In hard times like these, once again terribile for racial murders and tensions not only in the US but all over the world, Mc 'n' Mac (singers and players Mary McQueen and Jim McAuley) go back to a terribile event of 1963, and beautifully cover this moving Richard Farina song.
Nineteen sixty-three, the year of the March on Washington and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s greatest speech, was as pivotal in American history as 1863, the year of Gettysburg and the Emancipation Proclamation. It is easy, gazing backward, to see that year as a great milestone in an inexorable march toward justice and equality, from Emmett Till to Rosa Parks to Barack Obama.
Easy, but incomplete. That is why it is helpful to pause to remember how difficult the path was, how uncertain, by recalling the terrifying moment that occurred 55 years ago on Sunday, September 15th, not even three weeks after “I Have a Dream.” It was the bombing in Birmingham, Ala., of the 16th Street Baptist Church. That act of homegrown terrorism, which killed four young girls, sent a brutal message that the old order had no intention of surrendering and would not go down without bloodshed.
Shot and directed by Andrea Rossini and Pietro Lafiandra in 2018.
From the LP "Beautie on the Waters", comin' in late September 2018 on Long Song Records
www.longsongrecords.com