Mark Kurlansky (author of among other books of Cod, Paper, and Salt) takes Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing in the Street’ as his guide to write an account of the transformative year of 1964.

It was the year the Beatles formed the advance troops of the British Invasion. It was the year of Freedom Summer in Mississippi, when Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were kidnapped and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. It was the year LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. It was the year the Republican Convention nominated Barry Goldwater.

[I]t should have been sobering that 27 million people actually voted for a candidate who wanted to use nuclear weapons and opposed civil rights…The [Republican] party became belligerently militarist, anti-union, and anti-civil rights…

It was the year of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, that odious fiction perpetrated by LBJ as an excuse to ramp up the Vietnam War, a conflict he knew was unwinnable. It was a year of race riots, almost every one of which was provoked by a white police force assaulting black citizens. It was the year of the Warren Commission, whose report no one believed. It was the year Sam Cooke died.

And ‘Dancing in the Street’ became the year’s theme song, as well as the theme song of the Civil Rights movement, although Martha Reeves insists to this day that it was only ever meant to be a party song, a song to to make people dance and be happy. Art has a life of its own, though, once you release it into the wild, and here the wild took the song to heart.

The passage in the book that most interested me was this one.

In 1962 folksinger Pete Seeger advised SNCC to form their own singing groups and raise money for the organization throug concerts and recordings…It was Seeger’s contention that all great political movements had to have their own songs. in history this has usually been true. The American, French, and Russian revolutions, as well as the American labor movement, all had their songs of inspiration. In October 2011, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, in which thousands camped out in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and in most other major American cities as well as numerous others around the world to protest the abuses of big banks and finance companies, the New York Times music section ran an article with the kind of astute senseof history that is rare in newspapers. They wrote that though this movement appeared to be sweeping across the world, it lacked songs. The article quotes an array of historians and music critics questioning if this movement could survive without its own songs. the civil rights movement, however, had songs.

It sure did, but ‘Dancing in the Street’ is more than a song, it’s an anthem. As Bruce Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, says

There are some records that are so perfectly constructed, when I hear them, I can’t think of anything that would improve them–‘Johnny B. Goode,’ ‘Like a Rolling Stone’–‘Dancing’ is one of those records. The record is perfect.

From the trumpet fanfare to the minor key bridge (much admired by Keith Richards) to the tempo increase, from the William “Mickey” Stevenson, Ivy Jo Hunter, and Marvin Gaye lyrics to Martha and the Vandellas’ rousing voices to the Fuqua Brothers’ licks, it has proved as irresistible to future generations as it was to its own. In its day it was attacked by white leaders as inspiring the riots and hailed by H. Rap Brown as the sound of the civil rights movement and later by Laura Nyro as the sound of the women’s rights movement.

The Beatles kept it out of the Number One spot on the Billboard chart but in its lifetime ‘Dancing in the Street’ has been sampled by everyone from David Bowie and Mick Jagger to Bruce Springsteen. It’s been covered, as of the writing of this book, forty times, and those are only the covers in English. “The song lives,” Kurlansky writes,

because it keeps meaning different things to different people in different circumstances and with different experiences.

There’ll be music everywhere.

Recommended, and not just because Pete Seeger’s belief resonates so strongly in this of all election years. One candidate has all the music. Tell the storm I’m new.

Book Review Monday Chatter Mark Kurlansky Ready for a Brand New Beat