crazy.

And so like, I think right off the bat, my kind of horizons were expanded on what I could do.

And over the course of my time in grad school, I got very much interested, not just within my kind of musicology brain, but in the world.

I got interested in music and race, music and politics.

And my interest in singing kind of remained steadfast.

And so if you kind of think about what... what hits all those things, right? Like race, politics, singing, then the civil rights movement as like, you know, one of the singingist movements in history, right? It's a logical choice once you think about all those things that were kind of swirling for me at the time.

I started, so I did the thing, right? I did the lit review.

Right.

So what do you think that you're missing out?

Sure, yeah.

So I think, you know, again, this narrative that we have that kind of, you know, Rosa Parks just had this idea to sit down on the bus in Montgomery and that started this chain reaction really leaves out so much of the nitty gritty organizing that was happening of the really... day to day grind of organizing and the community building that it took on the local level to make all those things possible.

And I think that, you know, one of the problems is that we have, you know, we have this narrative that really emphasizes the great man, the great men of the civil rights movement, like Martin Luther King.

that give us this kind of, as you say, like cinematic overview effect.

But really what Martin Luther King would kind of travel to different areas and speak and inspire.

But the people on the ground were the folks who had put in the legwork, the hours and hours and hours of to make those things happen that King was commenting on and pushing ahead.

And what about today's music as protest songs?