Stephen Stacks, Ph.D. 2019

Advisor: David Garcia

Dissertation Title: Headed for the Brink: Freedom-Singing in U.S. Culture After 1968

Find it in the library here.

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation examines the practice of freedom-singing in the United States after 1968, the widely-accepted end date of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The historiography of freedom song conventionally narrates its declension in usage and importance in the period from 1965 to 1968. This dissertation challenges this narrative; its primary argument is that contrary to much of the current scholarship, freedom song has not only played an active role in how collectives within the United States remember the Movement of the 1950s–60s, but is also integral to how political actors negotiate their present relationship to that memory and sustain efficacious action in contemporary struggle. 

Using archival research, ethnography, case study analysis, and a variety of other methodologies, this dissertation demonstrates that freedom-singing after 1968 is multilayered in the meanings it generates, including its potential for supporting or contradicting the dominant narrative of the Civil Rights Movement. In order to make this final point, each chapter features contemporary vignettes alongside historical case studies, reinforcing the topic’s contemporary import. 

In the process of making its primary argument, this dissertation provides several other analytical and theoretical interventions. The first is a theorization of the “1968 lens”—a widely-used interpretive frame among U.S. Americans that passes instances of Black uprising through an oversimplified memory of the Civil Rights Movement, often for the iv purposes of delegitimizing such uprisings. Narratives of the history of freedom song have played into this “consensus memory,” and investigating the practice of freedom-singing after 1968 can reveal counter-memories and alternative histories with liberatory potential. This dissertation also argues for a shift from understanding freedom song as a canonized genre to examining freedom-singing as a meaning-making praxis. Lastly, it examines the implications of the use of freedom-singing in three contexts after 1968—performance, protest, and documentary sound recording and film— and delineates the ways actors mobilize freedom-singing in each. Ultimately, this dissertation has the potential to not only reorient the way (ethno)musicologists approach freedom-singing, but also deconstruct the dominant narrative of the Civil Rights Movement for U.S. publics, a narrative which has proved damaging to continued efforts for liberation. 

Rev. Dr. Stacks is currently Associate Pastor of Worship and Faith Formation at Greenwood Forest Baptist Church in Cary, North Carolina, where he has worked since 2012.