On Saturday afternoon hundreds of us gathered on the streets of South Minneapolis to sing in protest and grief for our neighbors
byu/zoinkability inMinneapolis
Singing vigil on streets of South Minneapolis, Jan. 17, 2025 (zoinkability).

Let’s get something straight right off the bat. I don’t claim to be some kind of civil rights hero. I was close enough to be inspired by it, but I was one of those ever-so-cautious white Southern moderates who so exasperated Dr. Martin Luther King. (At heart, I guess I still am.) Let’s put it like this: I saw parts of the movement from up close, when the schools in my county were desegregated and the National Guard was called out. And I benefitted from it in more ways than I can count, but I was able to watch from a safe, comfortable distance.

That said, I was moved almost to tears the other day when I watched a video of demonstrators in Minneapolis singing a refrain that sounded familiar from the protest marches of anti-war movement and civil rights days. Musically, it was captivating, a blend of the call-and-response energy of the African American tradition with a trace of the rich harmonies of upper Midwestern church choirs. It goes like this:

Hold on
Hold on
My dear ones
Here comes the dawn

Protesters in Minneapolis don’t like to attract the attention of federal agents, and that made it difficult at first for me to learn the song’s origin. Reddit user zoinkability (an internet handle), who posted the video to Reddit, said it was “led by a song leader who leads and teaches many of her own compositions, so it’s likely an original.” Zoinkability described the demonstration like this:

This Saturday, January 17, over 600 people marched in protest of ICE and Trump’s anti-immigrant BS on the streets of South Minneapolis between Lake Street and Powderhorn park. Rather than yelling or chanting we sang. We sang songs of anger, determination, grief, and hope. Out of almost every house people waved, a good number of whom likely have been staying inside out of fear. In times of darkness, we need to find ways to see light, and in times of ugliness we need to find ways to counter it with beauty.

In the comments, Zoinkability linked to another video, showing a song leader teaching it to a large group in a South Minneapolis church. Another commenter attributed it to songwriter Heidi Wilson of Vermont, which turns out to be correct. I didn’t know that at the time, though. All I knew was I liked the song — it’s a real earworm! — so I did a keyword search on the refrain, “hold on.” It turned into quite an excursion into American musical history, indeed, I’d say, into the heart and soul of America.

The first hit I got was a performance at Minnesota State University in Mankato of an arrangement of an old African-American spiritual by Harry Burleigh. A baritone and soloist at a prominent Episcopal church in New York City, Burleigh arranged a number of spirituals as art songs in the 1920s and 30s and is credited with introducing the genre to upscale white audiences. He is best known for introducing the Czech composer Anton Dvorak, under whom he studied, to the Black American musical tradition. So, in a way, it’s to him we owe the New World Symphony and some of the masterpieces of 20th-century American music.

“The future of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies,” as Dvorak famously declared in the 1890s. “This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.”

Dvorak wasn’t wrong about that, and Burleigh’s choral arrangement of “Hold On” is lovely. But I can’t imagine singing it at a street demonstration. (I suspect a YouTube algorithm served it up first because I was following events in Minnesota that day.) Equally polished but more to my liking was a 1958 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival by gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, backed by Duke Ellington’s band and titled “Keep Your Hand on the Plow.” Its refrain:

Hold on
Hold on
Keep your hand on the plow, hold on.

Repeating the refrain twice, Jackson gives it the drive and call-and-response energy that makes you want to sing along. And Duke Ellington is, well, he’s Duke Ellington. What more do I have to say? Switching the lyrics around, as people so often do with the old spirituals, she amplifies the message in another performance. Calling on Jesus to be her guide, she prays:

When my way gets dark as night
I know the lord will be my light
Keep your hand on the plow, hold on,

According to Wikipedia, which has as good a song history as any available online, it’s derived from an African American spiritual or gospel song commonly known as the “Gospel Plow,” and it was widely sung during the civil rights movement in a variant that urged activists to “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” Wikipedia explains:

Lyrics for traditional American folk songs and African-American spirituals are often changed, improvised and traded between songs by different artists and at different performances. This was and is especially true in the call and response of African American religious music. […] Modern choral arrangements of this song sound entirely different from either the Eyes-Prize or Hand-Plow songs.

Singer-song arranger, musicologist and political activist Guy Carawan is credited with introducing the song to Black students and civil rights workers in the early 1960s. As music director of the Highlander Folk School in East Tennessee, he adapted several songs from union organizers and the Black spiritual tradition — “We Shall Overcome” is the best known, but there were several others — that became anthems of the civil rights movement. An associate of Dr. Martin Luther King recalled:

The first time I remember any change in our songs was when Guy came down from Highlander. Here he was with this guitar and tall thin frame, leaning forward and patting that foot. […] And, little by little, spiritual after spiritual began to appear with new words and changes: “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, Hold On” or “I’m Going to Sit at the Welcome Table”. Once we had seen it done, we could begin to do it. [Links in the original.]

Carawan, who also did significant research into the Gullah musical traditions of the Sea Islands in the Carolina low country, was careful to give credit for the title –“Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” — to a local activist. As he taught it to Black students who helped organize the early lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s, it was picked up bu civil rights activists from across the South. Today we might say it went viral, at least to the extent the technology of the day allowed it.

In one variant or another, the song has been widely recorded. None, to my ears, have the spirit and authenticity of a take of “Eyes on the Prize” that Carawan recorded with Black activists billed as the Montgomery Gospel Trio and the Nashville Quartet for a Folkways LP titled We Shall Overcome: Songs of Freedom Riders and Sit-Ins in 1961.

Here, along with a 30-second excerpt of “Hold On” from the Folkways album, are several of the covers available on YouTube. Most of them are a little too uptempo and bluegrassy for my taste, compared to Carawan and the freedom riders in 1961, but they give an sense of how iconic the song, or songs, have become. In no particular order:

And here, for the sake of comparison, is the video clip of a song leader teaching Heidi Wilson’s song at a church in South Minneapolis: https://www.facebook.com/reel/2597489320644383 (shared by Drew Leitle on Facebook). The melody and tempo are quite different from almost all versions of both the “Eyes-Prize” and “Hands-Plow” variants, as Wikipedia terms them. But in all, the message is the same: Hold on, fight on; better days are coming.

I knew Guy Carawan slightly. It would be more accurate to say I heard him perform at an urban ministry and community arts center in Knoxville during the late 1960s and early ’70s, and I knew several musicians who were inspired by him and by Highlander’s fusion of the Appalachian labor and civil rights musical traditions. I started grad school at the University of Tennessee Knoxville several months after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened the off-campus restaurants to Black students, and I missed the demonstrations that led up to it. So I guess you could say I was a beneficiary of the civil rights movement more or less by default.

By happenstance I ate at a downtown restaurant, the kind of place that set out white linen tablecloths, the first Sunday after the civil rights act became law. Seated across the room from us was a Black family, elegantly dressed and mostly successful at keeping their composure while the white folks tried not to gawk. I remember thinking the kids even knew which forks to use! And earlier, when I was home from college for summer vacation, I had watched Black kids my age picketing a Rich’s department store and wondered if I’d have as much courage as they did. I still had a long way to go, but I knew the moral calculus of Jim Crow was wrong.

Several of my friends had marched and picketed the resturants down by the UT campus, but by the time I came along sympathetic whites were often advised the so-called “Negro problem” was really a white folks’ problem and we might do best to look inward and question where we fit into the overall pattern of institutional racism. I took that as good advice. I think a lot of us did, especially in the South, and I still try to do it 60 years later.

In the 60s I was what we called a “weekend hippie.” In the daytime I’d teach my freshman English classes — I had a TA — and I’d join an occasional anti-war demonstration, wearing a tie and a seersucker jacket to lend an air of what I hoped was respectability to the proceeding. But on weekends off-campus, where I lived, I was attracted to an ecumenical urban ministry that spun off something called Jubilee Community Arts that operated an Appalachian traditional music venue in a former Presbyterian church renamed the Laurel Theater. A few years later, just before I moved up north, I served on the Jubilee board and helped put together the application for 501(c)3 status.

In the meantime, during the counterculture of the 1960s and early 70s, I encountered the music of the civil rights era in an off-campus scene that was open to a variety of musical, political and regional impulses. The freedom songs, as they were known, originated as spirituals — in both the Black and white traditions — and labor songs. I was told “We Shall Overcome,” for example, started out with people singing “we will organize” on picket lines. Playing Jubilee and Laurel Theater were out-of-town artists like labor and civil rights activist Si Kahn, Irish sean nós singer and storyteller Joe Heaney and former Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblie) folksinger Utah Phillips. Local talent included Sparky Rucker who went on, with Guy Carawan as a mentor, to combine Black and white “Africalachian” traditions as a professional folk singer and civil rights activist.

In the affiliated Epworth ecumenical ministry, we sang the protest songs of the period and gospel standards from the Methodists’ old Cokesbury Hymnal, and we learned to sing the Old Harp, a regional style of shape-note singing. I learned to play the Appalachian dulcimer (if memory serves, I took part in a beginner’s lesson led by somger-songwriter John McCutcheon, who briefly served as Jubilee’s music director). All in all, I think there was an energy there that combined some of the put-some-flowers-in-you-hair idealism of the 60s hippie scene with regional music and the labor movement, especially of the southern Appalachian coal country.

Fifty years have passed now, and Jubilee Community Arts is still there, still offering concerts at Laurel Theater, according to the Jubilee website, with the same mission to “preserve and present the performing arts of the Southern Appalachian region and to nurture the cultural milieu responsible for the birth and evolution of these and related art forms.”

Sparky Rucker is still around, too. He and his wife Rhonda, still perform, teach and carry on a blend of musical traditions, according to their website, including “old-time blues, slave songs, Appalachian music, spirituals, ballads, work songs, Civil War music, railroad songs, and a few of their own original compositions.” After I moved up north, I kept up with Sparky from time to time, attending his concerts when he was in Springfield (see my blog posts HERE and HERE), and I took took classes from him on Black and 19th-century white minstrel traditions at Common Ground on the Hill, a folklife center in Maryland with a “mission and vision to create interracial harmony through the traditional arts.”

In one of those coincidences that seem almost too serendipitous to be true, I discovered that Sparky and Rhonda had a gig this weekend at Laurel Theater. Sparky took the occasion to reflect with a reporter for Inside of Knoxville, an online publication highlighting the downtown area, on his career as a professional musician and storyteller. He had the same emphasis on social justice that I remember so well from the 60s and 70s.

“When you think about it, music has always been part of movements for change,” he told editor-publisher Leslie Bateman. “A lot of those songs were borrowed from slave times and updated, which tells you something about how cycles of oppression repeat.”

Sparky said he hopes to appeal to a younger audience these days. “We need the wisdom of the elders and the fire of young people. […] “I call these kids my reinforcements. I’ve been waiting for them a long time.” Bateman said he was inspired by a recent student walkout in Knoxville protesting the immigration crackdown in Minnesota and a chaotic ICE raid at a construction site adjacent to a county school. She added:

Sparky often compares his life’s work to the Dutch folktale of the boy with his finger in the dike. “I can’t fix the whole thing,” he says. “But I can plug up that hole and save a few.”

Saturday night’s concert will include songs from Southern Appalachia, moments of humor and remembrance, and space for people to breathe together.

“My heart bleeds for people who are afraid to come outside their homes,” Sparky says. “This country is built on freedoms. That will find its way into this concert, along with songs to uplift people and songs that tell the old stories.”

A footnote (Feb. 7). It looks like Heidi Wilson’s “Hold On” is beginning to go viral. I’d never heard it before I saw clips of the Singing Resistance street vigil last month in South Minneapolis. Now it’s been featured in coverage of the protests in the Twin Cities by Anderson Cooper of CNN and an amateur video of a demonstration in San Luis Obispo, Calif. I hope it does go viral — I hope all the “singing resistance” songs from Minneapolis do. We are in very real danger of returning to Jim Crow — as largely Black and brown immigrant communities are terrorized by the federal government, and we need more people sticking their fingers in the dike.

St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, NYC, Imagine Worship service, Jan. 29, 2026.


Links and Citations

[Uplinked Feb. 8, 2026]

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Published by Pete Ellertsen

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