Storybook Vol 2, Part 2: Why So Few Songs Like These?
Storybook Vol 2, Part 2: Why So Few Songs Like These?
Last week, in Part 1, we followed two songs across borders: one written for a school choir in Johannesburg, the other written for a workers’ choir in Lille. Both outlived the moments that made them. That raises the question behind Storybook, Vol 2, which we released last Friday: what carries a movement’s story forward, and why do so few people write the songs that could?
Justice movements are often built on the urgency of the hour. But urgency leaks. The meeting ends, the rally disperses, and the press release is swallowed up by the next emergency. Urgency gets people into the street. Memory gets them back out the next morning.
Ann Rigney, a memory scholar from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, spent years studying how activism and protest are remembered once they stop making headlines. In her 2025 book, Remembering Hope: The Cultural Afterlife of Protest, she follows the trail from the Paris Commune to climate activism today. She finds that protest can live on long after the streets have emptied, if it is kept alive by the stories people tell, and she shows how those stories can pass hope from one generation of activists to the next. She has also studied the nineteenth-century movements themselves, finding that socialist meetings ended in singing together as a matter of course. Songs linked a crowd to everyone who had sung them before, so the past was relived in the body and not only recalled. James Baldwin called the artist “a sort of emotional or spiritual historian.” A song is how a people remembers what it felt like, not only what happened.
Two songs on the new record are about exactly this. “We Are the Echo (Virago Rise)” is sung by women “echoing foremother’s dreams, stewarding their wisdom,” and the bridge of “Remember” says it of the land itself: “Every road remembers. Every tree recalls.”
Walter Brueggemann, the Old Testament scholar, saw something similar in the Hebrew prophets. Their deepest work, he argued, was to nurture an alternative consciousness, another way of imagining the world, in the face of an empire that insisted it had everything locked up and nothing could ever change. The prophets refused that claim. They kept insisting that things could be different, and they gave people language to imagine it. When a culture stops carrying the memory of its own struggles and hard-won victories, movements are condemned to be starting over, and over, and over again. We’ve written more about this here.
Malcolm du Plessis, who instigated Common Hymnal, saw what songs can do up close as an activist in the South African struggle, where he pioneered a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual band at the intersection of worship and the justice movement. There, music, theater, art, and dance were never a side dish to the struggle for freedom. They were part of it. In September 1988, the apartheid government banned three songs from the band’s second record, but the songs got out anyway. Nelson Mandela knew the power of that: “Politics can be strengthened by music, but music has a potency that defies politics.” A state can block a broadcast. It can’t stop a melody from sticking in people’s heads, minds, and imaginations.
So why are songs like these so rare? Not everywhere, to be clear. Movement music has never left the wider world: it still lives in hip-hop, in the freedom songs of the Black struggle, in nueva canción, in the songs of Indigenous movements. Our concern is narrower, and it’s about a space we know from the inside: Christian music. Part of the answer there is economic. Capitalism does what it was built to do: it pays for what sells, and, in our experience, conscience rarely sells. It is very good at feeding us what we already feel, and far less interested in helping us feel what we’ve been avoiding. Hands full of comfort have no room for anything else. Christina Edmondson and Ekemini Uwan of Truth’s Table say it plainly on “Hands Full Of Hope”, the focus track of this record: “We can’t hold hope if our hands stay full.”
The uncomfortable truth is that, for the most part, Christian music is market driven. The market’s favorite genre is worship, and worship’s favorite subject is wonder, and rightly so. Awe is where worship begins, and a song that lifts a room toward God is a gift. Scripture’s great songs of praise were seldom vague, though. When the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, they sang of the horse and rider hurled into the waves, thanks for a rescue they could point to. There is a power in being specific that generality never generates. But once a genre becomes profitable, it begins to bend toward whatever reaches the most people. What starts as something beautiful soon turns contrived, because the more general a song, the larger its audience, and the genre drifts, quietly, toward vagueness. The first casualty is the detail: the name, the wound, the circumstances, the challenge ahead. We tried to write against that drift. “Time & Place (Yuri’s Song)” is named for one woman, Yuri Kochiyama, and “You Will See Me (I Am the Story)” opens on a woman patting powder on her face before she steps into a role she has been handed. Nobody was ever comforted by a generality. Chase the commerce of wonder long enough and even wonder loses its power to astonish.
The rest follows. When nobody is paid to write songs for movements, nobody practices the craft, and a craft nobody practices is soon lost. In the Christian world especially, writing songs with a movement, in the room, for the room, has become a rare craft. We are doing our best to dig it back up.
When we began this work, we refused to Xerox a genre built for the broadest possible acceptance. We went looking for the gaps instead, the unsung places where grief and hope, praise and protest, lament and celebration are allowed to share a table. A God whose paths are beyond tracing out, whose mercies are new every morning, would surely not pioneer a photocopy business, when everything He has ever made is an original.
That’s why CSA matters to us. An organization that has spent more than fifty years changing the church’s conversation with declarations, books, and policy has chosen to invest in stories, and in songs. Declarations change what a church says. Songs change what it sings on the way home. This partnership takes us straight into those gaps, and every song we bring back is a small act of resistance: music that wakes the conscience rather than sedates it.
Why a song, and not a statistic? A statistic can inform you. A story can follow you home. A song moves in. Lyric and melody braid together and play on a loop you never asked for, until the truth is something you know by heart. It hums along with you in the shower and in traffic, at the stove and at the sink. It’s there when you’re tucking your children into bed, sitting up with the day’s grief, or walking into the next meeting and the next defeat. It finds you when you’re entirely alone, when no one is beating a drum and no one is trying to sell you anything, and it quietly reminds you what you were fighting for, and who you were fighting beside.
Storybook, Vol 2 is out now: “Hands Full of Hope” with Truth’s Table, “We Are the Echo (Virago Rise)” with Virago Strategies, “You Will See Me (I Am the Story)” with Liberated Together, “Remember” with The Center for Restorative Justice, and “Time & Place (Yuri’s Song),” written for Yuri Kochiyama. Five organizations. Five stories. Five songs that didn’t exist last year.
We don’t have time to keep starting over.
Listen to Storybook, Vol 2, wherever you stream music.