This week’s last socially relevant song of the day is “Too Many Martyrs (The Ballad of Medgar Evers)” by the late, great folksinger, Phil Ochs. It’s a tribute to and a lament for the life and death of Medgar Evers.
Medgar Evers was a Civil Rights activist in Mississippi during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Evers was an Army veteran and college graduate whose activities attracted the attention and the hatred of local racists, one of whom was Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizen’s Council and Ku Klux Klan in Jackson, Mississippi. It was De La Beckwith who shot Evers in the back early in the morning of June 12, 1963. Medgar Evers died shortly after; he was just three weeks shy of his 38th birthday.
Evers’ assassination spurred protests across the South. Close to 5,000 people, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., marched in Evers’ funeral procession. He was memorialized by figures such as James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, and Eudora Welty. Evers’ tragic and senseless death prompted President John F. Kennedy to ask Congress for a comprehensive Civil Rights bill, which eventually resulted in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Phil Ochs, along with fellow folksinger Bob Gibson, wrote the song “Too Many Martyrs,” sometimes referred to as “The Ballad of Medgar Evers,” shortly after Evers’ death. Ochs first performed the song at the Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 1963 and included the song on his debut album, All the News That’s Fit to Sing, which came out in April of 1964.
The lyrics do a good job telling the story. The first few verses go like this:
In the state of Mississippi many years ago
A boy of fourteen years got a taste of Southern law
He saw his friend a-hangin’, his color was his crime
The blood upon his jacket put a brand upon his mind
Too many martyrs and too many dead
Too many lies, too many empty words were said
Too many times for too many angry men
Oh, let it never be again
His name was Medgar Evers and he walked his road alone
Like Emmett Till and thousands more whose names we’ll never know
They tried to burn his home and they beat him to the ground
But deep inside they both knew what it took to bring him downThe killer waited by his home hidden by the night
As Evers stepped out from his car into the rifle sight
he slowly squeezed the trigger, the bullet left his side
It struck the heart of every man when Evers fell and died.Too many martyrs and too many dead
Too many lies, too many empty words were said
Too many times for too many angry men
Oh, let it never be again
It’s a powerful song.
It’s likely that most of you reading this blog haven’t heard of Phil Ochs or, if so, only peripherally. Phil Ochs was a topical folksinger and songwriter in the vein of his contemporary, Bob Dylan. That Dylan achieved greatness and Ochs faded into obscurity we can write up to the whim of the fates, I suppose. Personally, I found Ochs’ lyrics the equal of Dylan’s but his melodic sense much better; Phil could write some beautiful melodies to go along with his socially trenchant lyrics. My favorite Phil Ochs songs include “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” “No More Songs,” “Changes,” “When I’m Gone,” “The Bells,” “Pleasures of the Harbor,” and “Flower Lady;” you should check them out.
Unfortunately, Phil Ochs suffered from a number of mental issues throughout his life—depression, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism. These problems gradually worsened over the years and he ended up committing suicide on April 6, 1976. He was just 35 years old.
A postscript: Byron De La Beckwith was almost immediately arrested and tried for Medgar Evers’ murder; unfortunately, two all-white juries refused to convict him. Thirty years later, however, new evidence emerged that resulted in a new trial. De La Beckwith was finally convicted of Evers’ murder on February 5, 1994, and sentenced to life in prison. He died, in prison, in 2001.
