‘Frederick’s Song’ Celebrates Freedom

Musicians have been singing about our country and what makes it wonderful for a long time. From Jimi Hendrix to Pitbull, the concept of freedom has been tackled again and again.

“Every generation needs to be acquainted with our country’s hard-fought struggle for freedom.”

Richie Havens belted out a rousing “Freedom” at Woodstock in 1969. Paul McCartney wrote about it in his 2001 song, “Freedom,” a response to the 9/11 attacks. Dierks Bentley debuted a new “Freedom,” at the Country Music Hall of Fame in March.

Bentley’s song, which will be on his next album, “Black,” includes lyrics that say: “We all wanna break the chains / Feel the wind against our face / Everybody wants the same thing / We wanna taste that freedom / Everybody ’round here wants to taste that freedom.”

And now, reggae/rock/pop band SayReal is joining the list of “Freedom” writers. But their “Frederick’s Song (Freedom)” is different from all the rest. The song uses nothing but quotes from abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. In some cases he’s paraphrased, but the lyrics all come from his historic words.

The goal of the song is to reflect the “social, political, and economic freedoms we all must remember to relentlessly fight for,” notes the music video’s YouTube description.

The band says that, at first, their new song made them the subject of controversy and discrimination.

Naia Kete, leader of the group (she appeared on Season 2 of “The Voice”), and her brother Imani Elijah (percussion, keyboards and vocals) are from Northampton, Massachusetts. Lee John, who plays bass and drums, is from Woodland, California, and songwriter and guitarist Lightfoot is from Burbank. Former “American Idol” judge and music producer Randy Jackson discovered the group while watching them perform at Hollywood’s Hotel Café in late 2014.

The band members are all mixed race — and they say that their heritage has been questioned. When they first released the video for the song in early April on the AfroPunk Facebook page, it was met with negative comments; they were called everything from “not black enough” to “whitewashed,” and were likened to controversial former NAACP Chapter President Rachel Dolezal.

In the end, SayReal says, the negativity helped them spread the message of freedom even more.

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Interestingly, their “Frederick’s Song (Freedom)” was co-written by Richard Fink, businessman, professor, and decades-long chief political adviser to billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his brother, David. The band was playing at Fink’s daughter’s wedding in California and he approached them with his idea of doing a song.

“Every generation needs to be acquainted with our country’s hard-fought struggle for freedom,” Fink says. He told Politico that he counts Douglass among his top three heroes.

“It’s a history of heroics and hypocrisy, brutality and mercy, and one where much has been lost, but much also gained, in the struggle to ensure that the dream in the Declaration of Independence reaches all Americans,” Fink writes on the SayReal site.

“For any generation, there is no better teacher, role model, or warrior able to advance the understanding of what it takes to advance  this dream than America’s greatest freedom fighter, Frederick Douglass.”

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Fink urges the “careful listener” of “Frederick’s Song (Freedom)” to hear, in the words of Douglass himself, the “sadness and anger at a monstrous system of slavery, where slave owners provided alcohol to their slaves during little down time so they would not think about escape and freedom. And why slave owners worked to keep the slaves from learning to read — threatening imprisonment and death for teachers.”

As the choruses progress, he says, notice how they reflect the evolution of Douglass’ life and thinking.

What the band and Fink want everyone to realize is the powerful message Douglass championed: “None of us are truly free if all of us are not free.”