Folk Song Challenge – New Jersey Folk Festival

Social Media Stage

Do you wish you could have performed at the folk festival this year?

Here is your chance to contribute to our collective social media stage! As we revisit our Rutgers Alumnus and folk music legend Paul Robeson, we want to encourage people to engage with some of the songs he sang and made famous. Our friend Jorge Arévalo Mateus has created an episode of his Radio Free Brooklyn program “Hurdy Gurdy Songs” on the influence of Paul Robeson and those musicians who have covered some of the songs he made famous. Take a moment to listen to this radio episode and be inspired!: Click HERE.

We would like to invite members of the public to contribute their own recordings or spin-offs of songs made famous by Robeson

“Behind the symphonic simplicity and brevity of Robeson’s spirituals and folk songs looked a great virtuosic talent whose skills extended well beyond the musical score and the written page. His talent was not a marker of his exceptionality but rather his deep and abiding connection to cultures throughout the world in his manifold roles as organizer, chronicler, interpreter, steward, and champion. It is precisely those enduring relationships that return him to us, again and again, and to which we now listen.”
Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, Scholar Shana Redmond

Here are videos of one of his most famous performance songs: “Joe Hill,” a labor ballad that many other folk musicians have covered over the years. What is your version, your cover, or your own original song inspired by his performance?
Please contribute by posting your song on social media! Tag @njfolkfest #njfolkfest #folksongchallenge