Toscano, Bruno Walter Renato

English

Università degli studi di Torino: SIRIO@unito.it - SIstema RIviste Open access

We Shall Not Be Moved. Voci e Musiche Dagli Stati Uniti (1969-2018)

Bruno Walter Renato Toscano

Directory of Open Access Journals

WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED. VOCI E MUSICHE DAGLI STATI UNITI 
(1969-2018) 
Alessandro Portelli (author) 
Roma: Squilibri, 2019, pp. 339, ISBN: 9788885571259 
Reviewed by Bruno Walter Renato Toscano 
n his latest book, We Shall Not Be Moved, the historian Alessandro Portelli describes the 
history of American radicalism through some audio tracks collected during his research 
stays in the United States. Starting from the Appalachian coal mines’ music tradition, the 
reader/listener is taken through folk music of the Latin American community of Berkeley, 
the workers’ songs of the Washington trade union demonstrations, and the voices of the 
young crowd that protested against gun violence in 2018. As Portelli writes, “We shall not 
be moved is the leitmotiv of this whole collection: it is the expression of the persistent 
resistance of ordinary people, workers, farmers, African Americans, Latinos” (74). In line 
with this remark, two elements are central to understand Portelli’s book. On the one hand, 
the author aims at describing American society in its complexity. The book does so through 
both a class analysis and taking into the differences of gender and race within different 
social groups. On the other hand, the narrative structure of the book itself is based on the 
oral expressions of the “common people” involved in political and social movements. In 
this sense, Portelli, as already shown in his previous scholarship, gives an oral and written 
dignity to all those lesser-known political and social expressions, which are rooted in the 
history of American communities and in American history in general. Although there are 
also audio recordings by leading musicians of American music culture—such as Marvin 
Gaye, Barbara Dane or Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick–in most cases the selected inter-
views and audio tracks are the political and cultural expressions resulting both from com-
munities with which the author has had direct contact and from the indistinct masses gath-
ered in chorus during the protest parades, from the 1960s until 2018. 
 Portelli arranges the collection–which includes 4 audio CDs that make up the core 
of the work–following an order that emphasizes the memory of the social actors involved 
in the recordings. The memory shared by ordinary women and men is therefore the key 
element of the narrative of We Shall Not Be Moved and it is a deliberately political and 
radical memory, that places the analyzed subjects and communities within their historical 
context. Indeed, Portelli presents radicalism as an integral part of American social move-
ments since the late 1960s, permeating American music and cultural heritage. Investigating 
the political value of American music culture, in this sense, means to face a long-lasting 
tradition that reinterprets the biblical language rooted “within the veins of [American] cul-
ture” (134), the founding myths of the United States, the political ideologies, the cultural 
I 
Bruno Walter Renato Toscano | 
JAm It! No. 2 December 2019 | Rethinking 1968 and the Global Sixties 103 
representations, the stylistic features, and the music traditions in order to build new mean-
ings for the historical past of the United States. From this point of view, the continuous 
return to the roots of U.S. historical identity is nothing more than an attempt by the sub-
jects under analysis to seize the relevance of the past, reconstructing its forms and thus 
conveying new political values. It does not mean that these oral manifestations are flat-
tened for the advantage of just one narration. Portelli instead puts the audio tracks together 
without trying to insert them into a whole interpretation tending to a well-defined conclu-
sion. He leaves the reader the task to compose the pieces like a mosaic, making up the 
complex framework of American radicalism.  
Unlike his previous works, in We Shall Not Be Moved, Portelli avoids the classical 
narrative structure of the essay, combining audio tracks and comments in four fundamen-
tal parts–songs related to Trade Union and radical struggles, very often linked to folk and 
country music (CD1); blues music and ballads that revisit songs and sounds at the roots of 
U.S. musical traditions (CD 2); songs that reflect religious themes typical of gospel (CD 3); 
music, choirs, and recordings already published in the book L’America della contestazione 
(Portelli, 1970), to which are added two audio tracks collected in 2018 (CD 4). 
 If we analyze the work from a historiographic point of view, we can look at the text 
as a support for historians dealing with oral history, given the strong anthological compo-
nent that creates a series of sources contextualized but not included in a much broader 
narrative. An innovative element is certainly the author’s attempt to look at the radicalism 
in some of the songs of American workers during the 1960s from the point of view of the 
Italian political and musical experience during those same years. This is the case, for exam-
ple, of the song I Hate the Capitalist System by Sarah Ogan Gunning, which gives an op-
portunity to reflect on how “it was not true that the United States were a country without 
class struggle, as almost all the Italian left-wing believed (being convinced that American 
workers were ‘integrated’ with the crumbs of imperialism)” (258-259). 
 One of the merits of We Shall Not Be Moved is a narrative structure capable of syn-
thesizing the history of American traditional music from the bottom up, thanks to the oral 
testimonies recorded by the author. On the other hand, it is difficult to capture an overall 
picture from We Shall Not Be Moved because of Portelli’s choice not to give a real guideline.  
 Unlike Benjamin Filene (2000) or Ricky Vincent (2013), who investigated the rela-
tionship between memory, history, political radicalism, and music culture in the United 
States, Portelli avoids inserting the audio tracks in a narrative that relates the oral tradition 
of “gospel, narrative songs” (260) within a broader history of American radicalism. Rather, 
in We Shall Not Be Moved, there is a lack of in-depth analysis to connect sources; indeed, 
individual audio tracks and comments associated with them are arranged by Portelli with-
out explicitly indicating the reason for such provision.  
 Although the choice of the title of the work is justified as “the expression of the 
persistent resistance of ordinary people” (74), the main aims of the book, instead, are never 
| Book Review 
 
 104 
mentioned, neither in the short introduction, nor throughout the text. Portelli leaves room 
only for comments, tracks, a photographic apparatus that composes the last part of the 
book, and the stories that led Portelli to relate to the object of each piece. Although the 
sources collected by Portelli respect the principle of oral history, according to which “oral 
sources are not found by the historian, but built in his presence, with his direct and decisive 
participation” (Portelli 2008), the same cannot be said about the narrative. Indeed, what 
drives the meaning of the work is the expressive immediacy of the audio tracks recorded 
by Portelli. But the overall analysis of the sources collected and the direct relationship “be-
tween the historian as a listener” and the “narrator as a witness” (Portelli 2008) seems to 
be missing. Nevertheless, the anthology appears to be addressed both to a non-specialized 
audience and historians. Through We Shall Not Be Moved, indeed, the audience outside 
academia has the possibility to enjoy the audio tracks recorded by Portelli, and the histori-
ans could, at the same time, use the book as an anthology in order to investigate American 
music history and its multiple political meanings.  
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. 
Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. 
Portelli, Alessandro. 2008. “Un lavoro di relazione. Osservazioni sulla storia orale.” 
http://aisoitalia.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Alessandro-Portelli-Storia-orale-un-la-
voro-di-relazione.pdf 
Portelli, Alessandro and Pellegrini Ferdinando. 1970. L’America della contestazione. I Di-
schi del Sole: Lp. 
Vincent, Ricky. 2013. Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers' Band and How 
Black Power Transformed Soul Music. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. 
Bruno Walter Renato Toscano graduated in History and Oriental Studies in March 2019 
at the University of Bologna with a thesis in History of Political Thought entitled “Revolu-
tion and Reformism in Babylon. The American Revolution of the Black Panther Party (1966- 
1972).” In 2018 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. 
He is currently a PhD student in the Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge 
at the University of Pisa. His PhD project aims at investigating the history of African Amer-
ican feminism during the Cold War through a transnational lens.  
 
 
 
 
 


https://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/jamit/article/download/4113/3713

We Shall Not Be Moved. Voci e Musiche Dagli Stati Uniti (1969-2018)

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Università degli studi di Torino: [email protected] - SIstema RIviste Open access

Directory of Open Access Journals