'Fannie Lou' Musical

In Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the early 1960’s, voting rights became a major issue for area residents. Some found it difficult to exercise their Constitutional right to vote, and many of those citizens took part in an ongoing struggle to claim that right. 

But there was another group of residents who didn’t at all like the disturbances caused by voting-rights advocates. They liked their life the way it had always been. They had their customs. And those customs helped provide their comforts. Everyone knew his place, and remained in it.

The third Fannie Lou Musical INSIDE TRACKS installment, “Make It Like It Was Before,” spotlights this second group of Sunflower County residents, the voting-rights resisters.

An audience favorite

According to post-performance audience discussions and written answers to our audience surveys, “Make It Like It Was Before” is one of the most popular songs in Fannie Lou. The feedback tells us that it did its intended job of capturing the apprehension, indignation, anger, fear of upheaval, and sense of entitlement among the voting-rights resisters. The demo here is a streamlined instrumental version (viola and bass) of the song.

This truncated version offers a sense of the original, which is more than eight minutes long -- including a gripping interaction during a spoken section.

We hope you enjoy this instrumental version, and if you haven’t seen Fannie Lou already, we look forward to your coming to see it and experiencing the vocal rendition performed live onstage.

Listen here to “Make It Like It Was Before.”

INSIDE TRACKS series

"Make It Like It Was Before" is the third installment of  the Fannie Lou musical INSIDE TRACKS series, which makes noncommercial demo versions of selected songs from the Fannie Lou score available to listen to on this website.

Additional songs
To hear the first two installments of  the INSIDE TRACKS series, "Who Owns You?" and "Forget Me Not," please visit here and here.
For more song demos from Fannie Lou Musical, please visit here, here, here and here.