Around the nation
Songwriter gets her due for civil rights anthem.
In 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Cincinnati to speak at a banquet for friend and fellow civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth.
Hotels were filled, so Shuttlesworth turned to his congregation’s music minister for help. Louise Shropshire and her husband, Robert, opened their home to King.
“She could sing well, she could play well, she could cook well,” recalled Patricia Massengill, one of Shuttlesworth’s daughters.
And Louise Shropshire could write well, too — extremely well. What many people in her own church and city did not know then was that she enjoyed a national reputation as an accomplished composer of gospel music.
Her most famous hymn, If My Jesus Wills, is the likely source from which singer Pete Seeger derived the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome when he heard it sung by striking African-American tobacco workers in the late 1940s.
The decades-long efforts to publicize Shropshire and her song received a big boost in recent weeks. A federal district court in New York on Jan. 26 oversaw a negotiated settlement that places We Shall Overcome in the public domain. The song is now free from six-figure rights fees that kept it from being heard in feature films and incomplete writing credit that shrouded Shropshire’s key contribution to the civil rights movement, her supporters say.
We Shall Overcome, the song that helped define the civil rights movement, the song that the Library of Congress labeled “the most powerful song of the 20th century,” has itself been freed.
“She wrote If My Jesus Wills to comfort her own broken heart,” said her grandson, Robert A. Goins Shropshire, 52, a record producer living and working in the Los Angeles area. “I think her hope would be for people to use it and never have to pay for it again.”
Louise Shropshire published If My Jesus Wills in 1942 and had it copyrighted in 1954.
The lawsuit was filed by Butler Films, which produced the 2013 film The Butler, and a non-profit called the We Shall Overcome Foundation that had been created by Isaias Gamboa. Gamboa and Robert A. Goins Shropshire were bandmates in the 1990s.
Shropshire told Gamboa that his grandmother’s last words to him before she died in 1993 were, “Someday, somebody’s gonna do somethin’ with all my music.”