Transcript of Stanley Nelson Podcast Blog

Bernard Lafayette Jr.: Music put us in harmony with each other, gave us support for each other and we relished the opportunity. Even if you didn’t have a great voice, it doesn’t matter, you can hum. So everyone can sing.

Stanley Nelson: I think one of the great stories of the music that we used is there’s a song called “Hallelujah, I’m Traveling,” which was actually written by Bayard Rustin, a great Civil Rights leader. And the only version, and this was actually written for the Freedom Rides, but the only version that we could find was him singing it, and he sings in this kind of really operatic voice. So it’s like “Hallelujah, I’m a-traveling. Hallelujah.” And it just didn’t work for anything in the film. And so we asked the guy who was composing the original music for the film, and he said, “I have a singer who I can ask to do it,” and he had her record it and he sent us the recording. And she sounded like Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey or something. It was just like too much vocalization, and I told him, “Have her do it again and have her do it like she’s riding on a bus in the middle of the night on the Freedom Rides. She’s going through Alabama. It’s three in the morning. Everybody else is asleep and she’s sitting there with her head up against the window kind of singing to herself. She’s just singing the song to herself. Have her do it like that.” He sent it back to us and everybody was just bowled over, and it becomes a central point in the film. That one song is something we go back to over and over again in the film.

John Lewis: Singing the music became a powerful non-violent instrument. I often said without music, without the singing, we would have lost the sense of solidarity. It gave us hope in a time of hopelessness.

Stanley Nelson: She actually ends the film singing that song, and it is the kind of thing where it’s just magic. It didn’t have to happen, it didn’t have to work, but it did.