Guy Carawan obituary

Folk singer and political activist who introduced the song We Shall Overcome to the US civil rights movement
Guy Carawan performs with Peggy Seeger in London in the late 1950s/early 1960s
Guy Carawan performs with Peggy Seeger in London in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Photograph: Alamy

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.