We are facing one of those gems that are rarely reissued, which belongs to the extensive catalogue of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, one of the crucial companies in the traditional roots black music The album story is the following one: the twentieth child of a Mississippi sharecropper family and one of the most prominent activists of the Civil Rights Movement called Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the first women to raise her voice against the brutality, indignities and intimidation of the ruthless racism that prevailed in the south of the United States Fannie kept in her mind as a precious treasure the songs her mother sang to her when she was a child, songs that told stories about sadness and the wish to get the true justice Fannie devoted her whole life to This album entitled Songs My Mother Taught Me is the reissue of a first album limited edition that was published in 1963 which gathered a capella recordings of those old slavery songs sung by her mother that, in the voice of Fannie Lou Hamer, get a new life and become the legacy and the wish of a better world for Afroamerican black people This reissue gives us the opportunity to listen to those blues, work songs, spirituals and a wide and varied range of traditional southern songs, sung with the sincerity that comes from the heart and not from the reason The album has a wealth and emotion that goes beyond the music, as it is the expression of suffering, darkness, anguish and despair but, at the same time, the deep wish of a new life of hope, enthusiasm and faith