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Guy Hughes Carawan, Jr. (July 27, 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 famous for introducing the 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 sang and played banjo, guitar, and hammered dulcimer. He frequently performed and recorded with his wife, singer Candie Carawan. Occasionally he was accompanied by their son Evan Carawan, who plays mandolin and hammered dulcimer. Carawan and his wife lived in New Market, near the Highlander Center.[1]
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 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]
Carawan first visited the 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]
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 Guy and Candie believe that the political usage of religious and folk music could shape movements and influence people to take action in social change, and Guy's initiative to record and preserve the already established Freedom Songs within the movement are used to inspire and to educate future leaders and activists.[3] 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.[4]
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]
Carawan first heard the hammer dulcimer played by Chet Parker. In turn, Carawan introduced both John McCutcheon and Malcolm Dalglish to the instrument.
Documentary Recording Projects
Personal Recordings
Included on Albums with Others
Old-time music, Music of Ireland, New-age music, Hammered dulcimer, Mandolin
United States, Country music, Appalshop, Appalachian music, Old-time music