One of the most amazing things about last Friday’s Sing Out for Justice concert was the genuine purpose of the whole event. The centerpiece of the evening was a two-set performance by Sparky and Rhonda Rucker, musicians who draw from just about every genre capable with guitar, banjo, harmonica and, of course, their voices. Yet the overall feeling of the performance was that they had not–as is quite common–written songs to round out an album, or plunged into the obscure for a chance at that Holy Grail of art: originality. They didn’t even seem to be hurrying through their set list. They were just there to tell a couple stories, and maybe teach a lesson or two while they were at it.

Both of them relied almost entirely on their own voices but most of the songs were accompanied by Sparky’s guitar or Rhonda’s harmonica, if not both. They each performed a song with the banjo as well.

Not only did they play and sing with a force and weight as pressing as the importance of the history they proclaimed–on a few songs, Sparky spent as much time beating the side of his guitar as strumming it–but Sparky, who did about 90 percent of the talking, emphasized the humans from whose struggle the songs derived rather than focusing on the songs themselves.

Whether he was paying direct homage to the great director John Ford or simply tapping into what is common knowledge among storytellers, Sparky seemed to wholly understand the importance of tradition and legend in shaping a country as well as Ford when he told the crowd, “When folklore sounds better than fact, print folklore.” In the way more prominent musicians should, Sparky and Rhonda understood the importance of the story they were telling, most likely because it wasn’t always their own. They were students of their music, and more than anything else, they strove to teach.

After his second song, Sparky spoke about how he was reading Macbeth in high school when Kennedy was shot and the comparisons he drew between the two tales. Then, not caring that his introduction wasn’t entirely related to the heart of his story, he spoke about the civil rights movement.

The only song that didn’t seem to fit was a blues piece Sparky and Rhonda sang early in the first set, perhaps because it was about personal problems and the other foci of the evening–the Civil War, the underground railroad, the tragedy of coal mining and the demise of the Titanic, to name a few–were far more grave. In other words, they were stories that catalogued changes of whole nations and peoples.

Whether they sang hundred-year-old ballads about hopes for Scottish political equality or black citizens seeking civil rights in our own time, Sparky and Rhonda revealed the essence of cultural struggle: the social situation may be different, but for every human who darkens humanity’s reputation, there is another who will cry out against it.

And thus the lesson: In times of struggle, the most important music is that which is not one’s own work, of one’s own personal grief with other human beings, but that which carries a collective voice.

Yes, sometimes it blurs the facts, but the emotions are always true. And in America isn’t it usually the loudest voice that rouses true change?