Proposal

For my final project in this course, I intend to create an edition of Holly Near’s protest song “Singing For Our Lives”. This edition is important both for educational and practical purposes. Protest music has a long and varied history in the United States, and this song in particular belongs to a genre of easily accessible and malleable genre called “zipper songs” where one simple melody is repeated over and over again for each verse, with only one line of the song changing while the rest stays the same. This makes this song a particularly interesting subject for an edition, because there are many different verses of the song that have been used in different struggles. Holly Near herself changed one of her original verses many times to reflect the proliferation of the recognition of different identity categories within the LGBTQ+ community. An edition showing textual change over time and providing viewers with videos of the song being sung would not only help provide historical context for how protesters use and adapt their language, it would also provide a resource for people who need music for their own protests, no matter the struggle. 

Contemporary protestors and everyday people on the internet would be potential targets for this edition. As I’ve previously mentioned, I hope that this edition could be helpful for those in need of new protest music, but I would also hope that this subject could draw in people less familiar with protest music and help them learn a little bit more. Since protest music is often taught orally, I would hope to include lots of video and/or audio in my edition to mimic this tradition. I would also hope to include a page that has all of the verses I can find documentation of, and if there is enough significant change over time in which verses are usually sung, create some kind of interactive timeline to show that change either within individual verses or for the text as a whole. This edition would be presented digitally, since video and audio will be such a large part of my concept. It will need a history/about page, a section with different videos, and the interactive text-timeline feature.