Songwriter, musician and activist Holly Near will take the Foundry stage Friday, Sept. 25. (Submitted photo via hollynear.com)
Holly Near’s half-century of ‘singing for our lives’
- Published: September 24, 2026
Holly Near has spent more than half a century writing songs meant to be useful. Some were written in response to particular moments of violence or upheaval, then moved outward from their original circumstances. Near’s songs have been taken up by choirs, churches, protesters and communities who, over the years, have added their own voices and, sometimes, their own verses.
These are songs that have been timely enough, at the time of their writing, to put voice to collective despair, fury or joy, and sturdy enough to be pulled out years later and put back to work.
“I’m very happy to have written some really good workhorse songs,” Near told the News by phone last week. “And that makes me happy. I honor them.”
Near will return to Yellow Springs Friday, Sept. 25, for “An Evening with Holly Near: Stories, Songs and a Time to Gather,” presented by the Yellow Springs Speaker Series with support from World House Choir and Mad River Theater Works. The 7 p.m. Foundry Theater program will bring together the two elements that have braided through Near’s more than 55 years as a performer: singing and storytelling.
“I tell stories, and it leads into a song,” she said, adding that audiences have sometimes told her they enjoy the stories nearly as much as the music. “It’s a mixture of talk and song that weaves very gracefully between one and the other.”
Some of those stories stretch back to the earliest years of Near’s career as an activist and musician — and, most likely, to her first visit to Yellow Springs. Near said she first came through the village in the early 1970s as part of the Indochina Peace Campaign, which traveled throughout the country in opposition to the Vietnam War.
By then, Near had already started to step away from a burgeoning mainstream career in film, television and theater. In 1971, in her early 20s, she joined the FTA Show organized in part by actors Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. The FTA Show — which stood for “Free the Army,” a play on the soldier slogan “F–k the Army” — traveled near military bases in the Pacific to perform for U.S. service members, including those organizing against the war from within the military — an ideological counter to the pro-war, DoD-sanctioned USO Tour.
Near said she learned that the touring show needed another performer and went to audition for Fonda, who asked about her politics, had her read from the script and demonstrate a few dance steps. Finally, Near was asked if she could sing.
“I sang about a chorus of something, and her mouth dropped open,” Near said.
Soon she was traveling to Hawaii, the Philippines, Okinawa and Japan, performing a show meant to support soldiers while opposing the war they were being asked to fight.
“And I got the bug,” Near said. “I got a taste of what it was like to do music, dance, theater that really took the risk to say what you wanted to say.”
After her experience with FTA, Near largely left Hollywood behind; she started writing openly antiwar and feminist songs. When she fell in love with a woman, she said, she started writing lesbian songs. In 1972, she founded Redwood Records, building an independent home for her own work and other politically conscious artists. Working outside of the mainstream meant that Near and her collaborators had to learn how to build the infrastructure around the work — distribution networks, concert production and ways of connecting artists directly with communities. It was hard work, Near said, but she had made a conscious choice.
“I just realized that I would be more true to myself and to my music if I worked in a different realm,” she said.
That realm was also where Near discovered what kind of activist songwriter she wanted to become. Political ideas can be far-reaching and bombastic, but songs, she said, need to start somewhere smaller, more intimate.
“The big and powerful doesn’t draw people in,” she said.
She remembered flying to a memorial after the Ohio National Guard killed four unarmed students and wounded nine others at an anti-war protest at Kent State University in 1970; she’d been asked by Dean Kahler, who was left paralyzed after the shooting, to write something for the event, but hadn’t been able to find her way into a song that met the immediacy of the moment in the way she wanted.
“And I found myself going, ‘How do you personalize this? How do you make this very intimate? Because the fact is that this could have been me,’” Near said. “And that was the beginning of the song.”
There on the plane, she said, she started to write what became one of her most enduring songs, “It Could Have Been Me,” which weaves together Kent State with the killing of Chilean activist Victor Jara and images of people working for liberty in Nicaragua, El Salvador and on the African continent. They’re all connected by a lyrical refrain that moves the singer eye-to-eye with the song’s subjects: “It could have been me, but instead it was you/So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two/I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs/A farmer of food and a righter of wrong … If you can live for freedom, I can too.”
Eight years later, following the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, Near was moved to confront a similar question while driving toward the city to perform: What could she sing that would meet the scale of the grief she would find there?
What emerged was “Singing for Our Lives,” a deliberately simple melody conjured from meditations on unity amid fury and sorrow, with many voices in mind: “We are a gentle, angry people/we are a land of many colors/we are gay and straight together/we are a peaceful, loving people,” each verse ending with “and we are singing, singing for our lives.”
The song has since been sung by generations of LGBTQ+ people, activists, congregations and choirs. New verses have been written to fit new places and struggles, and Near said the song has now moved well beyond her ownership.
“I want to pat it on the back and say, ‘You go, dear,’” she said.
After more than five decades of watching movements advance, retreat and return to familiar struggles, Near said she doesn’t envision social change as work with an end on the horizon. And she’s wary, she said, of talking about “hope,” writ large, without asking what, precisely, is being hoped for.
“Hope for what?” she said. “Nirvana? For everything to be OK? No, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Understanding that the work is ongoing, she said, can instead allow people to approach it by finding a rhythm that can be maintained rather than throwing themselves at injustice with the expectation that a year, two years, even a lifetime of intense effort will finally put an end to it. And she noted that, from her view, activist work isn’t restricted to stages or picket lines, but extends to places of work, social groups and households.
“You work with the platform you have,” Near said. “Let’s say somebody — more than anything … they want to have a family. They want to get up every morning and take those kids to school. So their platform is teaching their children to be good human beings.”
The thing that really ballasts Near, she said, is people’s ability to persist, even while trudging toward an unclear horizon.
“Humans have proven they have amazing endurance,” she said, pointing to examples of people surviving displacement, racism, poverty and punishing labor while continuing to create, organize and build lives. “I think we have models of endurance everywhere we look.”
Endurance and resistance aren’t grim obligations, she said — on the contrary, they’re full of joy and beauty, even amid struggle. And it helps that there’s singing along the way.
“I think singing is like getting massaged from the inside out,” Near said. “It’s a good thing to do to unify people. … I think it’s a good way to live.”
Which begs the question: Will Near ask her Yellow Springs audience to sing, too?
“I don’t think I’ll be able to stop you!” she said, with a laugh.
“An Evening with Holly Near” begins at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25, at the Foundry Theater. Tickets are $20 for general admission and $5 for students.
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