News/music The song John Lennon wrote to outdo ‘We Shall Overcome’
Every songwriter wants to write something that will last longer than they do. Even though music may come and go across generations, the power of a song can be strong enough to transcend any of the trends it fell prey to, often becoming classics without really trying. Although John Lennon already had a firm library of music immortalised with The Beatles, he had another phase of his career that saw him putting his protest hat on.
For the first half of the band’s career, Lennon made a conscious effort not to comment about the Vietnam War for fear that it would ruffle some political feathers. Starting with the track ‘Revolution’, though, Lennon’s hangups went out the window, singing about the concept of revolution and what it means for the state of the world.
Inspired by Yoko Ono’s work, Lennon would eventually start making songs with a more significant message than the straightforward tracks that had to do with puppy love. Across both Let It Be and Abbey Road, Lennon’s contributions toed the line between surreal art pieces and meditations on life itself, from the word jumbles on ‘Dig a Pony’ to the stream of consciousness in ‘Across the Universe’.
At the same time, Lennon and Ono had also started to undergo their own peaceful protests. Alongside getting married, the couple would end up staging massive bed-ins for peace, featuring scores of reporters descending on their bedroom in the hopes of catching something obscene but finding the pair campaigning for peace.
It would be at one of these bed-ins that Lennon would come up with the song that would help spread his message around the world. Based around only two chords, ‘Give Peace a Chance’ was a plea for the rest of the world to take a look at the violence happening around them and find some sort of peaceful resolution to their problems, accented by the sounds of spectators in the bed-in chanting alongside Lennon.
When talking about putting it together, Lennon later said that he wanted to write a track with the same emotional resonance as the protest songs that had come before. While Lennon had seen his fair share of political fodder from the likes of Bob Dylan, he had his sights set on the massive communal anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’.
Discussing the song’s power to Rolling Stone, Lennon recalled wanting to write something that equalled ‘We Shall Overcome’, saying, “You know, how can you beat Beethoven or Shakespeare or whatever? In me secret heart, I wanted to write something that would take over ‘We Shall Overcome’…The one they always sang, and I thought, Why doesn’t somebody write something for the people now, that’s what my job and our job is”.
Arriving at the end of 1969, the counterculture quickly adopted the song. It was even chanted at various marches to end the violence half a world away. Although Lennon would later distance himself from music altogether in the late 1970s, fans were still keeping his anthem close to their chests, famously singing it outside his Dakota apartment building the night he was murdered.
