Healing River

This was written by Fred Hellerman of the Weavers in collaboration with Fran Minkoff.  Fred and Fran collaborated on a number of great songs including singable English translations of a number of great Hebrew songs.

Pete Seeger spent Mississippi Freedom Summer working for racial justice in August 1964, the summer that three civil rights workers (James Chayney, Michael Schwerner & Andrew Goodman) were murdered in Meridian Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan. Seeger was singing to an audience that summer when someone handed him a note that the bodies of these three were discovered. This was the song he chose to sing at that difficult hour.

Pete Seeger later put a poem about these murders to music in his song Those Three Are on My End.

How much our nation and world need that healing river today.