Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)

Subject: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 03 May 15 - 08:04 AM

Just heard on fRoots Facebook page, Guy Carawan died on Saturday aged 87 a great civil rights and folk music activist, another good man gone, RIP

Dave H

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 03 May 15 - 08:21 AM

we need a big no bullshit register - abit like wikipedia- where active musicians - can just put a straightforward record of what they've done.

i found myself on the same record company as Guy in the 1980's. i was really impressed, but the company had somehow signed him without knowing who he was.

never mind one day, we shall overcome!

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: GUEST
Date: 03 May 15 - 08:52 AM

This is the first time I'm hearing about this. I was his singing partner in Los Angeles in 1950. Where can I find an obit? This is sad news. Thought he'd make it to 90.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: Deckman
Date: 03 May 15 - 09:36 AM

DAMN ... I remember him so fondly. He did so much, not just for music, but for people and social justice. bob(deckman)nelson

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: maeve
Date: 03 May 15 - 09:43 AM

So far I can only find this, which requires subscription to read it all. http://www.knoxnews.com/news/local-news/guy-carawan-folk-singer-civil-rights-pioneer-dies-in-new-market_36983659

A loss!

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: GUEST
Date: 03 May 15 - 10:00 AM

An obit written by Elijah Wald and posted on his Facebook page:

Guy Carawan, who died yesterday at age 87, was the most engaged and active political folksinger of the 1960s. When Bob Dylan stopped writing topical songs and Broadside magazine hailed Phil Ochs as the new standard-bearer, Ochs wrote an angry response saying that if they wanted to write about a real political singer they should focus on Carawan, "who not only writes songs, but devotes his full time to the civil rights movement in the South, actively working in a real struggle, promoting workshops on how to use music in the movement, and getting his banjo broken over his head on a picket line."

Carawan was born in Southern California, but his family was from the Carolinas, and in the early 1950s he made a trip through the South with his current playing buddies, Frank Hamilton and Jack Elliott, and soon emerged as a significant young revivalist of the old rural styles. He found his true calling, though, after Pete Seeger hooked him up with the Highlander Folk School outside Knoxville, Tennessee. He became Highlander's house musician as the school became a meeting place and training ground for activists in the growing civil rights movement.

It was Carawan, more than any other single figure, who encouraged southern organizers to rework their old, familiar church songs into new songs of struggle. Most famously, he introduced them to a song another Highlander singer, Zilphia Horton, had brought to the school, and which Seeger had somewhat reworked, called "We Shall Overcome." But it is misleading to associate Carawan with one song, or one style of song. His mission in life was to be a catalyst, and he described his work at Highlander, and in the movement, as backing up whoever wanted to start a song, strumming behind them on guitar or banjo to give them the assurance they needed to continue.

When I was writing my new book on the Newport Folk Festivals, I kept running across Carawan's name or face, but always in the background or on the sidelines. The program would list a group called the Freedom Singers, and would show a picture of a group of African Americans, and if you found a picture of the group onstage, they would often be joined by a few white stars--Seeger, Mary Travers, Joan Baez, Theo Bikel--but you'd have to look hard to find Carawan, off to the side, strumming his guitar or just smiling encouragement.

Carawan stayed at Highlander for the rest of his life, still doing grassroots organizing, still making music with his wife Candie. He added hammer dulcimer to his instrumental skills, made recordings with various groups, and published books on freedom songs, Appalachian music, the songs of the Carolina Sea Islands. (When the Newport Folk Festival began funding local music groups, Carawan organized small festivals in the Sea Islands that helped keep the old African American shouts alive.) He made twenty albums on his own and with Candie, produced albums by other artists, played back-up for more, and organized a local festival at Highlander that help keep local traditions alive and introduce them to new generations.

Guy Carawan was never a star, never a name that could draw huge crowds, but if one singer deserves to be remembered as the heart and soul of the folk scene in the early 1960s, the attempt to combine love of old rural traditions with a vibrant struggle for social justice, no one more perfectly exemplified those twin ideals, combined them so effectively, or worked so hard to keep them alive.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: GUEST,Dave Illingworth
Date: 03 May 15 - 10:28 AM

This is sad news.
I bought a 78rpm single of his on the Pye label back in the late fifties (unbreakable plastic - an experiment that was made redundant by 45rpm vinyl.) Anyway, this was his version of "The Talking Atomic Blues" (credited to Partlow) aka "OLd Man Atom" and
"To Be Or Not To Be". A classic song and performance.
Years later I bought his excellent LP "Songs of Trouble and Celebration" which included the marvellous "Take The Children And Run"
(by one Don Lange) - a chilling prophesy of nuclear plant disaster, written long before Chernobyl.
As Elijah Wald says (above) :- "never a star, never a name that could attract huge crowds"   but someone who certainly deserved a full obituary.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: GUEST,Mike Yates
Date: 03 May 15 - 10:52 AM

Sometime around 1960 Guy Carawan made an LP in England with Peggy Seeger.There was a lot of Appalachian material on the album and I just loved it. A great singer.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: GUEST
Date: 03 May 15 - 11:47 AM

I met Guy back about 1962 when I was a Freshman at Maryville College in Tennessee. I used to go over to Knoxville every Friday night to the Highlander Folk School to hear him sing. He was the first "real" Folk Singer" I ever knew and he has been the high water mark for me ever since. His singing and his songs were always honest, clear, simple, straightforward and to the point. His political commitment was unshakeable and always right on target. I knew this announcement was bound to come one day, but I have dreaded seeing it and I will greatly miss his presence in this world. He was a Hero.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: John Minear
Date: 03 May 15 - 11:50 AM

The last "GUEST" was me, John Minear.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: GUEST,Hootenanny
Date: 03 May 15 - 01:07 PM

I had the great pleasure of seeing Guy at the Ballads and Blues Club at The Princess Louise in London around 1957/58 and have a photograph of him in duet with Peggy Seeger. Also saw him many years later at the Singer's Club in the basement of a block of council flats in Islington.
Not such pleasant surroundings but Guy was as entertaining as ever. He was certainly one of the people who helped to get the folk scare started over here.
Hoot

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 03 May 15 - 01:28 PM

Another man done gone...

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: Phil Cooper
Date: 03 May 15 - 04:31 PM

I met Guy in 1982 when Margaret Nelson and I were asked to open for him at a concert at the David Adler Cultural Center in Libertyville, Illinois. He was very nice. I wound up jamming with him on guitar on the tune Banish Misfortune, which he played on hammer dulcimer. He also wrote a great promo blurb for us. I believe Michael Cooney once said there were people who played a tune faster than Guy, but nobody played a tune better.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan
From: ChanteyLass
Date: 03 May 15 - 07:23 PM

My sympathy to his family and friends. I would have liked to meet/hear him.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: Mark Ross
Date: 03 May 15 - 09:33 PM

Here's a newspaper article about Guy's trip Down South with Frank Hamilton and Ramblin' Jack Elliott back in 1953;

Newly Released Letters Reveal Folk Icon Guy Carawan's First Impressions of the S

Mark Ross

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: RoyH (Burl)
Date: 04 May 15 - 09:58 AM

My sympathies to his family. With his passing another fine man joins the many losses the folk world has suffered in the last few years. Are there any young ones to take up the flag and keep it flying as Guy Carawan did? I hope so, and I'm sure that he would hope so too. Goodbye and thank you Guy. Rest in Peace.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: Charley Noble
Date: 04 May 15 - 08:50 PM

Excellent obit written by Elijah Wald above.

That man has earned enduring respect!

Charlie Ipcar

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: Don Firth
Date: 05 May 15 - 04:59 PM

Sometime during the mid-1950s I met Guy Carawan at a songfest in Seattle. I'd never heard of him before, but like many others back then he was sort of barnstorming around the country, meeting and singing with people. He and a half-dozen of Seattle's folk singing crew, including me, spent a pleasant afternoon chatting and swapping many songs. Great voice, guitar and banjo, and great songs.   

After hearing me sing (I'd only been at it for three of four years), he made some suggestions for songs he thought I might be able to do particularly well. I followed his suggestions, tracked down the songs and learned them, and they turned out to be some of the most requested songs in my repertoire. Thanks, Guy!

Then a couple of years later (1957 or 58), on his way back from a tour of China following the Moscow Youth Festival in 1957, he sang a concert at Eagleson Hall in Seattle. Great concert, and the place was packed (even if the U.S. State Department was spitting sparks!).

Then again, sometime in the 1980s, I met him again at a house concert at the late John Ross's house. Great songs well sung, including a few of Woody Guthrie's children's songs for a couple of youngsters present. Again, the afternoon was a real treat.

I've always admired Guy for his great singing and for his dedication to the betterment of humanity. One of the true Nature's Noblemen….

I could say that the world is a bit dimmer now, but I don't think so. His light still shines.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: Elmore
Date: 05 May 15 - 09:28 PM

Saw him perform several times. Never met him. Enjoyed his work and (I believe) shared his political views. May he rest in peace.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: Waddon Pete
Date: 07 May 15 - 07:32 AM

A great singer and activist. I have added his name to the "In Memoriam" thread. My condolences to all who know and love him.

RIP

Peter

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: Vic Smith
Date: 07 May 15 - 01:04 PM

Guy Carawan's obituary in the Guardian by Derek Schofiels is now online:-
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/06/guy-carawan

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 07 May 15 - 10:22 PM

Guy Carawan Dies at 87; Taught a Generation to Overcome, in Song

By MARGALIT FOX
The New York Times
MAY 7, 2015

On an April night in 1960, Guy Carawan stood before a group of black students in Raleigh, N.C., and sang a little-known folk song. With that single stroke, he created an anthem that would echo into history, sung at the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965, in apartheid-era South Africa, in international demonstrations in support of the Tiananmen Square protesters, at the dismantled Berlin Wall and beyond.

The song was "We Shall Overcome."

Mr. Carawan, a white folk singer and folklorist who died on Saturday at 87, did not write "We Shall Overcome," nor did he claim to. The song, variously a religious piece, a labor anthem and a hymn of protest, had woven in and out of American oral tradition for centuries, embodying the country's twinned history of faith and struggle. Over time, it was further polished by professional songwriters.

But in teaching it to hundreds of delegates at the inaugural meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — held in Raleigh on April 15, 1960 — Mr. Carawan fathered the musical manifesto that, more than any other, became "the 'Marseillaise' of the integration movement," as The New York Times described it in 1963.

The now-familiar version of "We Shall Overcome" was forged by Mr. Carawan, Pete Seeger and others in the late 1950s, but its antecedents date to at least the 18th century.

The melody recalls the opening bars of the hymn "O Sanctissima," first published in the 1790s. (Beethoven would write a setting of the hymn in the early 1800s.) A version of the melody — recognizable by modern ears as "We Shall Overcome" — was published in the United States in 1794 in The Gentleman's Amusement magazine, which titled it "Prayer of the Sicilian Mariners."

The song's present-day lyrics appear to have originated with "I'll Overcome Some Day," a hymn by a black Methodist minister, Charles Albert Tindley, that was published at the turn of the 20th century, though apparently to a different tune. It includes the lines "If in my heart I do not yield,/I'll overcome some day."

By the mid-1940s, Tindley's words and the now-familiar melody had merged. In 1945, the resulting song, known as "We Will Overcome," was taken to the picket lines by striking tobacco workers in Charleston, S.C., who sang: "We will overcome,/And we will win our rights someday."

Afterward, several of the strikers carried "We Will Overcome" to Highlander Folk School, then in Monteagle, Tenn. It quickly became a favorite of the school's music director, Zilphia Horton, who had founded Highlander with her husband, Myles, in 1932 to train social justice leaders in a racially mixed setting.

It was at Highlander, in the 1950s, that Mr. Carawan first encountered the song.

The son of Southern parents, Guy Hughes Carawan Jr. was born on July 28, 1927, in Santa Monica, Calif. His mother was a poet, his father an asbestos contractor who later died of asbestosis. After Navy service stateside at the end of World War II, the younger Mr. Carawan earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Occidental College in Los Angeles, followed by a master's in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Around this time, Mr. Carawan, who sang and played the guitar, banjo and hammered dulcimer, became deeply interested in the use of folk music to foster social progress. But Wayland Hand, a distinguished folklorist with whom he studied at U.C.L.A., warned him against mixing folk music with activism — they had been combined to devastating effect, Professor Hand pointed out, in Nazi Germany.

Mr. Carawan disregarded the warning. Moving to New York, he became active in the folk revival percolating in Greenwich Village. In 1953, he and two friends, Frank Hamilton (later a member of the Weavers, the musical group closely associated with Mr. Seeger) and Jack Elliott (soon to be known as the folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott), took to the road, collecting folk songs and singing for their supper throughout the South.

At Mr. Seeger's suggestion, the three men stopped at Highlander, one of the wellsprings of the civil rights movement. The reworked version of the anthem — titled "We Shall Overcome" — would be born there later in the decade, its words and musical arrangement credited jointly to Mr. Carawan, Ms. Horton, Mr. Seeger and Mr. Hamilton.

Ms. Horton died in 1956, and in 1959, Mr. Carawan succeeded her as Highlander's music director. The next year, at S.N.C.C.'s founding convention, he was invited to lead the delegates in song.

"We shall overcome," he sang, accompanying himself on the guitar. "We shall overcome. We shall overcome someday. ..." Before he finished, as was recounted afterward, the delegates, some 200 strong, had risen from their seats, linked arms and were singing as one.

"That song caught on that weekend," Mr. Carawan told the NPR program "All Things Considered" in 2013. "And then, at a certain point, those young singers, who knew a lot of a cappella styles, they said: 'Lay that guitar down, boy. We can do this song better.' And they put that sort of triplet to it and sang it a cappella with all those harmonies. It had a way of rendering it in a style that some very powerful young singers got behind and spread."

Mr. Carawan remained with Highlander until his retirement in the late 1980s. During that period, and long afterward, he traversed the country with his wife, Candie, singing, marching, joining strikes and recording traditional songs. The couple did extensive fieldwork on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, where they organized festivals of traditional music.

The songs Mr. Carawan gathered continued to seed the civil rights movement. Once, on Johns Island, off the South Carolina coast, a local woman heard him sing a traditional song, "Keep Your Hands on the Plow."

"Young man," he recalled her telling him, "we have another way of singing that song. We sing, 'Keep Your Eyes on the Prize' " — a version Mr. Carawan soon helped disseminate.

Mr. Carawan's first marriage, to Noel Oliver, ended in divorce; he married Candie Anderson in 1961. She survives him, along with their two children, Evan and Heather Carawan, and a granddaughter.

In recent years, Mr. Carawan had suffered from dementia. His death, at his home in New Market, Tenn., next door to Highlander's present-day home, was confirmed by his family.

His books, compiled with his wife, include "We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement" (1963); "Ain't You Got a Right to the Tree of Life? The People of Johns Island, South Carolina" (1966); and "Voices From the Mountains: Life and Struggle in the Appalachian South" (1975).

He was a producer or co-producer of many recordings, including "Birmingham, Alabama, 1963: Mass Meeting," which features the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and the Birmingham Movement Choir; "The Story of Greenwood, Mississippi," featuring Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers and Dick Gregory; and "Freedom in the Air: Albany Georgia, 1961-62," produced with Alan Lomax. As a singer, Mr. Carawan can be heard on several albums, among them "Songs With Guy Carawan."

To this day, royalties from the commercial use of "We Shall Overcome" are donated to a fund that supports social and cultural programs in the South. The fund is administered by the Highlander Research and Education Center, as the folk school is now known.

An unmistakable measure of the song's reach came barely five years after Mr. Carawan first sang it in Raleigh. On March 15, 1965, in a televised address seen by 70 million Americans, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his intention to submit a voting rights bill to Congress.

Describing the legislation — which he would sign into law that August as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — President Johnson said: "Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life." He continued:

"Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice."

President Johnson added: "And we shall overcome."

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: GUEST,Peter Laban
Date: 08 May 15 - 05:02 AM

Obituary in the Guardian

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 08 May 15 - 05:55 PM

In tribute to Guy Carawan, from the University of North Carolina Southern Folklife Collection's blog. The Guy and Candie Carawan Collection is housed in the Southern Folklife Collection.

"Numerous media outlets have detailed Guy Carawan's legacy in obituaries this week. More people have learned of Carawan's role in popularizing an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, "We Shall Overcome," teaching it to organizers at the first meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh in 1960, this week than ever before. Our hope is that the materials presented here can expand from that moment and expose more of the world to the life and work of our friend and hero, Guy Carawan."

~ Becky in Long Beach

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: Noreen
Date: 22 May 15 - 12:05 PM

From the Guardian (in the event of links given above failing):

Guy Carawan obituary

Folk singer and political activist who introduced the song We Shall Overcome to the US civil rights movement

>photo: Guy Carawan performs with Peggy Seeger in London in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Photograph: Alamy

Derek Schofield

Wednesday 6 May 2015 15.15 BST Last modified on Friday 8 May 2015 15.23 BST


In 1965, the US president Lyndon Johnson announced a new voting rights bill to enfranchise African Americans, ending with the words "And we shall overcome". His reference was to the song We Shall Overcome, which had been introduced to the US civil rights movement by Guy Carawan, the folk singer and political activist, who has died aged 87.

The origins of the song lay in African-American religious music, but as We Will Overcome it was taken up by striking tobacco workers, black and white, in 1945. Some of them later sang it at the Highlander Folk school, an adult education centre for union organisers in Monteagle, Tennessee, where Zilphia Horton, the school's music director, taught the song to union and civil rights activists, including Pete Seeger, who changed its title to We Shall Overcome.

After Horton's death, Carawan became the school's music director in 1959, by which time Highlander's focus had become centred on civil rights as the anti-segregation sit-ins and bus boycotts grew. A gathering of activists held in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960 established the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and at the end of the meeting Carawan sang them his version of We Shall Overcome, by now with some new verses and an altered tempo.

Within weeks, the song was being sung on protest marches and sit-ins and by the bus protesters, quickly becoming the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement. Joan Baez sang it at the March on Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King recited the words in a speech shortly before his assassination and Robert Kennedy sang it in apartheid South Africa.

Born in Santa Monica, California, Carawan studied at Occidental College, and then gained an MA in sociology at UCLA. After an initial interest in jazz, he switched from the clarinet and ukulele to guitar and banjo after he discovered folk music in the late 1940s. Influenced by Seeger and Alan Lomax, Carawan ignored his folklore tutor, who advised him not to mix folksong and politics.

With a fellow Californian, Frank Hamilton (who later joined the Weavers), and the singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott, he travelled to North Carolina and Tennessee, listening to and playing music and witnessing segregation at first hand. Hamilton was already singing We Will Overcome, and they would all have heard the song on their visit to Highlander on that trip.

In 1957, Carawan visited the World Youth festival in the Soviet Union and then, with the singer Peggy Seeger, continued onwards to China in defiance of the US government, which temporarily cancelled his passport. He recorded several albums for Folkways Records in the late 1950s, and also visited Britain, where Lomax recruited him to play guitar on the English singer Shirley Collins's first two solo albums, and where Topic Records released his solo album, Mountain Songs and Banjo Tunes (1958).

Carawan sang many more freedom songs, including Keep Your Eyes on the Prize and I'm Going to Sit at the Welcome Table. By 1961, with the realisation that the civil rights protesters no longer needed him to lead their singing, Carawan changed tack and documented the music of the movement. He continued to work with SNCC, and to perform, recording several more albums, and worked again at what became the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, where he lived in retirement with his second wife, Candie (nee Anderson).

Carawan's first marriage, to Noel Oliver, ended in divorce. He is survived by Candie and their two children, Evan, a musician, and Heather, who made a film documentary about the family, The Telling Takes Me Home.

• Guy Hughes Carawan, folk singer and civil rights campaigner, born 27 July 1927; died 2 May 2015

• This article was amended on 8 May 2015. Guy Carawan's first wife, Noel Oliver, did not die in 1958 as originally stated, and is still alive.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: Noreen
Date: 22 May 15 - 12:08 PM

A lovely tribute to Guy Carawan just now on BBC Radio 4's obituary programme, available to listen again on iPlayer:

Last Word.

Includes various clips of "We shall overcome" and its development.

Very moving.

Subject: RE: Obit: Guy Carawan (1927-2015)
From: GUEST,irving Lane aka Irving Lipschutz
Date: 04 Jun 15 - 01:35 PM

I was a friendof Guy in high school at John Marshall High School. Guy first heard folk music thru hi girl friend who be came his first wife, Noel Oliver. Her father, the Drama Editon for the LA HEARLD EXPRESS played guitar and expossed usaround 1943 to Pete Seeger and troup giving a folk singing gatheringat the Mary Goround area of the park. Bill Oliver was on stage with the group playing a guitar. It was our first exposure to this kind of an expierence. Guy was a boyman regarding rights of others and always the peacemaker in our various boyhood sqables.He was the one in our group who [put WE in connection with overcome as we were growing up. I was six months older that Guy but years younger in social responsibility. I am proud to say I was a friend of a great human being...GUY CARAWAN.... my best wishes to his survieving family.......Lippy