Track 1 Chris Iijima, Nobuko Miyamoto, and "Charlie" Chin, "We Are the Children" (1973)

Context

Three musicians, three biographies, one album

The three musicians on this recording came to it from three different musical and political starting points, and the album they made together was the first of its kind in the United States. Chris Iijima was a 24-year-old Sansei Japanese American from Manhattan's Upper West Side, the son of activist parents (his father Takeru a veteran of the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, his mother Kazu one of the founders of the East Coast organization Asian Americans for Action), a recent Columbia graduate, and a longtime participant in the campus anti-war movement. Nobuko Miyamoto was a 33-year-old Japanese American singer-dancer, a former professional Hollywood and Broadway performer (The King and I in 1956, Flower Drum Song on Broadway in 1958, the film West Side Story in 1961, in which she played the Shark girl Francisca), who had walked away from a successful entertainment career to do documentary film work on the Black Panthers and the Young Lords in New York. She had been incarcerated with her family during the war, starting as a two-year-old at the Santa Anita racetrack assembly center. William "Charlie" Chin was a 28-year-old Chinese American multi-instrumentalist from Queens, of Cantonese and Trinidadian Chinese heritage, who had grown up in the early-1960s Greenwich Village folk scene and had spent the late 1960s touring nationally with the rock band Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys (whose first album was produced by Jimi Hendrix).

Iijima and Miyamoto met in 1970 at the Japanese American Citizens League convention in Chicago and discovered they could harmonize. They started writing songs together and performing them at Asian American Movement events: rallies, conferences, community fundraisers, and the broader cross-movement organizing world (the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, the Republic of New Africa) that the activist Yuri Kochiyama had introduced Miyamoto to in New York. Chin joined them later that year by accident at the Pace College Asian American Conference in lower Manhattan, picking up his guitar to back the duo from the audience and not leaving the stage. By 1971 the three of them were appearing regularly together. In February 1972, Iijima and Miyamoto sang "We Are the Children" on the Mike Douglas Show, the most-watched daytime talk show in America at the time, during a week-long residency in which John Lennon and Yoko Ono served as guest co-hosts and chose half the guests themselves. By the time of the studio recording in 1973 the songs had been refined through more than two years of community performance.

The song

"We Are the Children" is a three-verse, two-chorus protest song that catalogs Asian American identity by naming who the speakers' parents and grandparents were and who the speakers feel themselves in solidarity with. The verses move outward in concentric circles. The first and longest verse names migrant workers, concentration camp survivors, railroad builders, Chinese restaurant waiters, and Japanese gardeners (the immediate Japanese and Chinese American family histories and the working-class jobs the previous generation of Asian Americans had been allowed to hold). The second verse moves into the speakers' own postwar American childhoods ("Foster children of the Pepsi Generation, / Cowboys and Indians -- ride, red-man, ride! / Watching war movies with the nextdoor neighbor, / Secretly rooting for the other side"). The third verse opens the frame all the way out: "We are the cousins of the freedom fighter, / Brothers and sisters all around the world. / We are a part of the Third World people / Who will leave their stamp on Amerika." The chorus is the response: "Sing a song for ourselves. / What have we got to lose? / Sing a song for ourselves. / We got the right to choose." (The original 1973 album booklet uses the spelling "Amerika"; the 2021 Smithsonian Folkways re-release modernized this to "America." The political-music tradition the trio belonged to often used "Amerika" to signal a critique of the country's political character.) The recurring tagline of the verses, "Who leave their stamp on Amerika" (in the first verse, present tense, the ancestors actively leaving their stamp) and "Who will leave their stamp on Amerika" (in the third verse, future tense, the Third World people including the speakers about to leave theirs), is the song's protest-song pivot from inheritance to action.

The lyric "We are the offspring of the concentration camp" in the first verse is, according to the Densho Encyclopedia, likely the first song in English to explicitly name the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. By 1973 the camps had been closed for twenty-eight years, but the survivors, including Miyamoto and Iijima's mother, had largely not spoken about the experience publicly. The redress and reparations movement was still a decade away from its first formal organization (the Japanese American Citizens League's National Committee for Redress would form in 1978; the Civil Liberties Act granting reparations would not pass until 1988). When Miyamoto sings the line on the recording she is, as far as the historical record reflects, putting an English-language popular-song acknowledgment of the camps onto record for the first time.

The recording: Paredon Records, 1973

The album was recorded over two and a half days at A-1 Sound Studios in New York, on four-track tape, mostly from first or second takes. The producer was the blues singer and political organizer Barbara Dane, who had co-founded Paredon Records in 1969 with her husband, the writer Irwin Silber, to document protest movements globally. The engineer was Jonathan Thayer. Charlie Chin later compared the four-track recording process to a more technically sophisticated commercial production as "the difference between a folding chair and a Maserati." The album cover artwork was by Arlan Huang and Karl Matsuda for Basement Workshop. The trio chose Paredon, Miyamoto recalled, partly because Dane had recently released an album called I Hate the Capitalist System: "that convinced us this was the right record company."

The personnel for "We Are the Children" specifically, per Smithsonian Folkways, are Iijima on lead vocals and acoustic guitar, Miyamoto on lead vocals (Iijima and Miyamoto trade verse-by-verse), Chin on backing vocals and acoustic guitar, with uncredited electric bass guitar and bongos rounding out the rhythm section. The instrumentation is, by design, simple: the trio "intended to take their music on the road," Miyamoto told Smithsonian Folkways, "and kept their instrumentation simple, two guitars and three voices." The recording's spontaneous, almost-live feel comes from this conscious decision; the songs were workhorses, written to be sung at rallies as well as to be heard on a record, and the album captures them in a shape that a small group could reproduce anywhere with one bass, two guitars, and a hand drum.

Reception, the long quiet, and the 2004 reissue

The album sold roughly five thousand copies in its first run, primarily through Movement-affiliated bookstores, college Asian American Studies programs, community centers, and the trio's own performances. It was widely circulated within the Asian American Movement community for the rest of the 1970s; Charlie Chin has said that he still meets people in the Midwest, the South, and Canada in their sixties and seventies who own a copy from their college years, and that the song "We Are the Children" was rewritten with local verses to suit Asian American Canadian, Hawaiian, and Midwestern scenes. Outside the Movement community, the album was largely invisible. The structural conditions for it to be visible (a commercial Asian American music industry, Asian American programming on commercial radio, an Asian American press to review the album in) did not yet exist in 1973.

The album fell out of print after Paredon ceased active production in 1985. In 1991 Paredon's catalog was donated to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. A Grain of Sand was reissued on CD by Bindu Records in 1998 and again, more durably, by Smithsonian Folkways in 2004, with the original liner notes restored, and has remained in print and freely streamable since. A documentary on Iijima's life, A Song for Ourselves (Tadashi Nakamura, 2009), introduced the recording to a new generation. Iijima died in Honolulu on December 31, 2005, at the age of 57, after a long illness; he had spent his last seven years as a professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Miyamoto and Chin remain active. Miyamoto's 2021 memoir Not Yo' Butterfly (UC Press) and her 2021 double album 120,000 Stories (Smithsonian Folkways) include re-recordings of songs from the album with new arrangements; Chin works as a community historian and educator at the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco.

Things to listen for

The song is in the key of G major, in 4/4 meter, at a tempo of about 111 BPM: a moderate, walking tempo that lets a group sing along without rushing. The harmonic vocabulary is the simplest in this listening guide so far, even simpler than the Tharpe recording: three chords (G, C, and D, the I, IV, and V we have met repeatedly across these guides) carry the entire song, with one passing E7 chord sometimes added in the chorus. The runtime is 2 minutes 54 seconds. Personnel are spelled out in the recording paragraph above; bear in mind throughout that the arrangement is deliberately spare (two acoustic guitars, three voices, electric bass, bongos), with no horns, no strings, no piano, and no drums in the conventional kit-drummer sense, designed to be reproducible at a rally with whatever instruments are on hand.

First, the timbre and the trade-off of the two lead voices. Iijima and Miyamoto trade verses, with Chin's voice joining underneath them on the choruses. Listen to how the two lead voices sit differently in the same song. Iijima's voice is a relatively unaffected tenor, slightly nasal, conversational, with the careful diction of someone who has been writing the lyrics himself and wants the words heard. Miyamoto's voice is a fuller mezzo-soprano with a stronger vibrato, more theatrical projection (the trained Broadway voice she had been using ten years earlier in Flower Drum Song is still audible), and more melodic decoration on the long vowels. The two voices overlap in the chorus, where Iijima and Miyamoto sing the title phrases together and Chin adds a third harmony underneath. The political effect is partly the fact that the trio is plural: the song is called "We Are the Children" and the recording demonstrates the "we" by literally being three people singing together. The song is held up by the act of three voices joining, not by a single soloist out front.

Second, the texture, and the choice to keep it simple. Two acoustic guitars, voices, electric bass, and bongos. Compare to the dense salsa texture of the Cruz recording, the gospel-and-orchestra layering behind Cooke, the boogie-woogie band-plus-electric-guitar setup behind Tharpe. The trio could have asked Dane for any band they wanted; she had access, through Paredon, to Latin-music musicians, jazz musicians, and the New York folk-revival session players. They asked for almost nothing. The two guitars play fingerpicked patterns, sometimes shifting to a strummed feel on the chorus, with the bass marking the chord changes underneath and the bongos providing a quiet shuffle pulse rather than driving the song forward. The texture refuses to be commercial. A 1973 recording with this much political conviction could easily have been arranged for a tighter folk-rock sound (the moment was full of folk-rock; the Eagles' debut album was a 1972 release, James Taylor's One Man Dog was 1972, Carole King's Tapestry was 1971). The trio's choice to stay this spare is part of what locates the recording in the folk-revival protest-song tradition rather than in commercial folk-rock. The texture says: this is a song you can sing.

Third, the form, and what it does that a verse-chorus form usually does not. The song is in verse-chorus form, the same shape we met in "Strange Things Happening Every Day" and that "St. Louis Blues" had refused. The verses are over a I-IV-V chord pattern, and the choruses repeat the same chord cycle. There are three verses and two choruses, with an extended outro at the end built on repetitions of "Who will leave their stamp on Amerika" and "Sing a song sing it." So far this is conventional. What the song does that most verse-chorus pop songs do not do is use each verse to introduce new content rather than restate the same situation, while keeping the chorus exactly the same each time. The three verses build, almost like a series of expanding circles, from the immediate ancestors and their working-class jobs (verse 1) outward to the speakers' own postwar American childhoods (verse 2) outward to global Third World solidarity (verse 3). The chorus, "Sing a song for ourselves / What have we got to lose / Sing a song for ourselves / We got the right to choose," does not change. The static chorus is the song's claim that there is one consistent thing the speakers are asking for, regardless of which generation, occupation, or political affiliation the verse just named. The fixed chorus is the song's argument that all of these histories belong to one act of self-determination.

Fourth, the gesture of writing the song in plural first person. The song is called "We Are the Children" and not "I Am a Child." Almost every verse line is built on a "we" or "our" or "us." This is not the voice of a single confessional singer-songwriter (which had been the dominant mode in commercial folk by 1973, after Joni Mitchell's Blue and Carole King's Tapestry); it is the voice of a collective political subject speaking in the first person plural. In 1973, claiming that "we" was a real political act, because the "we" the song was claiming (Asian American as a unified identity) had only existed for five years, since the May 1968 founding of AAPA at UC Berkeley. The song is among the first sustained acts of speaking from inside the new category, and one of the things that makes the recording work is how unselfconsciously it does this; the trio sings as if the "we" is established, and that confidence is part of what helped establish it. Pay attention also to who the chorus addresses. "Sing a song for ourselves" is in the imperative, addressed to the listener, and the listener it is addressed to is the same "we" the verses are speaking from. The song asks the audience it is speaking from to sing for the audience it is speaking to, which is the same audience. This is how a Movement song functions: it does not address the powerful, it addresses the people it is teaching to recognize themselves. Whether you, listening in 2026, can locate yourself inside that "we" or outside it is part of what the song is asking.