L'Estaca

Grandfather Siset was a real man. Narcís Llansa, a barber from Besalú, had been elected a town councillor for the Catalan republican left in 1931, and after the Civil War Franco's authorities forced him to clean the church and even attend Mass. In the early 1960s he spent his summers in Verges, where he played cards and went fishing on the river Ter with a teenage friend of his grandson: Lluís Llach. According to the Catalan Wikipedia account, those conversations opened the boy's eyes to what the dictatorship was, and in 1968 Llach turned them into a song. L'Estaca, the stake, is set in a doorway at dawn. A young man asks old Siset about the post they are all tied to, and the old man answers that no one can pull it down alone, but if everyone pulls in their own direction it will fall. When Siset dies, the narrator passes the lesson on to the next generation of boys. The song soon outgrew Catalonia. In December 1978 the Polish songwriter Jacek Kaczmarski heard it on a borrowed Spanish record and wrote new words to the melody. His version, Mury, became an anthem of Solidarność, and a Belarusian adaptation of it returned to the streets in the 2020 protests. A Tunisian version became an anthem of the 2011 revolution. There are dozens of recordings in other languages, and in many places people assume it is a local song. That may be the best sign of how well a barber's advice travelled.