Guy 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. Guy Carawan first visited the Highlander Folk School in 1953, with singers Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Frank Hamilton. At the recommendation of Pete Seeger, he returned in 1959 as a volunteer, taking charge of the music program pioneered by Zilphia Horton, who had died in an accident in 1956. When college students in Greensboro, NC, began the lunch-counter sit-in movement on Feb 1, 1960, Highlander’s youth program took on a new urgency. Highlander’s seventh annual college workshop took place on the first weekend in April, with 83 students from twenty colleges attending. As part of a talent show and dance, Carawan taught the students the song “We Shall Overcome.” Two weeks later, on April 15, two hundred students assembled in Raleigh, NC, for a three-day conference at Shaw University. Called by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to develop a youth wing, the students instead organized the independent 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.

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. At Highlander’s April workshop, Guy 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.