[B]RATTLEBORO — Back in January, as President Donald Trump’s travel ban was drawing the first of many questions from immigration attorneys and activists, Vermont artist Peter Gould was wondering about something else.
“What are the full words,” he recalls thinking, “to that poem on the Statue of Liberty?”
Gould looked up the late Emma Lazarus’ 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus” and its concluding statement, “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
“The statue represents the absolute best in us,” Gould says. “I felt I just had to do something, so I sat down and made it into a song.”
Six months later, the poem has sparked a YouTube video, which in turn spawned the website www.yourtiredyourpoor.com, which is aiming to spur a viral movement to raise awareness and money in support of immigrant rights.
“We’ve started a campaign,” Gould writes on the website. “You can sing the song at rallies large and small. And we ask you to donate to the dedicated people among us — lawyers, advocates, doctors, nurses, shelter hosts — who are hard at work in every part of the country, helping the ‘tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’”
The Brattleboro resident is known for juggling writing and performing, directing theater, teaching Shakespeare and promoting peace and justice causes, so putting words to music wasn’t a stretch.
“I wrote the song, but you could say it was already written,” he says. “The words were mostly there, and the tune came through me, as if the statue herself were singing, to remind us all why she stands there.”
Alas, even Lady Liberty can use a little help, as Gould discovered when he shared a first draft of the song with his son Willie.
“He texted, ‘great song, great idea, needs a reliably singable hook.’”
And so his father turned the words “give me your tired, give me your poor” in the chorus of what he calls “a spiritual call and response song.”
The ban on travelers from six Muslim-majority countries, which caused chaos in airports upon its announcement days after Trump took office, is to be considered by the U.S. Supreme Court this fall.
“When I heard about human rights advocates dropping everything to try to save people from being sent back to war zones, the goodness of these volunteers overwhelmed me,” Gould says. “I thought they are heroes and just the kind of Americans I want to be and support.”
The artist recorded the song with help from Brattleboro’s Black Mountain Audio and sang it this spring at the Vermont Statehouse and an immigrant rights rally outside the Massachusetts capitol building in Boston.
“What I really want more than anything is to not own the song anymore,” he says. “I’d like people around the United States to make their own videos of it.”
Take Grace Potter, who Vermonters know as a nationally recognized singer-songwriter but Gould remembers as a student he taught at the Governor’s Institute on the Arts.
“I’d love to say, ‘Grace, could you sing the song?’”
People can find the music and lyrics on the website, as well as information on how to donate to the nonprofit International Refugee Assistance Project.
“No matter whether you support this crazy, complicated war in Syria, you have to accept the fact the situation has created hundreds of thousands of refugees,” Gould says. “I believe we have a moral obligation to help, and that’s what the words of the statue represent.”
