This blog is dedicated to the amateur or beginner musician with music written in a simple and easy to read Alpha Notes format and with Chords for the left hand. This is to assist those with little or hardly at all note reading skills. This is a blog that shows all the chords in Alpha Notes format too which you can find the notes for the chords in one of the blogs. Please feel free to leave a comment or any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Enjoy!
"The Last Thing on My Mind" is a song written by Americanmusicianand singer-songwriterTom Paxtonin the early 1960s and recorded first by Paxton in 1964. It is based on the traditionallamentsong "The Leaving of Liverpool". The song was released on Paxton's 1964 albumRamblin' Boy, which was his first album released onElektra Records.
The song remains one of Paxton's best-known compositions.
"The Last Thing on My Mind" was covered by Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton and released as their debut duet single on October 30, 1967, by RCA Victor. Their version peaked at No.7 on the BillboardHot Country Singles chart, the first of an almost uninterrupted string of top ten singles they would release over the next several years.
The single was well received by critics upon release. Billboard gave a positive review of the single, which said that Wagoner and Parton's "initial outing should be a giant." They concluded by saying that "the folk-oriented ballad...has much pop potential." In another positive review, Cashbox called the single "a very effective updating of the contemporary folk ditty," with "an appealing blending of voices" which "makes this a good bet for big chart honors."
"The Last Thing on My Mind" debuted at No.70 on the BillboardHot Country Singles chart. It would eventually peak at No.7 and spend a total of 17 weeks on the chart. The single's B-side, "Love Is Worth Living", was successful in Canada, peaking at No.4 on the RPM Country Singles chart.
A solo version by Dolly Parton was released on February 16, 2023, from the Doc Watson tribute album I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100. The song was nominated for the 66th Grammy Awards in the Best Country Solo Performance category.
To download the easy alphanotes sheet music, look here.
Enjoy!
Lyrics:
Are you going away with no word of farewell Will there be not a trace left behind Well, I could have loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind You know that was the last thing on my mind
It's a lesson too late for the learnin' Made of sand, made of sand In the wink of an eye my soul is turnin' In your hand, in your hand
Are you going away with no word of farewell Will there be not a trace left behind Well, I could have loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind You know that was the last thing on my mind
You've got reasons a-plenty for goin' This I know, this I know For the weeds have been steadily growin' Please don't go, please don't go
Are you going away with no word of farewell Will there be not a trace left behind Well, I could have loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind You know that was the last thing on my mind
As I lie in my bed in the mornin' Without you, without you Each song in my breast lies a burnin' Without you, without you
Are you going away with no word of farewell Will there be not a trace left behind Well, I could have loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind You know that was the last thing on my mind
Are you going away with no word of farewell Will there be not a trace left behind Well, I could have loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind You know that was the last thing on my mind That was the last thing on my mind
"Four Strong Winds" is a song written in 1962 byIan Tysonand recorded byCanadianfolk duoIan and Sylviaon their 1963 albumFour Strong Winds. The song was the first one that Tyson wrote.Tyson has stated that he wrote the song in about 20 minutes in the New York apartment of his manager at the timeAlbert Grossman. Tyson said that he was inspired to write it after hearingBob Dylansing.The song is a melancholy reflection on a failing romantic relationship. The singer expresses a desire for a possible reunion in a new place in the future ("You could meet me if I sent you down the fare") but acknowledges the likelihood that the relationship is over ("But our good times are all gone/And I'm bound for moving on ...").
"Four Strong Winds" is a significant composition of the early 1960s folk revival, and has been recorded by numerous artists, including Bobby Bare, whose 1964 rendition was a hit on the U.S. country chart, and Neil Young, who has performed the song frequently throughout his career.
The song has a clear Canadian context and subtext, including an explicit mention of the province Alberta as well as references to long, cold winters. In 2005, CBC Radio One listeners chose it as the greatest Canadian song of all time on the program 50 Tracks: The Canadian Version. It is considered the unofficial anthem of Alberta.
"Four Strong Winds" was the first song Ian Tyson wrote; before it, he, as well as the duo Ian & Sylvia, had played only covers. In the autumn of 1962, Tyson ran into Bob Dylan, whom Tyson recalled as "this kind of little grubby kid", at the Greenwich Village bar Kettle of Fish, and Dylan played for him a song he had just written; Tyson would later say that he believed, though he was not sure, that the song was "Blowin' in the Wind". Tyson decided he could write a song as well, so he asked Albert Grossman, who managed both Ian & Sylvia and Bob Dylan, and "who was the only one [on the local folk music scene] that had a roof over his head:"...'Can I use your apartment tomorrow, cause I want to try and write a song?'"...I went over there and it was a funky, little apartment. Took my guitar and just opened up the case and started to fooling around and strumming. And it took half an hour" to write "Four Strong Winds".
Later, Tyson played the song for his fellow folk musicians at the local music venues Kettle of Fish and The Bitter End, and was surprised to see that the song "blew everybody away."
Tyson would later credit Dylan with giving new impetus to Ian & Sylvia's career by inspiring the duo to follow his lead in writing "original folk songs". As Tyson put it, "We had to go in some direction, because we had used up all the real roots music from the Delta on north. Bob blazed the trail into the wilderness, into unknown territory."
The song was included in Ian & Sylvia's second Vanguard LP, Four Strong Winds (stereo: VSD-2149; monaural: VRS-9133), released July 1963. The album entered the Billboard Top LPs chart at number 150 the week of September 28, 1963. The song was a hit in Canada, making number 9 on the single charts there in October 1963.
In the United States, the song did not have the same initial chart success. Ian and Sylvia's single version (released on Vanguard 35021) entered the Cashbox magazine Looking Ahead chart in September 1963. It was then recorded by The Brothers Four in a version that "bubbled under" the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1963. It was released in a country arrangement by Bobby Bare in 1964 and became a number three hit on the U.S. country singles chart in early 1965. That recording reached just number 40 in Canada.
The song also became a big hit in Norway in 1966 in a Norwegian version, "Mot ukjent sted" by The Vanguards; and a big hit in Sweden in 1967 in a Swedish version, "Mot okänt land", recorded by Hep Stars. (The title of both of these renditions translates to "Towards an unknown land".)
Neil Young recorded the song for his 1978 album Comes a Time, with harmony vocals from Nicolette Larson, and on The Band's The Last Waltz. It has received significant airplay over album oriented rock and classic rock radio stations and has become part of Young's concert repertoire, including featured performances during Young's yearly appearances at Farm Aid benefit concerts. In Canada, his version reached #18 on the AC charts, #48 on the country charts, and #61 on the rock charts.
Swedish artist Ulf Lundell recorded a translated cover called "Fyra vindar", for his 1985 album Den vassa eggen, which did not make the cut but was later included in a remastered edition in 1998. Another version of Swedish translation, "Mot okänt land", appears on the 2016 album Vid Grinden by Georga.
Ian and Sylvia sang the song together at the 50th anniversary of the Mariposa Folk Festival on July 11, 2010, in Orillia, Ontario. On April 5, 2013, a recording of the song by Ian Tyson was played during the funeral of former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, as the honour guard brought his urn into the Jack Singer Concert Hall.
The song is referenced in the 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, which deals with Americans living near or across the Canada–United States border. The narrator remembers how the main character Owen loved to hear that song as sung by the character of Hester.
To download the easy alphanotes sheet music, look here.
Enjoy!
Lyrics:
Chorus
Four strong winds that blow lonely, seven seas that run high All those things that don't change come what may For our good times are all gone and I'm bound for movin' on I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way
Guess I'll go out to Alberta, weather's good there in the fall Got some friends that I can go to workin' for Still I wish you'd change your mind if I asked you one more time But we've been through that a hundred times before
Chorus
If I get there before the snow flies and things are goin' good You could meet me if I sent you down the fare But by then it would be winter, not too much for you to do And the winds sure do blow cold way out there
In 1947, the song was published under the title "We Will Overcome" in an edition of the People's Songs Bulletin, as a contribution of and with an introduction by Zilphia Horton, then-music director of the Highlander Folk School of Monteagle, Tennessee—an adult education school that trained union organizers. She taught it to many others, including People's Songs director Pete Seeger, who included it in his repertoire, as did many other activist singers, such as Frank Hamilton and Joe Glazer.
In 1959, the song began to be associated with the civil rights movement as a protest song, when Guy Carawan stepped in with his and Seeger's version as song leader at Highlander, which was then focused on nonviolent civil rights activism. It quickly became the movement's unofficial anthem. Seeger and other famous folksingers in the early 1960s, such as Joan Baez, sang the song at rallies, folk festivals, and concerts in the North and helped make it widely known. Since its rise to prominence, the song, and songs based on it, have been used in a variety of protests worldwide.
The U.S. copyright of the People's Songs Bulletin issue which contained "We Will Overcome" expired in 1976, but The Richmond Organization (TRO) asserted a copyright on the "We Shall Overcome" lyrics, registered in 1960. In 2017, in response to a lawsuit against TRO over allegations of false copyright claims, a U.S. judge issued an opinion that the registered work was insufficiently different from the "We Will Overcome" lyrics that had fallen into the public domain because of non-renewal. In January 2018, the company agreed to a settlement under which it would no longer assert any copyright claims over the song.
In 2025, the publication Rolling Stone ranked Seeger's adaptation of the song at number 8 on its list of "The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time."
"I'll Overcome Some Day" was a hymn or gospel music composition by the Reverend Charles Albert Tindley of Philadelphia that was first published in 1901. A noted minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Tindley was the author of approximately 50 gospel hymns, of which "We'll Understand It By and By" and "Stand By Me" are among the best known. The published text bore the epigraph, "Ye shall overcome if ye faint not", derived from Galatians 6:9: "And let us not be weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not." The first stanza began:
The world is one great battlefield, With forces all arrayed; If in my heart I do not yield, I'll overcome some day.
Tindley's songs were written in an idiom rooted in African American folk traditions, using pentatonic intervals, with ample space allowed for improvised interpolation, the addition of "blue" thirds and sevenths, and frequently featuring short refrains in which the congregation could join. Tindley's importance, however, was primarily as a lyricist and poet whose words spoke directly to the feelings of his audiences, many of whom had been freed from slavery only 36 years before he first published his songs, and were often impoverished, illiterate, and newly arrived in the North. "Even today," wrote musicologist Horace Boyer in 1983, "ministers quote his texts in the midst of their sermons as if they were poems, as indeed they are."
A letter printed on the front page of February 1909, United Mine Workers Journal states: "Last year at a strike, we opened every meeting with a prayer, and singing that good old song, 'We Will Overcome'." This statement implied that the song was well-known, and it was also the first acknowledgment of such a song having been sung in both a secular context and a mixed-race setting.
Tindley's "I'll Overcome Some Day" was believed to have influenced the structure for "We Shall Overcome", with both the text and the melody having undergone a process of alteration. The tune has been changed so that it now echoes the opening and closing melody of "No More Auction Block For Me", also known from its refrain as "Many Thousands Gone".This was number 35 in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's collection of Negro Spirituals that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of June 1867, with a comment by Higginson reflecting on how such songs were composed (i.e., whether the work of a single author or through what used to be called "communal composition"):
Even of this last composition, however, we have only the approximate date and know nothing of the mode of composition. Allan Ramsay says of the Scots Songs, that, no matter who made them, they were soon attributed to the minister of the parish whence they sprang. And I always wondered, about these, whether they had always a conscious and definite origin in some leading mind, or whether they grew by gradual accretion, in an almost unconscious way. On this point, I could get no information, though I asked many questions, until at last, one day when I was being rowed across from Beaufort to Ladies' Island, I found myself, with delight, on the actual trail of a song. One of the oarsmen, a brisk young fellow, not a soldier, on being asked for his theory of the matter, dropped out a coy confession. "Some good spirituals," he said, "are start jess out o' curiosity. I been a-raise a sing, myself, once."
My dream was fulfilled, and I had traced out, not the poem alone, but the poet. I implored him to proceed.
"Once we boys," he said, "went for to tote some rice, and de nigger-driver, he keep a-calling on us; and I say, 'O, de ole nigger-driver!' Den another said, 'First thing my mammy told me was, notin' so bad as a nigger-driver.' Den I made a sing, just puttin' a word, and den another word."
Then he began singing, and the men, after listening a moment, joined in the chorus as if it were an old acquaintance, though they evidently had never heard it before. I saw how easily a new "sing" took root among them.
Bob Dylan used the same melodic motif from "No More Auction Block" for his composition, "Blowin' in the Wind". Thus similarities of melodic and rhythmic patterns imparted cultural and emotional resonance ("the same feeling") towards three different, and historically very significant songs.
Music scholars have also pointed out that the first half of "We Shall Overcome" bears a notable resemblance to the famous lay Catholic hymn "O Sanctissima", also known as "The Sicilian Mariners Hymn", first published by a London magazine in 1792 and then by an American magazine in 1794 and widely circulated in American hymnals. The second half of "We Shall Overcome" is essentially the same music as the 19th-century hymn "I'll Be All Right". As Victor Bobetsky summarized in his 2015 book on the subject: "'We Shall Overcome' owes its existence to many ancestors and to the constant change and adaptation that is typical of the folk music process."
In October 1945 in Charleston, South Carolina, members of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers union (FTA-CIO), who were mostly female and African American, began a five-month strike against the American Tobacco Company. To keep up their spirits during the cold, wet winter of 1945–1946, one of the strikers, a woman named Lucille Simmons, led a slow "long meter style" version of the gospel hymn, "We'll Overcome (I'll Be All Right)" to end each day's picketing. Union organizer Zilphia Horton, who was the wife of the co-founder of the Highlander Folk School (later Highlander Research and Education Center), said she learned it from Simmons. Horton was Highlander's music director during 1935–1956, and it became her custom to end group meetings each evening by leading this, her favorite song. During the presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace, "We Will Overcome" was printed in Bulletin No. 3 (September 1948), 8, of People's Songs, with an introduction by Horton saying that she had learned it from the interracial FTA-CIO workers and had found it to be extremely powerful. Pete Seeger, a founding member of People's Songs and its director for three years, learned it from Horton's version in 1947. Seeger writes: "I changed it to 'We shall'... I think I liked a more open sound; 'We will' has alliteration to it, but 'We shall' opens the mouth wider; the 'i' in 'will' is not an easy vowel to sing well ...." Seeger also added some verses ("We'll walk hand in hand" and "The whole wide world around").
In 1950, the CIO's Department of Education and Research released the album, Eight New Songs for Labor, sung by Joe Glazer ("Labor's Troubador"), and the Elm City Four. (Songs on the album were: "I Ain't No Stranger Now", "Too Old to Work", "That's All", "Humblin' Back", "Shine on Me", "Great Day", "The Mill Was Made of Marble", and "We Will Overcome".) During a Southern CIO drive, Glazer taught the song to country singer Texas Bill Strength, who cut a version that was later picked up by 4-Star Records.
The song made its first recorded appearance as "We Shall Overcome" (rather than "We Will Overcome") in 1952 on a disc recorded by Laura Duncan (soloist) and The Jewish Young Singers (chorus), conducted by Robert De Cormier, co-produced by Ernie Lieberman and Irwin Silber on Hootenany Records (Hoot 104-A) (Folkways, FN 2513, BCD15720), where it is identified as a Negro Spiritual.
Frank Hamilton, a folk singer from California who was a member of People's Songs and later The Weavers, picked up Seeger's version. Hamilton's friend and traveling companion, fellow-Californian Guy Carawan, learned the song from Hamilton. Carawan and Hamilton, accompanied by Ramblin Jack Elliot, visited Highlander in the early 1950s where they also would have heard Zilphia Horton sing the song. In 1957, Seeger sang for a Highlander audience that included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who remarked on the way to his next stop, in Kentucky, about how much the song had stuck with him. When, in 1959, Guy Carawan succeeded Horton as music director at Highlander, he reintroduced it at the school. It was the young (many of them teenagers) student-activists at Highlander, however, who gave the song the words and rhythms for which it is currently known, when they sang it to keep their spirits up during the frightening police raids on Highlander and their subsequent stays in jail in 1959–1960. Because of this, Carawan has been reluctant to claim credit for the song's widespread popularity. In the PBS video We Shall Overcome, Julian Bond credits Carawan with teaching and singing the song at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1960. From there, it spread orally and became an anthem of Southern African American labor union and civil rights activism. Seeger has also publicly, in concert, credited Carawan with the primary role of teaching and popularizing the song within the civil rights movement.
Four days before the April 4, 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., King recited the words from "We Shall Overcome" in his final sermon, delivered in Memphis on Sunday, March 31. He had done so in a similar sermon he gave previously in 1965 to an interfaith congregation at Temple Israel of Hollywood, California:
We shall overcome. We shall overcome. Deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome. And I believe it because somehow the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. We shall overcome because Carlyle is right; "no lie can live forever". We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right; "truth crushed to earth will rise again". We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right:
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the then unknown Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above his own.
With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to speed up the day. And in the words of prophecy, every valley shall be exalted. And every mountain and hill shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. This will be a great day. This will be a marvelous hour. And at that moment—figuratively speaking in biblical words—the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy
Farmworkers in the United States later sang the song in Spanish during the strikes and grape boycotts of the late 1960s. The song was notably sung by the U.S.Senator for New YorkRobert F. Kennedy, when he led anti-Apartheid crowds in choruses from the rooftop of his car while touring South Africa in 1966. It was also the song which Abie Nathan chose to broadcast as the anthem of the Voice of Peace radio station on October 1, 1993, and as a result it found its way back to South Africa in the later years of the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
William Bradford Reynolds, facing a mounting torrent of criticism for not moving fast enough on civil rights enforcement in the 1980s, sang "We Shall Overcome" hand in hand with Jesse Jackson on a trip to meet with the black communities of the Mississippi Delta.
The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association adopted "we shall overcome" as a slogan and used it in the title of its retrospective publication, We Shall Overcome – The History of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland 1968–1978.The film Bloody Sunday depicts march leader and Member of Parliament (MP) Ivan Cooper leading the song shortly before 1972's Bloody Sunday shootings. In 1997, the Christian men's ministry, Promise Keepers featured the song on its worship CD for that year: The Making of a Godly Man, featuring worship leader Donn Thomas and the Maranatha! Promise Band. Bruce Springsteen's re-interpretation of the song was included on the 1998 tribute album Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger as well as on Springsteen's 2006 album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.
On March 4, 2025, House Representative Al Green (D-TX 9) and several colleagues sang the song acapella in protest during PresidentDonald Trump's 2025 speech to a joint session of Congress. Congressman Green was removed from the House chamber by U.S. Capitol Police for the remainder of the evening for another interruption regarding Medicaid, and was subsequently censured by the House of Representatives for disrupting the President's joint address to Congress, pursuant to a resolution introduced the next morning by Representative Dan Newhouse (R-WA 4). The resolution to censure Green officially passed the House of Representatives 224 to 198 via rollcall vote on March 6, 2025, with 'Yea' votes from all 214 House Republican members along with ten House Democrats.In the aftermath, Green and several members broke out into the song again on the well.
"We Shall Overcome" was adopted by various labor, nationalist, and political movements both during and after the Cold War. In his memoir about his years teaching English in Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution, Mark Allen wrote:
In Prague in 1989, during the intense weeks of the Velvet Revolution, hundreds of thousands of people sang this haunting music in unison in Wenceslas Square, both in English and in Czech, with special emphasis on the phrase 'I do believe.' This song's message of hope gave protesters strength to carry on until the powers-that-be themselves finally gave up hope themselves. In the Prague of 1964, Seeger was stunned to find himself being whistled and booed by crowds of Czechs when he spoke out against the Vietnam War. But those same crowds had loved and adopted his rendition of 'We Shall Overcome.' History is full of such ironies – if only you are willing to see them.
— 'Prague Symphony', Praha Publishing, 2008
The words "We shall overcome" are sung emphatically at the end of each verse in a song of Northern Ireland's civil rights movement, Free the People, which protested against the internment policy of the British Army. The movement in Northern Ireland was keen to emulate the movement in the US and often sang "We shall overcome".
The melody was also used (crediting it to Tindley) in a symphony by American composer William Rowland. In 1999, National Public Radio included "We Shall Overcome" on the "NPR 100" list of most important American songs of the 20th century. As a reference to the line, in 2009, after the first inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, a man holding the banner, "WE HAVE OVERCOME" was seen near the Capitol, a day after hundreds of people posed with the sign on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
As the attempted serial killer "Lasermannen" shot several immigrants around Stockholm in 1992, Prime MinisterCarl Bildt and Immigration Minister Birgit Friggebo attended a meeting in Rinkeby. As the audience became upset, Friggebo tried to calm them down by proposing everyone sing "We Shall Overcome". This statement is widely regarded as one of the most embarrassing moments in Swedish politics. In 2008, the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet listed the Sveriges Television recording of the event as the best political clip available on YouTube.
On June 7, 2010, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame released a new version of the song as a protest against the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
In India, the renowned poet Girija Kumar Mathur composed a literal translation in Hindi "Hum Honge Kaamyab (हम होंगे कामयाब)" which became a popular patriotic/spiritual song during the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in schools. This song also came to be used by the Blue Pilgrims for motivating the India national football team during international matches.
In Bengali-speaking India and Bangladesh, there are two versions, both of which are popular among schoolchildren and political activists. "Amra Korbo Joy" (আমরা করবো জয়)”, is a literal translation by Bengali folk singer Hemanga Biswas, re-recorded by Bhupen Hazarika. Hazarika, who had heard the song during his days in the United States, also translated the song to Assamese as "Ami hom xophol" (আমি হ'ম সফল). Another version, translated by Shibdas Bandyopadhyay, "Ek Din Shurjer Bhor" (এক দিন সূর্যের ভোর, literally "One Day The Sun Will Rise") was arranged by Ruma Guha Thakurta and recorded by the Calcutta Youth Choir during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence, becoming one of the bestselling Bengali records. It was a favorite of Prime MinisterSheikh Mujibur Rahman, and it was regularly sung at public events after Bangladesh gained its independence in the early 1970s.
In the Indian state of Kerala, a traditional Communist stronghold, the song became popular on college campuses during the late 1970s. It was the struggle song of the Students Federation of India (SFI), the largest student organisation in the country. The song translated into the local Malayalam as “Nammal Vijayikkum” by SFI activist N. P. Chandrasekharan, using the same tune of the original. Later, it was published in Student, the monthly magazine of SFI in Malayalam as well as in Sarvadesheeya Ganangal (Mythri Books, Thiruvananthapuram), a translation of international struggle songs.
Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys released their version of the song as a single and music video in 2022. Their version can also be found on the expanded edition of their 2021 album, Turn Up That Dial.
The copyright status of "We Shall Overcome" was disputed in the late 2010s. A copyright registration was made for the song in 1960, which is credited as an arrangement by Zilphia Horton, Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton, and Pete Seeger, of a work entitled "I'll Overcome", with no known original author. Horton's heirs, Carawan, Hamilton, and Seeger share the artists' half of the rights, and The Richmond Organization (TRO), which includes Ludlow Music, Essex, Folkways Music, and Hollis Music, holds the publishers' rights, to 50% of the royalty earnings. Seeger explained that he registered the copyright under the advice of TRO, who showed concern that someone else could register it. "At that time we didn't know Lucille Simmons' name", Seeger said. Their royalties go to the "We Shall Overcome" Fund, administered by Highlander under the trusteeship of the "writers". Such funds are purportedly used to give small grants for cultural expression involving African Americans organizing in the U.S. South.
In April 2016, a lawsuit was filed against TRO and Ludlow by the We Shall Overcome Foundation (WSOF), a group led by producer Isaias Gamboa that was denied permission to use the song in a documentary on its history. The suit alleged that the TRO-Ludlow copyright claims were invalid because the copyright had not been renewed as required by United States copyright law at the time, and that the copyright of the 1948 People's Songs publication containing "We Will Overcome" had therefore expired in 1976. Additionally, it was argued that the registered copyrights only covered specific arrangements of the tune and "obscure alternate verses", that the registered works "did not contain original works of authorship, except to the extent of the arrangements themselves", and that no record of a work entitled "I'll Overcome" existed in the database of the United States Copyright Office. The WSOF was working on a documentary about the song and its history, and were denied permission to use the song by TRO-Ludlow. The suit sought to have the copyright status of the song clarified, and the return of all royalties collected by the companies from its usage.
The suit acknowledged that Seeger himself had not claimed to be an author of the song, stating of the song in his autobiography, "No one is certain who changed 'will' to 'shall.' It could have been me with my Harvard education. But Septima Clarke, a Charleston schoolteacher (who was director of education at Highlander and after the civil rights movement was elected year after year to the Charleston, S.C. Board of Education) always preferred 'shall.' It sings better." He also reaffirmed that the decision to copyright the song was a defensive measure, with his publisher apparently warning him that "if you don't copyright this now, some Hollywood types will have a version out next year like 'Come on Baby, We shall overcome tonight'". Furthermore, the liner notes of Seeger's compilation album If I Had a Hammer: Songs of Hope & Struggle contained a summary on the purported history of the song, stating that "We Shall Overcome" was "probably adapted from the 19th-century hymn, 'I'll Be All Right'", and that "I'll Overcome Some Day" was a "possible source" and may have originally been adapted from "I'll Be All Right".
Gamboa had shown interest in investigating the origins of "We Shall Overcome"; in a book entitled We Shall Overcome: Sacred Song On The Devil's Tongue, he notably disputed the song's claimed origins and copyright registration with an alternate theory, suggesting that "We Shall Overcome" was actually derived from "If My Jesus Wills", a hymn by Louise Shropshire that had been composed in the 1930s and had its copyright registered in 1954. The WSOF lawsuit did not invoke this theory, focusing instead on the original belief that the song stemmed from "We Will Overcome". The lawyer backing Gamboa's suit, Mark C. Rifkin, was previously involved in a case that invalidated copyright claims over the song "Happy Birthday to You".
On September 8, 2017, Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York issued an opinion that there were insufficient differences between the first verse of the "We Shall Overcome" lyrics registered by TRO-Ludlow, and the "We Will Overcome" lyrics from People's Songs (specifically, the aforementioned replacement of "will" with "shall", and changing "down in my heart" to "deep in my heart") for it to qualify as a distinct derivative work eligible for its own copyright.
On January 26, 2018, TRO-Ludlow agreed to a final settlement, under which it would no longer claim copyright over the melody or lyrics to "We Shall Overcome". In addition, TRO-Ludlow agreed that the melody and lyrics were thereafter dedicated to the public domain.
To download the easy alphanotes sheet music, look here.
Enjoy!
Lyrics:
We shall overcome, We shall overcome, We shall overcome, some day.
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe We shall overcome, some day.
We'll walk hand in hand, We'll walk hand in hand, We'll walk hand in hand, some day.
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe We shall overcome, some day.
We shall live in peace, We shall live in peace, We shall live in peace, some day.
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe We shall overcome, some day.
We are not afraid, We are not afraid, We are not afraid, today
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe We shall overcome, some day.
The whole wide world around The whole wide world around The whole wide world around some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe We shall overcome, some day.
