other, we like each other, we know how to make each other laugh (which comes in handy a lot!). Our life has a lot of uncertainty and change — every day we are in a new place, every day we need to find where we can get wireless reception. So we need the ability to get through that stress.
“On our emma’s revolution CDs, there are songs like ‘Vote’, ‘codePINK’ and ‘Kilimanjaro’ which are a little more pop/rock — which is my sort of sound. And there are songs like ‘Silence and Lies’ and ‘Who Lies’ that are Pat’s sound. I think that people like the variety of our music and the mixture of different styles. And we’ve found that we have a very multi-generational listening audience. There was a woman in Massachusetts who told her daughter that she was bringing us in to do a concert at her church. And the daughter said, ‘How do you know emma’s revolution? That’s MY music!’”
Pat Humphries knows, first hand, that the life of an activist musician can be challenging.
“Sometimes songs are as difficult to sing as they were to write or to hear about. We sobbed through the writing of ‘If I Give Your Name’, but for us it was harder to contain those stories than to put the words and lives of those people into a song. The first time that we sang that song was in Ithaca, New York — we got through the song and the room was dead silent, except for a gasp. We just stood there for these moments, which felt like an eternity, feeling that we’d sung a song that was too hard for the audience to hear and then, after that horrendous pause, the applause was deafening. We hear devastatingly difficult stories from people, but I do think that there is something tremendously cathartic about shining a light onto those stories so that we can all be involved in the problem solving around them.
“The things that we sing about do put our lives in danger to some extent, but no more than the lives of the people who have experienced those things. What we know about people who take risks is that the more of them who are taking risks at the same time, the harder it is to silence the stories. So I always feel like it’s more important for us to pass these stories along because everybody is safer when we have the information and everybody is safer when they know that there are people and groups working on every aspect of these incredibly dangerous and difficult issues. There is always more danger under the veil of secrecy and in the silence.”
Sandy O also recognises the challenges.
“We work with a lot of people who are taking far greater risks than we are and we’re very inspired by the fact that they do that. Sometimes when I’m singing ‘If I Give Your Name’ I remember how those family members spoke — but they shouldn’t have to be the only ones talking about their stories. We know people who can’t go back to their home countries because they will literally be picked up and arrested, if not killed, right away — but they are outside their country doing all this work to make the situation change in their country and to bring safety to their family and friends who are still there. It’s important that people see that we are still doing our work — that we haven’t been silenced, that our music is being played on the radio.
“We’ve had support in some unlikely towns. We’re actually on our way to a town in Orange County, California for a performance. When we were in Northern California a few years ago, we mentioned that we were going to Orange County and people said, ‘Don’t go!’. Orange County is considered to be one of the most conservative counties in the country, but when we went there, we sang the same stuff that we sing everywhere and we told the same stories that we tell everywhere, and while some people looked a little surprised, most people were thrilled. And we find, even in places others think of as completely conservative or completely reactionary, that there are people who care about issues the way we do.”
As Pat Humphries goes about her musical travels, she keeps coming across people for whom her songs have special meaning.
“When we played at the Old Songs Festival in Altamont, New York, there was a man who had seen me play at that festival about 15 years before, when I had sung the song ‘People Love’ — about being a lesbian. He told me that when he heard the song all those years before, he just couldn’t hear it and he had wondered why I had had to bring it up, why I had had to ‘flaunt’ it. Then he went on to tell me that when his son had came out to him after the first festival, he had the song in his head and he was so grateful because it gave him some way to respond lovingly to what his son was going through.
“At that same festival, which always has a very mixed audience, we were singing a song called ‘We Are One’, that I had written about the first meeting of the leaders of North and South Korea in June of 2000. An elderly man and his daughter walked up after the set and he said in a somewhat cursory manner, ‘That song you sang about Korea. You’re right about that.’ His daughter chimed in and said, ‘You know, he’s just being modest. He was a General in that war.’ We stood there stunned, tears welling up in our eyes — the General’s and mine — just staring at each other — it was an incredible moment.”
Although Pat Humphries and Sandy O are both accomplished songwriters, emma’s revolution also performs and records songs written by other people. One of these songwriters is Phil Ochs, whose music Pat has been listening to since she was a girl in Ohio.
“Phil lived in Ohio for a while and, although he didn’t get a great deal of airplay across the US (he was seen as too controversial), his songs were played on the radio in Cleveland. So I grew up hearing his songs, although I never got to see him in concert. Phil was one of the organizers of the demonstrations in Lincoln Park during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. And when there was a very small turnout and when students and other young people there got really beaten up, Phil felt very personally responsible. In 1985, I met Phil’s sister Sonny at a gathering of the People’s Music Network (which is loosely organised band of political songwriters and people that use culture and progressive politics in their work and in their organizing). Sonny had been organizing music events since Phil’s death in 1976 to keep his work in circulation and to share the wealth of his beautiful music. She invited me to sing at one of these events at The Bottom Line in New York City. And I found the song, ‘Chaplains of the War’, which Sonny had never heard!
“When we are on tour, we like to lay eyes on important historic places in progressive history — so on one of our trips to Chicago we went to Lincoln Park.”
As well as performing, Pat Humphries and Sandy O conduct music workshops. For Sandy, the art of song writing has been something that she’s been considering since her Petronella days.
“I think that the people who need to take notice of Petronella’s ‘The Too-Long Song’ definitely wouldn’t get a positive message from it! The story behind that song is that Lucia and I had signed up for an open mic and we didn’t get on until five or six hours later because of these majorly depressing ‘woe is me’ songs. In our workshops, there’s a completely different feel. We create a really encouraging and positive and playful experience in a setting where people get to try a whole lot of different stuff and have a good time. And often people are surprised by songs that they themselves write. One woman said at one point that she didn’t write bluesy songs — but she’d just finished writing this great blues tune! People in our workshops get to tap into the whole wealth of music that they have in them.”
Over the years, many people have performed and recorded Pat Humphries’ songs.
“It’s a tremendous honor, actually, when other people record your songs. I think of my songs as tools in a toolbox of things to use when you’re at a demonstration, when you’re trying make a point, when you’re trying to bring a crowd together. But it’s a great compliment when anyone, particularly another songwriter, choses to use your songs.
“I met Judy Small for the first time at Si Kahn’s song writing workshop in 1984. And pretty much the first words that I heard come out of anybody’s mouth after I tearfully sang ‘Never Turning Back/Keep on Moving Forward’ to the song writing class were from Judy saying, ‘I want the words to that song’. It was rather startling to me, being a new songwriter. Judy and I hit it off right away and she made me sing the song over and over and over again. We went on to write ‘Walls and Windows’ at the same workshop — and, as I recall, lots of coffee and ice cream went into that song!
“I heard from Judy on a tour a few years later that ‘Never Turning Back/Keep on Moving Forward’ had been translated into the Djabugay Australian Aboriginal language and she sang a little bit for me. I was delighted to hear that. And just in this past year, we got a poster signed by the cast of an Australian show called Never Turning Back, which was acted by an Aboriginal cast. My family has Indigenous heritage here in the United States. My family is Cherokee on my father’s side, from the south east US, although I wasn’t raised in the culture. So I feel very, very connected to Indigenous and Aboriginal people around the world. And I was really honored to have people take my song as a part of their own contemporary culture.
“When we introduce our song, ‘Women Say No to War’, we note that in the Cherokee tradition it was the women who chose the leaders and historically in that culture it was the women who chose whether or not the nations would go to war.”
Despite their busy touring schedule, Pat Humphries and Sandy O are in the process of writing a book (scheduled for release in 2009) that includes their songs and the stories about those songs.
That touring schedule is bringing emma’s revolution to Chicago this week (Sunday 27 April 2008), to perform with Voices and Holly Near (whose music Pat has been listening to for years).
“I think that I first came across Holly’s music when I was in college in the early ’80s. I was just at the point where I was discovering that I was lesbian — I was just beginning to identify as a lesbian and starting my first relationship. And, I have to say, I was most fearful when I heard Holly — I was still a little timid about the whole thing. Then a friend of mine asked whether I wanted to go to one of Holly’s concerts in Cleveland. And I said, ‘Oh no, I’m not really that into politics’. I admitted that on stage with Holly one time! When I did go to my first Holly Near concert in around 1983 — in Cleveland, as part of an audience of more than a thousand people — I sang ‘we are gay and straight together and we are singing, singing for our lives’ — and it was a very moving experience.
“We met Chris Inserra (one of the members of Voices) through the School of the Americas Watch. Voices had recorded ‘Never Turning Back/Keep on Moving Forward’ years before we met Chris. Sandy and I were planning to perform in Chicago, but when the gigs with Holly were scheduled we decided to do a larger show involving Holly and Voices.”
Like Pat, Sandy has been visiting Chicago for a long time.
“The first time that I visited Chicago, many years before Pat and I were performing together, was to see a friend of mine. What is great now is that we have a huge group of people in Chicago that we know and love. It’s just become this increasing circle of almost family. One couple chose to have their baby naming ceremony when we were in Chicago, because they wanted us to sing at it. And Chicago has a great gay and lesbian population and activism scene which we like to tap into.”
Pat Humphries and Sandy O adopted the performing name “emma’s revolution” in recognition of the work of radical activist Emma Goldman.
“When Sandy and I were looking for a name, we thought of Emma Goldman. We feel the need in our music to make sure that there is an element of hope and a way in which people can see their own stories in other people’s stories and connect to them and to connect to the groups that are working on these issues. Without that seed of hope, there is really no energy and no motivation to move forward. So it’s been nice to carry Emma with us and her spirit and the legacy of her organizing.”
Pat Humphries and Sandy O (emma’s revolution) will be in Chicago on Sunday 27 April 2008 for an afternoon CD signing with Holly Near at the Women & Children First bookstore (5233 N. Clark Street) and for an evening performance with Holly and Voices at the Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ.
More info
www.emmasrevolution.com
www.hollynear.com
www.myspace.com/voiceschicago
www.womenandchildrenfirst.com
www.waucc.org/near.php
SUE BARRETT is an Australian music writer, with a special interest in women in music. In January 1996, Sue travelled many hours by bus to the small town of Bodalla on the New South Wales south coast, where she saw the Bidngi Birds (www.mettaphor.com), with Heather Bishop (www.heatherbishop.com) and Judy Small (www.judysmall.com.au), perform ‘Gari Warrnggin-Mudu’, an Aboriginal language version of Pat Humphries’ song ‘Never Turning Back/Keep on Moving Forward’.
© 2008
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