Songs of Freedom

In a scene from a forthcoming documentary, Betty Reid Soskin listens pensively to her songs from decades ago as the reel-to-reel tapes spin. Then the iconic national park ranger begins singing along to lyrics inspired by the turbulence of the Civil Rights era. “Your hand in mine,” she sings, “this simple sign of love.”

Decades after Soskin first started writing these powerful songs, her music is reaching audiences beyond family and longtime friends through the documentary (view the trailer below) and a new musical, both titled “Sign My Name to Freedom.” It’s an extraordinary, if not entirely surprising, turn for Soskin, who has led a long and storied life that continues to inspire. She turns 103 on Sept. 22.

“I’ve outlived my peer group, so I have to make it up as I go along,” she says in the documentary. “I’m dealing with an exploding life while I’m dealing with end-of-life issues.”

A decade ago, Soskin rose to prominence nationally as the oldest ranger in the National Park Service, drawing crowds to Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park with her sharp insights about race and history. But she almost never spoke about her past life as a singer and songwriter in the 1960s and early ’70s.

She’d gotten rid of her reel-to-reel machine, and at one point, she dumped recordings of her music on the curb during a move, before changing her mind in the middle of the night and retrieving them. She ended up stashing the tapes in a plastic tub in her closet for decades.

Filmmaker Bryan Gibel entered the picture around 2016. The director of the documentary short “Sickness in the System” — about COVID at San Quentin Prison — was interested in filming Soskin, but was searching for an original angle.

Then Gibel learned that Reid’s Records, the historic music store in Berkeley that Soskin co-founded with her first husband, Mel Reid, in 1945, was still around, run by their daughter Di’ara Reid. As a filmmaker, Gibel said he looks for locations to portray a larger story, and the record shop, which has since closed, seemed like a compelling way to tell the history of South Berkeley, once an epicenter of Black culture.

Di’ara introduced him to her mother, and he embarked on what became a series of interviews with Soskin. “I was asking her about parts of her and her family’s stories that other reporters weren’t interested in,” Gibel said. Months after the two first met, Soskin played a handful of her songs saved onto a CD for Gibel, a jazz aficionado, and he was “completely blown away.”

“She’s incredibly talented, her voice is beautiful, her writing style is totally unique,” he said.

Gibel found a reel-to-reel machine on Craigslist and set it up for Soskin so she could listen to the recordings. The music had been the product of a difficult period of her life when she was contending with racism in the suburb where her family had settled, as well as the disintegration of her marriage. As Soskin recounts in her 2018 memoir — also titled “Sign My Name to Freedom” — she suffered a mental breakdown. Among other symptoms, she routinely had panic attacks and blacked out when she was driving through tunnels and across bridges.

It was during those years that she taught herself how to play the guitar. Music “became my way of processing and making sense of the terrifying history that we were living through at that time,” she wrote in the book. A therapist helped her see that “I was not mad, the world was.”

She devised a method for crossing the roughly 8-mile-long Bay Bridge without panicking: singing with the windows open. “When I sang, my breathing would be natural, determined by regular phrasing of the lyrics, and even predictable. I could not run out of breath. It worked,” she wrote.

In 1964, she composed the song “Sign My Name to Freedom,” in honor of Susan Sanford, a young white volunteer from the Bay Area who traveled to teach at a Freedom School in Mississippi. Four years later, Soskin wrote the haunting piece, “Ebony the Night.” “The world made the rules and established the ante,” the lyrics go. “Proclaimed white as sinless and black straight from Dante. Ebony the night, ebony satin bright. Star jewels held in black velvet hands of ebony the night.”

After her divorce in the 1970s, she married William Soskin, a research psychologist and professor at University of California, Berkeley. When she shared a new song with him, he praised it but also suggested that she take classes at the university’s music department, where she could “learn how the real composers do it,” she wrote.

Soskin lost her confidence and never penned another song again. In time, her creative expression found other formats, she noted in her memoir: in a blog she started in 2003, in her other writing — and in her role as a ranger whose storytelling and social justice work attracted the admiration of President Barack Obama and a new generation of aspiring activists and artists. (In 2018, NPCA gave Soskin the Robin W. Winks Award for enhancing public understanding of national parks.)

The documentary, co-directed by A.K. Sandhu, portrays Soskin’s partnership with younger musicians. Gibel helped arrange for her to collaborate with a youth jazz orchestra that performed three of her songs at the Community Music Center in San Francisco. And in 2018, when she was 97, she sang “Your Hand in Mine” — a tribute to the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer — with the Oakland Symphony.

Nine months later, Soskin suffered a stroke, which affected her cognitive abilities and her speech. “We’re just so lucky that Bryan was able to talk to her before that stroke happened — before memories were lost,” said Soskin’s granddaughter Alyana Reid, the documentary’s associate producer and social media manager. In writing, her grandmother is a little more guarded, Alyana said, whereas in interviews for the film, she goes deeper emotionally.

Soskin spends most days at home now, under the care of her daughter Di’ara, who helped arrange a short conversation on Zoom at my request. When I asked about the ongoing public attention, Soskin slowly said, “It’s pretty unbelievable. I have no idea about tomorrow, no idea about yesterday. I’m really caught up in the now.”

Soskin retired from the Park Service at the age of 100, but visitors at Rosie the Riveter still ask about her. “Betty showed us the importance of inclusion in revisiting our history,” said Armand Johnson, a park spokesman. “Not only have visitors resonated with the importance of inclusion, but it also connects to how the Park Service carries out its mission.”

The $97,000 the filmmaker and producers recently raised in a crowdfunding campaign will go toward editing and other postproduction work; they estimate they will need an additional $300,000 to complete editing, shoot dramatic re-creations and pay for sound mixing, color correction and archival licensing. They hope to release the documentary in 2025 — in time for Soskin to see it.

Meanwhile, the musical — which is built around Soskin’s music and features the characters of Little Betty, Married Betty, Revolutionary Betty and Ranger Betty — completed a short run at Z Space in April, with nearly all the shows sold out.

Presented by the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company, the show is the brainchild of Jamie Lee Zimmer, who first met Soskin in 2018. Zimmer, a 26-year-old first-generation Chinese American who identifies as nonbinary, was deeply touched by Soskin’s personal history. Like Soskin, “I am searching for equality, and I wanted to be regarded as a human being — a simple thing that’s somehow extraordinary,” Zimmer said. “We have both been othered. She doesn’t let the confines of toxic masculinity and patriarchy take her down.”

Zimmer created a workshop version of the musical in 2021 and later drew in other collaborators, including a playwright and a director who helped develop the production. After the initial success of the play, the hope is that other regional theaters or venues will produce it, said director Elizabeth Carter.

“Betty’s story is really a story for us about how we can show up in the world and be ready, or be willing to speak up,” Carter said. “Betty did not plan her life to go this way, but when something happened, she said, ‘I think I need to learn this. I think I need to do this,’ and then she stepped into a whole new phase each time.”

Learn more about the documentary, or support the effort, here.