Tuesday, July 19, 2011

“I changed the Will to Shall”

Pete Seeger, on the development of “We Shall Overcome”:

“Long-meter style is the way Zilphia Horton learned it — why didn’t her parents just call her Sylvia, I wonder — and she taught it to me, but I didn’t know how to play it right. I just gave it a banjo accompaniment, and I didn’t even sing it very much. Eventually I changed the Will to Shall. Toshi jokes that it’s my college education, but I’ve always used shall in the first person. Are you going to town tomorrow? Yes, I shall. Anyway, shall opens up the mouth better; the short ‘I’ is not as dramatic a sound as the ‘aah.’ I taught the song to Frank Hamilton, who taught it to a young boy named Guy Carawan, and they put it in this twelve-eight meter, but slow, and that gave it that great, pulsating rhythm. I am not sure where Dr. King heard it, but there was a woman, what was her name, she died only last year, and she remembered driving Dr. King to a speech in Kentucky and him in the backseat saying, ‘“We Shall Overcome,” that song really sticks with you, doesn’t it.’”

Alec Wilkinson, The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).
[Toshi: Pete’s wife Toshi Seeger.]

Related reading
“We Shall Overcome” (Wikipedia)

comments: 6

Adair said...

Michael, I've often wondered about this---doesn't will show more determination than shall? Thanks. Your posts on grammar are always so illuminating and helpful.

Michael Leddy said...

Garner’s Modern American Usage has a good entry for shall. Long story short: there’s no real distinction. Will was once used to express determination or promise in the first person. And shall in the first person expressed “simple futurity.” (And it was the other way around with the second and third persons.) So by old-school standards, “we shall overcome” states what will happen; “we will overcome” expresses determination. “We shall overcome” might then be more forceful: it’s inevitable; it’s going to happen, no matter what. Whether Pete Seeger understood the verbs in this way, I can’t say. It sounds to me as if he was thinking about what would sound better in a song.

Michael Leddy said...

Oh, and thanks for the kind words!

Elaine said...

I always think of _East of Eden_ and the discussion of 'Thou mayest' and 'Thou shalt' as translations of the Hebrew 'timshel.'

I agree that Seeger would have been looking for the more euphonious combination, but a poet, say, would have been seeking the connotations that exactly fit his message...

Michael Leddy said...

Thanks for that example, Elaine.

I should’ve added in my comment above that there’s something paradoxical about shall expressing greater determination (if it does).

Elaine said...

I would not use 'shall' to imply determination. If one says he WILL do something it seems much more a matter of implacable intent than the mild-sounding 'shall' which seems to express more casual future expectation... 'I shall be glad to see the back of Rupert Murdoch; I will not believe Rupert Murdoch is innocent in this matter.'