“The Black experience in America is just so multilayered,” gospel legend Kirk Franklin tells Apple Music. “The things we celebrate are also things birthed out of tragedy. We are a group of people who have historically always taken lemons and made lemonade. I think [Juneteenth] is more than the acknowledgment of the day because we still have the issues of Reconstruction, we have Jim Crow, we still have segregation. Juneteenth was not this ‘Meet us in the promised land’ moment, because we still had to deal with and address so many other issues. And there is a myriad of systemic issues that people of color continue to have when it comes to the political history of the Americas.” For Apple Music’s 2021 Juneteenth-inspired Freedom Songs, an exclusive collection of covers and originals, Franklin recorded an exclusive-to-Apple Music cover of gospel turned civil rights protest anthem “We Shall Overcome.” “To be able to take this historic chant that has meant so much to so many people of African descent and to be able to find a tone and a narrative and to be able to reimagine the different verses and reimagine the DNA of the song is humbling,” he says. “I hope that it’s something special for people.”