Folk icon and longtime activist Eliza Gilkyson, along with her son, Cisco Ryder, has released a compelling video illustrating the history of political resistance in the United States set to accompany her 2008 song, “The Great Correction.” In the song, Eliza sings, “people round here don’t know what it means, to suffer at the hands of our American dreams, they turn their backs on the grisly scenes, traced to the privileged sons.” The video includes powerful historic and recent images chronicling the ongoing struggle for racial, gender, and economic justice as well as environmental sustainability. The images include works from some of the world’s most renowned photojournalists and documentarians (all permissions are secured).
Eliza screened this video earlier this month at Folk Alliance International’s 2017 conference, “Forbidden Folk: Celebrating Activism in Art,” where she co-hosted a panel with fellow musician and activist Billy Bragg titled “Contemporary Protest: Music, Politics and Activism.” Eliza and Cisco compiled the footage and set these moving images to “The Great Correction,” which, given the current state of our nation, is unfortunately more relevant than ever.
THE GREAT CORRECTION (ELIZA GILKYSON)
THE GREAT CORRECTION (ELIZA GILKYSON)
Making this video has been a real opportunity for us to increase our knowledge of the history of resistance, the political movements and the icons who stood up to entrenched systems of power in the USA since the forming of this government. The formidable challenge of finding the most powerful images to enhance the song’s lyrics inevitably brought us to some of the world’s most renowned civil rights photo-journalists and documentarians like Matt Heron, Bruce Davidson, Leonard Freed, Dorothea Lange and Larry Towell…it’s an honor to have their work in our video, as well as that of many other brilliant photographers whose pictures say more than words could ever convey. It confirms to us that art truly can have its place in the bending of the moral universe towards justice.
It was strangely comforting to put today’s political crisis into the context of past struggles, to see the common threads running through the stories of heartbreaking losses, determined commitment and incremental victories brought about by brave souls linked together arm in arm and heart to heart to fulfill a vision of a decent, fair, humane society and a protected and loved planet, somehow, in spite of everything, just maybe, not so far away.
— Eliza Gilkyson and Cisco Ryder, February 2017
