The man behind me exuberantly delivered his off-pitch notes loudly into my ear.
PATTI SMITH POWER TO THE PEOPLE HOW TO
The singers didn’t need to know how to read music, or even sing particularly well, as participant Elyse Orecchio described in a blog post: The event was staged by Choir! Choir! Choir!, a Canadian organization whose commitment to community building vis-à-vis weekly drop-in singing sessions at a Toronto tavern has grown to include some starry names and world-renowned venues, raising major charitable funds along the way.Īs per Choir! Choir! Choir!’s operating instructions, there were no auditions. Witness the glowing faces of 250 volunteer singers who gathered in New York City’s Public Theater lobby to perform the song as part of the Onassis Festival 2019: Democracy Is Coming last spring. But his widow has carried it around the world, and witnessed its joyful transformative power. Sadly, Fred Smith, who died in 1994, never saw it performed live. That’s why at the end it goes, “I believe everything we dream can come to pass, through our union we can turn the world around, we can turn the earth’s revolution.” We wrote it consciously together to inspire people, to inspire people to come together. … what we wanted to do was remind the listener of their individual power but also of the collective power of the people, how we can do anything. As Patti declared in an NME Song Stories segment:
The goal was to recapture some of the energy they’d felt as youth activists, coming together to protest the Vietnam War. As protest songs go, “ People Have the Power” by Godmother of Punk Patti Smith and her late husband Fred Sonic Smith is a true upper.