Guy Carawan

Guy Carawan

Guy Carawan, ca. 1990; photograph by Heather Carawan
Background information
Born July 27, 1927
Origin Los Angeles, California
Genres Folk music
Occupations Folk musician, Musicologist
Instruments Guitar, Hammer dulcimer
Years active 1950–present

Guy Carawan (b. Los Angeles, California, United States, July 27, 1927) is an American folk musician and musicologist. He serves as music director and song leader for the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee.

Carawan is famous 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.[1]

Carawan sings and plays banjo, guitar, and hammered dulcimer. He frequently performs and records with his wife, singer Candie Carawan. Occasionally he is accompanied by their son Evan Carawan, who plays mandolin and hammered dulcimer. Carawan and his wife live in New Market, near the Highlander Center.[1]

Contents

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 who worked as an asbestos contractor. 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. He also traveled abroad, visiting England, attending a World Festival of Youth and Students in the Soviet Union in 1957, and continuing on to the People's Republic of China.[1]

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. When college students in Greensboro, NC, began the lunch-counter sit-in movement on Feb. 1, 1960, Highlander's youth program took on a new urgency. Highlander's seventh annual college workshop took place on the first weekend in April, with 83 students from twenty colleges attending. As part of a talent show and dance, Carawan taught the students the song "We Shall Overcome." Two weeks later, on April 15, two hundred students assembled in Raleigh, NC, for a three-day conference at Shaw University. Called by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to develop a youth wing, the students instead organized the independent Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They invited Carawan to lead the singing, and he closed the first evening with "We Shall Overcome." The audience stood, linked hands and sang—and went away inspired, carrying the song to meetings and demonstrations across the South.[2] Movement leader Rev. C. T. Vivian, a lieutenant of Martin Luther King reminisced:

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.[3]

At Highlander's April workshop, Carawan had met Candie Anderson, an exchange student at Fisk University in Nashville, from Pomona College in California, who was one of the first white students involved in the sit-in movement. They were married in March 1961.[1]

Hammer dulcimer

Carawan first heard the hammer dulcimer played by Chet Parker. In turn, Carawan introduced both John McCutcheon and Malcolm Dalglish to the instrument.

Bibliography

Discography

Documentary Recording Projects

Personal Recordings

Included on Albums with Others

References

  1. ^ a b c d Neely, Jack (2005). Lifelong Students, Eternal Activists. --Metro Pulse.
  2. ^ Adams, Frank (1975). Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander. pp. 152–155. 
  3. ^ Interview, 1983, quoted in Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs, 1990, p. 4.

Video References

External links

Topics and events
(timeline)
Albany Movement · Birmingham campaign · Black Power · Browder v. Gayle · Brown v. Board of Education · Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church · Chicago Open Housing Movement · Civil Rights Act of 1964 · Civil Rights Act of 1968 · Dexter Avenue Baptist Church · Emmett Till · Freedom Riders · Mississippi Freedom Summer · Greensboro sit-ins · Greyhound Bus Station (Montgomery, Alabama) · Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections · Little Rock Nine · Loving v. Virginia  · March on Washington · Mississippi civil rights workers murders · Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party · Montgomery Bus Boycott · Nashville sit-ins · Poor People's Campaign · Selma Voting Rights Movement · 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing · Twenty-fourth Amendment · Voting Rights Act of 1965
Activists
Ralph Abernathy · Victoria Gray Adams · Ella Baker · James Bevel · Claude Black · Unita Blackwell · Julian Bond · Joseph E. Boone · Margaret Davis Bowen · Stokely Carmichael · J. L. Chestnut · Shirley Chisholm · Septima Clark · Dorothy Cotton · Claudette Colvin · Vernon Dahmer · Annie Devine · Medgar Evers · Chuck Fager · James Farmer · James Forman · Marie Foster · Dick Gregory · Prathia Hall · Fannie Lou Hamer · Dorothy Height · Lola Hendricks · Aaron Henry · Myles Horton · T. R. M. Howard · Jesse Jackson · Jimmie Lee Jackson · T. J. Jemison · Judge Frank Johnson · Matthew Jones · Clyde Kennard · A. D. King · Coretta Scott King · Martin Luther King, Jr. · Bernard Lafayette · James Lawson · Bernard Lee · John Lewis · Viola Liuzzo · Z. Alexander Looby · Joseph Lowery · Clara Luper · Malcolm X · Thurgood Marshall · Ralph McGill · James Meredith · Amzie Moore · Irene Morgan  · Bob Moses · Bill Moyer · Diane Nash · E. D. Nixon · James Orange · James Peck · Rosa Parks · Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. · Al Raby · A. Philip Randolph · Cordell Reagon · Amelia Boynton Robinson · Bayard Rustin · Charles Sherrod · Fred Shuttlesworth · Modjeska Monteith Simkins · Kelly Miller Smith · Charles Kenzie Steele · C. T. Vivian · Wyatt Tee Walker · Roy Wilkins · Hosea Williams · John Minor Wisdom · Andrew Young · Whitney Young
Activist groups
Historians