Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., something unthinkable at that time finally happened: the election of an African-American president. The election of Barack Obama would have been impossible without the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, and that movement would have been unlikely if the spirit of black America had been entirely crushed in earlier years.
Music sustained that spirit, and much of disc one of the three-CD set Let Freedom Sing is devoted to songs of the '40s and '50s that set the stage for the protest and outrage to come. The tradition of spirituals is represented by the Southern Sons' "Go Down Moses" (1941), bringing a frisky rhythm to a song of hope in the face of bondage. Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" (1939) was a poetic meditation on the horror of lynching. Protest becomes explicit in Josh White's "Uncle Sam Says" (1941), a bluesy rebuke to degrading conditions for blacks in the military.
Confidence builds on disc two with dynamic tracks such as the Impressions' "People Get Ready" (1965) and the Mighty Clouds of Joy's "Nobody Can Turn Me Around" (1966). Disc three reflects disappointment in the slow progress of the post-'60s era on the Undisputed Truth's edgy "Smiling Faces Sometimes" and Chuck D's "The Pride." The booklet accompanying the CDs intelligently puts the music in the context of political and social developments.
