Teaching how to overcome, in song

Guy Carawan who popularised the song, "We Shall Overcome"

On an April night in 1960, Guy Carawan stood before a group of black students in Raleigh, North Carolina, 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". Carawan, a white folk singer and folklorist who died on May 2 at 87, did not write "We Shall Overcome", nor did he claim to. The song, variously a religious piece, a labour 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 - 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 Carawan, Pete Seeger and others in the late 1950s, but its antecedents date to at least the 18th century.

It was at Highlander Folk School, then in Monteagle, Tennessee, in the 1950s, that Carawan first encountered the song. The son of Southern parents, Guy Hughes Carawan Jr was born on July 28, 1927, in Santa Monica, California. 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 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, 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 UCLA, warned him against mixing folk music with activism - they had been combined to devastating effect, Hand pointed out, in Nazi Germany.

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 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 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 Carawan, Horton, Seeger and Hamilton.

Horton died in 1956, and in 1959, Carawan succeeded her as Highlander's music director. The next year, at SNCC'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," Carawan told the NPR programme 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."

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.

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

As a singer, Carawan can be heard on several albums, among them "Songs With Guy Carawan."

©2015 The New York Times