The Fires of Napalm

Annotation

"Everybody's Got a Right to Live" (Broadside Records # BR 308), a contemporary folk album collaboration between .... Kirkpatrick had an interesting political career in edition to his musical work. Born in Haynesville, Louisiana in 1933, he established in 1964 the CORE Group - Congress of Racial Equality - in Jonesboro, Louisiana, a key civil rights movement in the United States.1 Following threats of violence from locals and the Ku Klux Klan, he helped in the organisation of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, another civil rights group that called for self-defence methods to oppose racial abuse. He later joined Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Leadership Christian Conference.2 Musically, he also collaborated with Pete Seeger - Ballads of Black America. Both Kirkpatrick and Collier appeared on the compilation The Best of Broadside 1962-1988 released by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 2000.Sources1core-online.org↩2Everybody's Got a Right to Live - FW05308↩

Annotation by Justin A. Brummer

Lyrics

English: You know we're wrong, we're in the war and we don't belong... / Come on home and stop the fires of napalm / Rivers running the colour of red / Rice paddies full of the other dead / It's for freedom of the Vietnamese we claim / The same freedom that the Indian gained... / We are the children, god is the father / We and Vietnamese Viet Cong are brothers... / You wonder how you can be affected / Your schools and hospitals neglected / You can't fight for the good you need / If it's in the national interest to make children bleed

About the artist

Duo of civil-rights movement song leaders: Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick (1933-1987), Louisiana-born folk singer and SCLC activist, and Jimmy Collier (b. 1947, Fort Smith, Arkansas), field organizer and singer for Dr. King's movement; they recorded together on 'Everybody's Got a Right to Live' (1968). [Source: Wikipedia]

Themes

Anti-War · Napalm

In collections

Peace, Protest, & Anti-War Songs [War Years]