a style that some very powerful young singers got behind and spread." We can do the song better.' And they put that sort of triplet to it and sang it a cappella with all those harmonies. "And then at a certain point," he says, "the young singers, who knew a lot of a cappella styles, they said, 'Lay that guitar down, boy. In the weeks that followed, Guy Carawan met other student leaders who were convening their own gatherings. "He taught us a number of songs that weekend, and one of them was 'We Shall Overcome.' And I can remember this electrifying feeling when we heard it, that that song just said exactly what we were doing and what we were feeling." "Guy was there trying to find out what songs we were using as part of our demonstrations - and mostly we didn't have a lot of songs," Candi says. A California transplant like Guy, she'd gotten involved with sit-ins in Nashville in 1960 and visited Highlander for a weekend event for students from various cities who'd been carrying on similar demonstrations.
So by the time I came to Highlander, I was playing it with the guitar like that."Ĭandi Carawan, too, remembers the first time she heard the song. "When I came to Highlander in 1959, Zilphia Horton had died, and I had some singing and musical skills and they needed somebody there. He taught me this song, and he also had put some chords to it ," Guy Carawan says. "I first heard this song from a friend of mine, Frank Hamilton. They met as the center's focus was shifting to civil rights, and "We Shall Overcome" was about to become an inspiring force. Candi Carawan and her husband have been teaching together at Highlander for many years now. He also learned about the Highlander Center in Tennessee, and that's where he ended up. He was finishing graduate work in sociology at UCLA and doing some singing himself. In Southern California in the early 1950s, the song reached Guy Carawan. And she always liked shall, too, I'm told." I'm usually credited with changing to 'Shall,' but there was a black woman who taught at Highlander Center, a wonderful person named Septima Clark. "Over the years, I remember singing it two different ways. "I remember teaching it to a gang in Carnegie Hall that year, and the following year I put it in a little music magazine called People's Songs," Seeger adds. It was medium slow as I sang it, but the banjo kept a steady rhythm going. "I gave it kind of ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump. "She had a beautiful alto voice and sang it with no rhythm," Seeger says. She sang the song there for Pete Seeger, who adopted it and added his own touches. In 1947, Horton went to New York City, as she did every year, to raise money for Highlander. When I sing it to people, it becomes their song." And it's so simple, and the idea's so sincere, that it doesn't matter that it comes from the tobacco workers.
"I sang it with many different nationality groups. "This is the song of 'We Will Overcome' - it's a spiritual," she says.
On a tape from the late 1940s, Horton can be heard speaking with a group of farm workers in Montana.
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