The Carawan residence is just up an unpaved driveway from the Highlander Research and Education Center, an institution that has shaped and been shaped by the Carawans for the past half century or so.
Through Highlander, Guy Carawan had the opportunity to introduce "We Shall Overcome" as a protest song during the civil-rights movement, along with "Eyes on the Prize" and other retooled tunes. They've brought their own philosophy to the work of the center and to progressive activism across Appalachia and the South — the notion that injustice is more easily overcome by those whose voices are joined in song.
"You can look to them to find a vision of hope," said Mary Thom Adams, who grew up at the Highlander Center and worked there as a development director. "Everything they did in 1959, they have managed to stay relevant."
Guy and Candie first met at Highlander in April 1960.
She was a 19-year-old student from California's Pomona College studying at Fisk University in Nashville as part of a semester exchange program between the two schools. With her classmates at the historically black university, Carawan had plunged into the sit-in demonstrations in the late winter and early spring.
Guy was a 31-year-old troubadour employed by the Highlander Center, with a repertoire of old-time spirituals and labor movement songs.
On the night of April 1, 1960, he played for the student sit-in leaders and participants who had come to Highlander for training and networking. One of the songs he played was "We Shall Overcome," an old African-American spiritual turned into a labor song, with a simple first verse and chorus:
"We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome, some day
Oh deep in my heart, I do believe
We shall overcome, some day"
"It hit us like, 'We have to have this song,' " Candie Carawan said, her face lighting up at the memory.
Her attraction to Guy began as she watched him play and sing that evening. At Fisk, Carawan was a light face in a sea of dark ones, and to some extent a fish out of water despite her friendships there and passion for cause. In Guy, who had also grown up in Southern California, she found someone who shared both a common background and her passion for the civil-rights struggle.
The friendship and romance blossomed as Guy's songs exploded in popularity. He played "We Shall Overcome" at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in North Carolina and at a major demonstration in Nashville.
Eventually, he stepped back from performing the songs as more people picked them up, focusing instead on recording and collecting the renditions of others.
When Guy and Candie Carawan tell the story of their lives together, the narrative itself takes on an almost musical form.
Candie supplies the verses, in the form of longer explanations of the context behind the events. Guy's contributions resemble refrains, a repeated series of vivid recollections woven into Candie's explication.
Most of all, Guy remembers the "rich" diversity of the songs he collected as he traveled to communities and civil-rights demonstrations, his suitcase-sized recorder in tow.
The fascination with beauty, "richness" and sensory detail still lingers.
Sitting on the couch next to his wife, he admires a woven pattern on Candie's Guatemalan blouse. Reaching one arm around her back, he brings up his other hand to stroke the floral design.
Marriages like the Carawans' sprang up everywhere during the heady days of the early 1960s, glued together by the common struggle.
As the decade wore on, some relationships within the civil-rights movement community, whether intimate or organizational, began to falter or change.
"There got to be a time when people didn't want to sing 'We shall overcome,' " Candie said. "By 1965, when many people got killed, when many people realized just how deep racism was … well, we weren't overcoming."
In response to tensions over the role of whites in some civil-rights organizations like SNCC in the late '60s, the Carawans took a break from their work in South Carolina to live in New York and write a book about their experiences learning from the people of the South Carolina Sea Islands.
When they returned to the South, it was to a Highlander Center that had revamped its goals from just aiding the civil-rights movement to attempting to bring together Appalachian community activists from across a broad spectrum of communities.
Candie Carawan says that she thinks that is in part because of the center, and the constant flow through the doors of hopeful activists and artists of all shapes and colors, that she never gave up on the message of "We Shall Overcome."
These days, the Carawans are both retired but show up when they can to play and sing in support of causes they care about.
In their upland cabin, Guy plays his music almost every day. Reaching for his guitar, he demonstrates how little his fingers have forgotten, deftly weaving in and out of "We Shall Overcome" and other tunes of the movement, his wife singing a quiet accompaniment.
He finishes his set, with a song he co-wrote, "The Ballad of the Student Sit-Ins."
He ends the last verse by singing: "We'll travel on to freedom, like song birds on the wing." He then strikes a jangling, clarion chord and cries out the song's chorus one last time: "Heed the call, Americans all, side by equal side. Sisters, sit in dignity, brothers sit in pride."
Jessie Pounds is a freelance contributor to the News Sentinel.
© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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