United We Sing

I'm so grateful to the friend who sent me a link to a Bill Moyers interview with Mark Johnson, a record producer who's traveled the world uniting musicians through common songs. The end result is a documentary called Playing for Change: Peace Through Music and includes incredibly moving footage of musicians from all over the world, from all kinds of circumstances, singing songs like Stand By Me and One Love People Get Ready - recorded at different times, but edited together into one rich, beautiful tapestry of humanity and creativity.

As Mark Johnson says:

I think that in order to really unite people we have to show that in our darkest situations and in the places with the most struggles in the world, that we can find a way of uplifting each other out of it. I remember hearing somebody that said, "The last person who knew why we were fighting died a long time ago."

We all know the world is changing. And we get to decide if it's changing for the better or if it's changing for the worse.

And so with music, it opens up these doors that ordinarily wouldn't be opened.

You can check out the Playing for Change blog, which has news and information about the foundation that was created to build schools in some of the communities where the documentary was filmed.