At the Mežaparks Great Bandstand on 7 October 1988, a song that had travelled from an exile Latvian record became a shared voice. At Arnold Klotiņš’s suggestion, Ieva Akuratere stood alone with her guitar at the people’s manifestation “For a Law-Governed State in Latvia” and sang Brigita and Andris Ritmanis’s “Manai tautai,” with those present joining in. One day before the founding congress of the Latvian Popular Front, politics in Pēteris Pētersons’s staged Mežaparks event still spoke with the breath of song.

The autumn of 1988 was the moment of the Third Awakening, when culture, public singing, and political self-organization in Latvia could no longer be separated. “Manai tautai” linked the experience of Latvian exile communities with the public space of Soviet-occupied Latvia and became one of the best-known songs of the Singing Revolution.