TV REVIEW : ‘We Shall Overcome’ Puts History to a Tune in PBS’ Documentary

The challenge: Can someone make a documentary on the history of one song without it seeming like a ride through Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World,” only to a different tune?

The challenger: “We Shall Overcome,” a PBS program that tells us everything we’d ever want to know about that famous folk song and civil-rights anthem.

The outcome: Like a ride through “It’s a Small World,” only to a different tune.

But the “Small World” ride can be enjoyable if you don’t mind one song being repeated over and over and over and over . . . and so can “We Shall Overcome” if one takes the same view.

This good-natured, caringly made, rambling special, which starts at approximately 9:15 tonight on Channel 28, has problems beyond all those versions (most truncated, thankfully) of the song: At 82 minutes (actually a lot longer depending on how extended two pledge breaks are), the program is too long, and it tries to be too much--not just a history of a song but the history of the civil-rights movement and more. Also, the presentation is very low-key.

The result is a documentary that lacks focus and energy, but still is worth tuning in for anyone interested in a prime example of how music can heal and strengthen. Among the performers are Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, the Freedom Singers, Peter, Paul and Mary, Taj Mahal, and Guy Carawan--who, though lesser-known, did perhaps the most to spread the song, like a Johnny Appleseed of folk music, around the South in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Narrator Harry Belafonte and chief interviewee Seeger trace the evolution of the song. Its origins are obscure, though it was apparently a gospel number called “I Shall Overcome” that got its “We” and a slower tempo when some striking tobacco workers sang it on the picket line in 1945.

We see the song’s use throughout the ‘60s black-freedom movement, with too much of an attempt to be all-inclusive, but with several moving scenes--especially one showing a boy singing it tearfully but strongly at the funeral of James Chaney, one of three civil rights workers slain outside Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964. The documentary ends with examples of how “We Shall Overcome” has been subsequently used by nonviolent demonstrators around the world.

A great, simple song; a fairly good but overly protracted program.