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"ZILPHIA GAVE THE MELODY TO THE CROWD, [and the] whole crowd of people would sing."1 Pete Seeger's recollection, coming more than half a century after Zilphia Horton's death, encapsulates who she was as a musician, labor activist, and person. Armed with a small accordion and a distinctive alto voice, Horton travelled the upland South giving voice to the struggles of textile workers and farmers through song. A native of Arkansas coal country, Horton might seem an unlikely activist in every way-white, college-educated, and the daughter not of a miner but of a mine owner. Yet Horton is a vital link in the legacy of musical protest, connecting labor and civil rights, black and white, religious and secular. She is perhaps best known for teaching Pete Seeger an early version of "We Shall Overcome," which would become the most important civil rights anthem of the twentieth century. But Horton's work bears examination, too, because it challenges some scholars' perception of a stark divide between folk music collected and preserved as an artifact and folk music's use as a tool of political mobilization, such as by the Communist Party during the Great Depression.2
Zilphia Horton combined folk music collection with the dissemination of songs intended to inspire labor activism. She adopted the song collecting methods of better-known contemporaries such as John and .Alan Lomax. But, whereas the Lomaxes and their kind were interested in preserving regional identities by capturing the "authentic" and distinctive music of a particular place, Horton gave music back to the people who created it, hoping they would find new uses for it.3 Based at the interracial Highlander Folk School, Horton encouraged ordinary workers to freely adapt folk songs to fit their circumstances, believing that shared music could serve as a catalyst of change. By employing familiar tunes, Horton hoped that this music could be adapted for labor work in disparate places, creating a sense of solidarity across space and time.
Despite a historiography that almost entirely excludes her, Horton did in fact advance the cause of racial and economic justice in the South through the songs she collected, notated, arranged, and published.4 Not only "We Shall Overcome," but "We Shall Not Be Moved," and "This Little Light of Kline" inspired generations of activists....
