Guy Carawan

Biography

Guy Hughes Carawan Jr. (July 28, 1927 – May 2, 2015) was an American folk musician and musicologist. He served as music director and song leader for the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee.
Carawan is best known for introducing the protest song "We Shall Overcome" to the American Civil Rights Movement, by teaching it to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. A union organizing song based on a black spiritual, it had been a favorite of Zilphia Horton (d. 1956) wife of the founder of the Highlander Folk School. Carawan reintroduced it at the school when he became its new music director in 1959. The song is copyrighted in the name of Horton, Frank Hamilton, Carawan and Pete Seeger.
Carawan sang and played banjo, guitar, and hammered dulcimer. He frequently performed and recorded with his wife, singer Candie Carawan. The couple had two children, Evan Carawan and Heather Carawan. Occasionally Guy was accompanied by their son Evan Carawan, who plays mandolin and hammered dulcimer.

Early life

Carawan was born in California in 1927, to Southern parents. His mother, from Charleston, South Carolina, was the resident poet at Winthrop College (now Winthrop University) in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and his father, a veteran of World War I from North Carolina, worked as an asbestos contractor. He described his parents: "He was a poor farm boy and she was a Charlestonian blue blood". He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Occidental College in 1949 and a master's degree in sociology from UCLA.
Through his friend Frank Hamilton, Carawan was introduced to musicians in the People's Songs network, including Pete Seeger and The Weavers. Moving to New York City, he became involved with the American folk music revival in Greenwich Village in the 1950s.

Career at Highlander Center

Carawan first visited the Highlander Folk School in 1953, with singers Ramblin' Jack Elliot and Frank Hamilton. At the recommendation of Pete Seeger, he returned in 1959 as a volunteer, taking charge of the music program pioneered by Zilphia Horton, who had died in an accident in 1956.

As Carawan explained his securing the Highlander position:"I called Myles; I'd met him before. He said Highlander needed a musical director. My job would be to help get people singing and sharing their songs. When someone began to sing, I'd back them up softly on my guitar so they'd get courage and keep going. Sometimes in sharing a song, people find bonds between themselves that they never knew they had. I can't tell you how many pictures I have of myself standing behind other people, accompanying them on the guitar. I took the job, just for a year − that was thirty years ago"
According to his wife Candie, one of Guy's most important roles during the Civil Rights Movement — more so than introducing "We Shall Overcome" as a Freedom Song — was his desire to record and archive the evolution of the movement through song. Both Carawans believed that the political use of religious and folk music could shape movements and influence people to take action in social change. His initiative to record and preserve the already established Freedom Songs within the movement was intended to inspire and to educate future leaders and activists.
As explained by Movement leader Rev. C. T. Vivian, an associate of Martin Luther King Jr.:

I don't think we had ever thought of spirituals as movement material. When the movement came up, we couldn't apply them. The concept has to be there. It wasn't just to have the music but to take the music out of our past and apply it to the new situation, to change it so it really fit. ... The first time I remember any change in our songs was when Guy came down from Highlander. Here he was with this guitar and tall thin frame, leaning forward and patting that foot. I remember James Bevel and I looked across at each other and smiled. Guy had taken this song, "Follow the Drinking Gourd" – I didn't know the song, but he gave some background on it and boom – that began to make sense. And, little by little, spiritual after spiritual began to appear with new words and changes: "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, Hold On" or "I'm Going to Sit at the Welcome Table". Once we had seen it done, we could begin to do it.
At Highlander's April 1956 workshop, Carawan had met Candie Anderson, an exchange student at Fisk University in Nashville, from Pomona College in California. She was one of the first white students to participate in the sit-in movement. As a couple they traveled the south hosting workshops to influence people to embrace in the Civil Rights Movement's music.
They also travelled the world influencing activists. They visited England and attended the World Festival of Youth and Students in the Soviet Union in 1957, continuing onward to the People's Republic of China. The couple married in March 1961.
Guy and Candie Carawan lived in New Market, near the Highlander Center.
Guy remained the musical director at Highlander till his retirement in the late 1980s.
The Guy and Candie Carawan Collection (1955–2010) is located in the Southern Folklife Collection of the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Video references

We Shall Overcome, Ginger Group Productions, 1988; PBS Home Video 174, 58 min. Pete Seeger, Bernard Lafayette, Julian Bond, and Bernice Johnson Reagon comment on Guy Carawan's role in teaching the song "We Shall Overcome."
The Telling Takes Me Home, Heatcar Productions <heatcar productions | Video Production, Editing and Media Education>, 2005; produced, directed and edited by Heather Carawan, 29 min. Music and memory tell the story of Guy and Candie Carawan, activists and folk singers who have carried their work from the deep south of the Civil Rights Movement into today's daunting struggle for peace. Interweaving past and present, the filmmaker integrates her own reflections on growing up in a rich musical and political landscape with her parents' views on race relations, community organizing, and the sustaining power of song.