Back in January when the Trump regime’s Department of Homeland Security agents were terrorizing immigrant communities in Minnesota, I was deeply moved by a song I heard on TV news clips. It was “Hold On” by activist singer-songwriter Heidi Wilson, and it went viral as community volunteers picked it up in demonstrations.
Now the virus has gone national, as Wilson has shared sound files of the melody and harmony parts, along with sheet music, to her Patreon website, where she shares music in the hope it will be “sung as lullabies, at family celebrations, at street actions, or at bedside vigils.” She asserts her copyright (dated 2018) on the sheet music, but provides a link to a printable one-page PDF file. I’d say she means it to be copied and sung. Sje writer:
It is January 2026, and the people of Minneapolis are inspiring the rest of the country with what it looks like to really take care of one another in the face of escalating ICE raids and authoritarian violence. They are walking kids to school, delivering food to neighbors, standing on street corners in rapid response. And they are singing. I am humbled and moved that this song is useful to folks right now. People have been asking ‘can I sing it in my church?synagogue? school? street choir? The answer is yes, of course, this song has work to do. Please see the separate harmony track recordings and sheet music attached below. (I don’t usually use sheet music, but when my mom joined the list of people asking for it, I felt compelled.) Even though it’s on a piece of paper now, please add your own harmonies and bring it to life in your way! And a big thank you to Sarina Partridge (Minneapolis-based songleader and composer) for leading the singing in this video clip, and in so many other important moments! [Boldface type in the original.]
That video, embedded at the top of Wilson’s “Hold On” page, shows Patridge leading the song at a street vigil. is well worth watching, as it shows her improvising — “let’s turn and sing it to the neighborhood,” for example, followed a stanza or two later by, “let’s turn around and sing it to each other” — between repetitions of the melody lin. (It’s quite an earworm). Musically, it has the call-and-response drive of the old freedom songs in civil rights days. The words are short and simple:
Hold on, hold on / My dear ones, here comes the dawn.
So if a song leader like Partridge didn’t chime in, keeping up the energy, things could get repetitious (unless, I’m sure, unless you’re you’re standing on a street corner singing it with a group of likeminded people). Quite different in tempo and dynamics are a videos by a songleader at First Universalist Church in Minneapolis, available online in an Instagram a reel; and one shared to the Facebook group Justice Choir, that shows Sarina Patridge teaching the song to volunteers who then sing it in a South Minneapolis street march.
More sonorous, even contemplative, to my mind is the video I shared at the top of this journal, of the interpretation an “Imagine Worship” service designed to “[amplify] a kinder, truer, justice-seeking Christianity for the world,” at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York City. All of them, as far as I’m concerned, are true to the spirit of the song.
Especially as sung on the streets of Minneapolis, it has echoes the kinetc enrgy of the call-and-response freedom songs but with overtones of the foursquare harmonies of Lutheran and Methodist church choirs in the upper Midwest? What’s not to like for a Southrn expat?
I started grad school six months after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so I missed the sit-ins and picket lines outside off-campus cafes, but I had friends who were active in the movement at UT-Knoxville, and I though they trailed clouds of glory for it. (I was a history and English major.1) I was energized by the similar call-and-response and message I heard at benefits for the Brookside miners and in other music of the southern Appalachian labor movement. Or “People like you help people like me go on” by songwriter-labor organizer Si Kahn. Even R&B or funk hits of the day like Curtis Mayfield’s “Keep On Keepin’ On.” I hear the same message now in Minneapolis and the protest songs reemerging elsewhere today.
With that in mind, I’m collecting information about “Hold On” and putting up links here in the hope it inspires anyone t learn it before the nationwide No Kings rallies March 28. I am convinced that we need more than occasional headline-generating rallies, though; we need what George Packer of The Atlantic calls a “a mass movement for basic decency” if we are to survive as a free-market, small-d democratic society. Says Packer:
[…] Throughout 2025, institutions that once restrained the presidency weakened or fell away one by one, until earlier this month Trump told The New York Times that the only limit to his power is his own mind. That same day, January 7, authoritarianism had its predictable consequence in freezing Minneapolis with the execution of Renee Good.
If rogue federal agents can shoot American citizens dead with total impunity, then it doesn’t matter whether state and local authorities, the courts, the media, the political opposition, and a mobilized public object. “ICE > MN,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on social media—an assertion of raw force, not constitutional authority. When Trump and his loyalists call protesters terrorists and warn that disobeying orders will get you killed, they strip away any illusion that the federal government respects the lives, let alone the rights, of those who oppose it—potentially half the population or more.
A lawless regime is an illegitimate one. If the country seems to have reached a breaking point in Minneapolis, this is why. And yet Minneapolis also offers a compelling answer to the question that democracy-loving Americans have asked for the past year: What can I do?
Packer wrote at the end of January, a month before Trump launched the current war against Iran. I am not alone in considering a prima facie violation of international law. Nor am I alone in fearing that war overseas will lead to suppression of dissent at home. If not to a far worse place. But only if we let the racists and wannabe fascits lead us there.
In the meantime, Heidi Wilson’s song — indeed, the whole idea of resistance through singing — is picking up a worldwide audience. There’s even a YouTube video from Wales, where people have a national tradition of good choral singing, shared by a local choral society “in solidarity with the people of Minneapolis,and beyond, with love, from Wales.”
One account I especially enjoyed was a backgrounder by Candice Helfand-Rogers, a journalist (CBS Local and the StarLedger in New York and adjacent north Jersey), who in her spare time is a “professional ensemble singer who performs with several choirs that address social-justice causes.” Her article, on a women’s rights platform called The Story Exchange, is headlined “The Growing Chorus of Resistance, and The Women Holding the Baton.”
Helfand-Rogers’ article is so nuanced, and so evocative of my experience in the spaces where art, music, coscince and social justice intersect, I won’t attempt to paraphrase her. To do so would risk leaving out important detail that wasn’t apparent t me with my different experience of intersectional issues. Helfand-Rogers opens her stories with an extended account of the song, and it’s apparent she’s using as a framing device to make points about the Resistance movement in general:
On a cold early-February evening in New York City, the first of what would become several “ICE Out Sing-Ins” was held.”
Co-hosted by two ensembles – the Resistance Revival Chorus and the Jerriese Johnson Gospel Choir – as well as New York City’s Interfaith Alliance, the event’s purpose was singular: Teach the hundreds who assembled at Manhattan’s Middle Church a set of songs to sing at protests against the Trump administration and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
When the Resistance Revival Chorus led the crowd in singing a particularly poignant piece – “Hold On,” by Vermont song leader Heidi Wilson – a ripple began to visibly spread. A few choir members reached out to embrace one another, followed by more. Within a minute, the entire ensemble was as bonded physically as they were musically, and spiritually.
The moment serves as a metaphor for the broader, growing use this year of singing – group singing, specifically – as a form of resistance. Many see it as a powerful act of intention, rippling out from a center until it touches all who are open to it. [Links in the original.]
The bulk of Helfand-Rogers’ story is taken up with the history of Women’s Reistance, the social justice group formed in response to the federal government’s terror tactics in Black and brown neighborhoods in Minneapolis-St. Paul; and protest song in general, prominently featuring the civil rights movement down South and elsewhere — anywhere, in fact, that Minnesota organizers drew inspiration from.
Nor is “Hold On” the only song she mentions. Helfand-Rogers cites, for example, “It’s Okay to Change Your Mind” by local activist Annie Schlaefer that was famously sung outside a hotel in downtown Minneapolis, with the declared goal of prodding ICE agents to quit their jobs. This. she said, was “inspired by the Serbian ‘Otpor!’ movement of the 1990s to oust dictator Slobodan Milošević – by, in part, encouraging members of his regime to step away.”
As she concludes her profile of what she hopes will become a national singing resistance movement, Helfand-Rogers returns to her initial encounter with “Hold On” by Heidi Wilson. Somehow she manages to weave togeher her love for the song, which I share, with her hopes for the movement, which I also share: rather than “murdering to dissect” by paraphrasing,2 I’ll just opt for an extended quotation:
As part of its ongoing efforts, Singing Resistance has shared a toolkit for organizers throughout the country, including a full songbook with tunes like “Hold On” – the song that created the ripple effect seen at that first packed event in New York City’s Middle Church.
The song’s simple-yet-fervent melody and slower tempo make it more of a prayer than a rallying cry – and movements need that spirit, too, says Melinda St. Louis of Beheld [a women’s vocal ensemble in Washington, DC]. “Something I’ve been loving about what is happening in this moment, what is happening in Minneapolis, and what is happening in uprisings all over the country is, it’s not just all f—ing wanting to punch something all the time.”
“There’s something to group singing that [reminds us] not everything has to be a fist in the air,” she continues. “Sometimes it is the embrace. It’s the wiping of a tear. It is just a human touch.”
And, she and several other sources noted, this too is often women’s work: Caring when it’s difficult, loving with bruised hearts, pouring from drained cups. Showing up unsteady, yet ready.
Gathering the scared and the tired and transforming that exhausted assembly into a robust choir.
Yet there is joy derived on both sides of that effort, “Hold On” composer Wilson says. Joy, and restoration, and hope for something better on the horizon. “In this moment, collective singing offers us a chance to stand up against rising authoritarianism and violence in a way that is also simultaneously creating the world that we want to inhabit – one rooted in love.”
Notes
1 Since the subject matter here triggered my memories of grad school, it coaxed my inntre child and his old pal, my inner English major, out of hidng. This resulted in two literary allusions tthat may not be intelligible to readers who weren’t afflicted with 19th-century English Romantic poetry in high school. The first is from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home […]
2 More Wordsworth! The allusion is to “The Tables Turned.” which memorably begins, “Up! up! my friend, and quit your books,” and contains the image:
Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mishapes the beauteous forms of things;
—We murder to dissect.
And now I’d better wind this up before I wax literary again. It’s getting on toward spring in central Illinois, and — who knows? — I might see “a crowd, / A host of golden daffodils” if I wander outside.
[Uplinked March 22, 2026]
Ordinary Time 