R.I.P “Rip” Patton: A Tennessee Freedom-Rider Sings His Final Hymn
Decidnos las canciones de un pueblo y os diremos sus leyes,
sus costumbres y su historia.
From the 16th-century South American proverb, “Tell us the songs of a culture and we will tell you its laws, its customs, and its history,” to the 20th-century protest anthems of North America, people live their history through song.
Ernest Patton, Nashville civil rights activist confirmed this connection, saying, “When something happens to you, there’s always a song for it.” Much of the attention about Civil Rights history focuses on Selma or Birmingham, but Nashville had its own contribution. And like much about Nashville, this contribution had a strong music presence. The Nashville activists were led by students at historically black institutions in Nashville: Fisk University (home of the Fisk Jubilee Singers), Meharry Medical College, Tennessee State University (then Tennessee A&I), and American Baptist College (then American Baptist Theological Seminary), but also included students from historically white Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School.
Among these activists was Nashville-born Ernest “Rip” Patton. Trained as a musician, Rip served as drum major for Tennessee A&I. He was able to incorporate music into his training in “direct action,” the non-violent protest methods based on the teachings of Gandhi, the Indian freedom fighter, and followed by Martin Luther King, Jr in the US. Patton interrupted his music education to get the specialized protest training in the mountains of North Carolina alongside the famed John Lewis, destined to become a member of the US House of Representatives and the name heading voting rights legislation currently before Congress.
After training, Patton joined the “freedom riders” bus trip from Nashville to Jackson, Mississippi.
[W]e used music to comfort us, to give us strength. To know that we were all under the same banner. That we were all together.
Once there, he and 300 others were arrested and sent to the brutal Parchman Prison for a time. But even there they sang: “I woke up this morning with my mind, stayed on freedom, hallelu-, hallelu-, hallelujah.”
Protests had already begun in Nashville with less violence and fewer vicious arrests. After the first successful lunch counter sit-ins, the black religious community of Nashville endorsed this non-violent effort and by the end of the Sixties, Nashville had begun serious desegregation. Having been expelled from Tennessee State because of his activism, Patton worked as a jazz drummer, playing with musicians like Roy Ayers and Lou Rawls. Later, TSU gave him an honorary doctorate for the same activities that had gotten him expelled.
I was honored to sit beside him on a panel for the Nashville YWCA. The panel had been invited by Sharon Kendall Roberson, the Y’s CEO and my sister. In addition to running the state’s largest domestic violence shelter for women, children, and pets, part of the Y’s mission is “eliminating racism and…promoting peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all,” so they were hosting a discussion on the role of music in the Civil Rights movement. Sitting alongside “Rip,” as he insisted we call him, current Tennessee State professor and nationally recognized singer, Patrick Dailey and I were in awe of this historical icon. I was a historical musicologist faced with actual living music history.
But he never took himself too seriously. As he often did far and wide, Rip spoke of his own experiences in an engaging and surprisingly positive manner. He remained ever curious about new trends in musicology and in a variety of musical styles. He was a musician through and through. In telling the stories, he would often break into song as a natural part of his speech patterns. “Our movement was known as a singing movement.” He told of how the activists updated the old spirituals for a new era.
One particularly poignant story he told to the Corrymeela Community, a longstanding peace and reconciliation movement in Belfast, Ireland, was about a small group determined to desegregate a Nashville movie theater. In the story, young black woman was standing in line when a young white man came up to her. Let’s let Rip tell it:
Some stories were more lighthearted. When their group was arrested in 1961, he joined with Bernard Lafayette who began to sing “Buses are coming, oh yes, buses are coming.” When the guard objected to their singing, they joked “What are you gon’ do? Arrest us?”
In 2011, our own Rip Patton was featured in a PBS documentary called Freedom Riders.
A decade later on Monday August 23, 2021, Rip Patton died. But before he died, to paraphrase the old gospel song, we didn’t forget to “give him his flowers while he was living.” He was honored in dedicated concerts, celebrated in his own performances like this smooth jazz set for a Juneteenth event in Nashville, and featured in books like Eric Etheridge’s Breach of Peace, a compendium of photographs from the Freedom Rider era.
May he ride on in well-deserved peace, singing with the angels. Free at last! Free at last!
