Entertainment

Soundtrack for a revolution

The documentary “Soundtrack for a Revolution” retells the epic of the civil rights era in song, using the struggles of the Freedom Riders and Martin Luther King Jr. to introduce the classic folk songs that protesters sang in marches and in jail cells.

The interviews with such witnesses and participants as Julian Bond, Harry Belafonte, John Lewis and Andrew Young are riveting, vital and still shocking after all these years. But the film is primarily interested in the music that accompanied this turmoil, which is a bit like covering the American Revolution with the focus on the wigs Washington and Jefferson wore.

Moving as the songs are (many of them were favorites in black churches), they don’t compare with the details of, for instance, a Freedom Rider’s story about his Greyhound bus being blown up in Alabama because whites and blacks were traveling together on it.

Newsreel footage and the protesters’ fond memories of the songs they sang (“We Shall Overcome” being the best known) intermingle with contemporary scenes in which young singers and bands of today (John Legend, Joss Stone, TV on the Radio) record updated versions. Stone may be a lovely singer, but her importance to the Civil Rights movement is nil.