https://medium.com/media/4a93b0bd465811efa2241ce8a05a92a6/href
Here’s the story of this song, video, and how it remains part of the story of 9/11, 25 years later.
Pamela Yoder and Steven Rosenbaum, the co-founders of the production company CameraPlanet, directed and edited “Overcome.” It consists of footage from seven camera crews had shot around Ground Zero on September 11, 2001. During that day, Rosenbaum had heard “Overcome” on the radio — the song had been picked up by several stations in the wake of the attacks — and in the evening Yoder started editing the footage to the song. On September 13, after a total of seven hours of editing, they showed the finished video to a friend at VH1 which put it into rotation within an hour. It was subsequently also picked up by VH1’s sister station MTV and both channels played it, along with only a handful of other videos, for weeks.
The story continues, as told to Belief Net.
“Then 2 or 3 more days went by, and I remember people in the office asking “did we have permission to do that”? Since it wasn’t our music, and I said “you know what, I don’t care, I had to get it out, I had to say it.” So, three days go by and I get a call from the manager of Live, and “I said here it comes, you know we’re going to sue you.” Their manager paused for about 4 seconds, and he said “we’re just so honored that you used our music.”
“Another week goes by and he calls back and he says they want to shoot a video using the footage in LA, and I said “no.” He said “Let me get this straight you can use our music but we can’t use your footage?” I said “If Ed wants to record a song about the trade centers he has to come to NY.” He called back an hour later and “alright we’re going to be on a plane today.” He flew to NY, we walked down the West Side highway and we brought a boom box so that he could sing to the pre-recorded music. There were people from the label and us, just this big group of people. We got as far as the sanitation trucks [near Ground Zero], and the police officer stopped us, and said you guys don’t have press credentials. [After some negotiating] Ed, me, my wife who was filming, and one other were allowed in. He left behind all the handlers, all the agency people.”
A few minutes later we are standing with the buildings in the background in a place that people weren’t allowed to go at that point. In front of the burning smoking ruins Ed sang the song a capella. It was incredibly haunting, incredibly beautiful. You know, it is one of those stories 9/11 is a terrible, terrible thing. Nobody would wish that it happened, but in addition to that, I met some amazing people, Ed, he’s one of them. He was really frankly thankful that I called him out and said don’t sit on the west coast. He did the right thing, got on a plane, and it wasn’t a time when people were looking forward to air travel.”
The story, as explained on Wikipedia (with some corrections), and on BeliefNet.
