2025 DC Labor Chorus Spring Concert: Rise Up, Fight Back!

Program:

First set:

  • Mountain Song - Holly Near & Emma's Revolution (arranged by Laura Bellows)
    “Mountain Song” speaks to the incredibly destructive process of mountain-top removal coal mining. Explosives and enormous machinery are used to blow apart Appalachian mountains to get at small seams of coal and the waste rock is dumped in local stream beds. Already, over 600 mountains and several thousand miles of streams have been destroyed in this way for our electricity in the US.

  • Reclaiming My Time - Mykal Kilgore (arranged by Noel León)
    “Reclaiming My Time” is a musical parody created after a 2017 congressional hearing in which Representative Maxine Waters stood up for her right to talk while continuously being interrupted.

  • Wings - Little Mix (arranged by Anna Miller ; revised by Lucy Fleming)
    A song from the “Girl Power” pop era, this catchy tune reminds us to believe in ourselves and carry on the fight. A few words have been changed in the version that SongRise performs to acknowledge that communication and discourse is still needed to create change.

  • I’m Gonna Walk It With You - Brian Claflin & Ellie Grace (arranged by Rebecca Blum)
    "I’m Gonna Walk It With You" is an anthem of solidarity for a new era. We sing it as a message of solidarity for all sorts of audiences, from marginalized communities experiencing injustices to close friends going through a rough time.

  • Bread and Roses - James Oppenheim & Mimi Fariña (arranged by Noel León)
    This song is commonly associated with the successful textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, now often known as the "Bread and Roses strike". The slogan pairing bread and roses, appealing for both fair wages and dignified conditions, found resonance as transcending "the sometimes tedious struggles for marginal economic advances" in the "light of labor struggles as based on striving for dignity and respect."

Second set:

  • Breathe Fire (Song for Bhopal) - arr. Noel León and Rebecca Fahrer
    The lyrics in this song use the words of people in Bhopal (either as direct quotes or close paraphrasing).

    Woven together, they tell a story of tragedy - how thousands of people died needlessly in the Bhopal disaster. It also tells the story of what the survivors did about it! The lyrics are grim...but they are meant to be a call to arms as much as a lament ... a celebration of the survivors' fight.

  • Pilot Light - Sarah Beller (arranged by Noel León)
    Written by Sarah Beller and arranged by Noel Leon (both SongRisers), “Pilot Light” is a song about persisting in our justice struggles in the face of burnout. It tells the story of the movement for refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants from 2015-2018, during which Sarah worked at HIAS, the world’s oldest refugee agency.

  • We Are the Ones - Sweet Honey in the Rock (arranged by Mackenzie Howard & Jeanné Lewis)
    “We Are the Ones” was adapted from a poem called “Poem for South African Women” by June Jordan. The poem commemorates a group of women with profound inner strength who marched on the South African government in 1956 to protest the Apartheid regime.

  • Solidarity Forever, Words by Ralph Chaplin, new verse by Steve Suffet

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