Instead of choosing a song for this week, the following may hold some interest to Rotarians and guests:
 

Fifty years ago, Barbara, a French singer of Jewish descent, wrote the song Goettingen about a German city she loved. Many believe her song helped build a new relationship between Germany and France. Here are some of the songs that you think also changed the world:

1. "For me and for my generation it was Free Nelson Mandela by The Specials (1984). I was born in 1960 and had no memory of Mandela being sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. So when we heard the song on the radio, it was a case of who is this guy and what has he done? Before long I was a member of Anti-Apartheid Movement, taking part in boycotts whilst apartheid, Desmond Tutu, Winnie Mandela and Steve Biko all became household names and in the national news." Barry King, Walsall, UK

2. "I am a fan of Barbara, but feel you have made far too much of it. The important one is Jean Ferrat's Nuit et Brouillard, or Night and Fog (1963). It talks about the trains that took Jews, like his father, to the concentration camps and is very powerful. De Gaulle did not like it as it interfered with his rapprochement with Adenauer. Ferrat says let the young dance the twist if they like, but the world should know who you - the people in the trains - were." Irene Ball, London

3. "Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready (1965), a hymn of the civil rights movement and taken up in other places of struggle such as South Africa. The song has been covered by many, but the original still inspires, unites and reminds all of the human struggle for equality. It's also been used and played by many LGBT groups and causes." Cookie Schwartz, US

4. "It may be cheesy and too popular for consideration, but maybe Band Aid's Feed the World (1984) is important for just that reason. Until the song was released, with its videos of starving children, the plight of millions of African families was seen as just a footnote in the news. Live Aid generated revenue, but it was the song which caught people's imagination and made us realise that famine abroad was a problem for all of us to fight, not just the people suffering. The response to other subsequent disasters has been markedly different to before, and millions have benefitted as a result." Jamie, Aylesbury, UK

5. "Ben Kayiranga's Freedom was a daring song in 1997 right in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda, not much for the bits of dancehall and reggae there, but the lyrics. It's not just that the lyrics were in Kinyarwanda, French and English either. But the message - freedom for people, freedom forever, freedom. The youth wants freedom, children want freedom. And maybe not the message either, because it was not that new in Rwandan music. But the moment, the timing - that fresh message of hope when a country is still mourning. The song gave a smile to a whole nation, so if Rwanda is the world, then that song changed the world." Rafiki Ubaldo, Knivsta, Sweden

6. "The anthem of the incredible movement that rescued almost two million Soviet Jews from oblivion and launched an effective human rights push that was the demise of the Iron Curtain was launched with a repetitive, easy Hasidic-style song that ignited people in Britain, the US and, most of all, the silenced Jews in post-Stalinist, atheistic USSR. In 1965, Shlomo Carlebach, an American Jewish rabbi/singer-songwriter, debuted the song Am Yisrael Chai (The People of Israel Live, the Father Lives). Almost a decade later, I was a student at UCLA in California, protesting the continued gulag internment of Jews and other human rights protestors, and we danced to that anthem. At the same time, in protest, young Jews were courageously gathering outside boarded-up synagogues across the USSR and danced too. A few years later, I married one of them!" Racelle Weiman, Charlotte, NC, US

7. "Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit (1939). There's racism in the world, but for many it's far too easy to mentally block out. This song kept it in your face, dangling from the tree, completely unable to be ignored. A brutal awaking to what was still transpiring in the southern parts of the United States long after the emancipation." Michelle, Iowa

8. "The Japanese song Ue O Muite Aruko (I Will Walk Looking Up, 1961) - but inexplicably known in the US and UK as Sukiyaki (1963) - did as much or more to change the attitudes of Americans toward their former enemies as any policy or speech. I am not old enough to remember the song coming out in 1963, but many older Americans have said this song marked the first instance where they began to see Japanese people not just as a former enemy or some mysterious, exotic race, but as people with feelings no different from their own, and capable of expressing beautiful, tender emotions. The effect went both ways. I lived in Japan for about five years, and many older Japanese shared with me how moved they were at the reception this song received in America, and this made them feel more positive toward their former foes. It is still to this date the only Japanese song to ever top the American charts. I do think it helped accelerate the alliance between Japan and the US that has maintained peace in the Pacific for over 50 years." John Taylor, Washington, DC