Egalite

This week on Three Tune Tuesday, Boneapart and Yulia explore the theme of Égalité — equality — through three recordings from the acoustic era. We open with a “This Day in History” spin: the All Star Trio’s rollicking fox trot medley “You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet,” recorded by Victor Arden, George Hamilton Green, and F. Wheeler Wadsworth in New York City on this very date in 1920. Then we turn to the theme, beginning with the Manhattan Harmony Four’s stirring 1923 recording of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” — the Black National Anthem, written by James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosamond, and pressed on Black Swan Records, the pioneering Harlem-based label founded by Harry Pace as an act of racial pride and cultural self-determination. We close with Emile Van Bosch, a Belgian-born operatic baritone, delivering a thunderous Dutch-language performance of De Internationale — recorded in Berlin in August 1925, just as the tensions that would define the coming decades were beginning to gather. Three songs, three movements, one enduring question: what does it mean to demand a more equal world?

Show Notes

Lift Every Voice and Sing

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand
True to our God, true to our native land

De Internationale

Arise, wretched of the earth
Arise, convicts of hunger
Reason thunders in its crater
This is the eruption of the end
Of the past let us wipe the slate clean
Slave masses, arise, arise
The world is about to change its foundation
We are nothing, let us be everything

Chorus:
This is the final struggle
Let us gather together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race.

There are no supreme saviors
Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.
Producers, let us save ourselves,
Decree on the common welfare
That the thief return his plunder,
That the spirit be pulled from its prison
Let us fan the forge ourselves
Strike the iron while it is hot

Chorus

The state represses and the law cheats
The tax bleeds the unfortunate
No duty is imposed on the rich
“Rights of the poor” is a hollow phrase
Enough languishing in custody
Equality wants other laws:
No rights without obligations, it says,
And as well, no obligations without rights

Chorus

Hideous in their self-deification
Kings of the mine and rail
Have they ever done anything other
Than steal work?
Into the coffers of that lot,
What work creates has melted
In demanding that they give it back
The people wants only its due.

Chorus

The kings intoxicate us with gunsmoke,
Peace among ourselves, war to the tyrants!
Let the armies go on strike,
Guns in the air, and break ranks
If these cannibals insist
In making heroes of us,
Soon they will know our bullets
Are for our own generals

Chorus

Laborers, peasants, we are
The great party of workers
The earth belongs only to men
The idle will go reside elsewhere
How much of our flesh they feed on,
But if the ravens and vultures
Disappear one of these days
The sun will shine always

Chorus