![\"32020002.JPG\"](\"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/01\/32020002.JPG\")
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waking up with the view.<\/p>\n
today we meet guy and candie carawan, whose lives have been intertwinned with the Highlander since the early 1960s. after many years of an itinerant existance, also following the Highlander’s move to New Market, they built a house on the farm land, a cosy log cabin filled with music and folk instruments, and now they gently age in the shade of the Highlander that they helped to shape, and that shaped their lives in turn. candie made warm cider for all of us, guy shows us the books they made – collections of images, stories and most of all music from Appalachia and the South – and then he also dozes off in his rocking chair. guy’s name is connected to the song We shall Overcome, as he helped to spread it throughout the civil rights era, and today he is still part of a foundation that gets the royalties of the song and grants it to social justice projects. (interesting, the fact that they thought of copyrighting it, before anyone else did, with a vision to get the money back to the movement.)<\/p>\n
they are folk musicians, artists, cultural workers, activists who organize and build movement through music. it feels wrong to begin talking about what they do in terms of a connection<\/em> between art and politics; how they bring things together feels too organic. the taken for grantedness with which music is part of the fabric of the struggle against oppression and for social justice, or perhaps it’s the other way around. but it does invoke the disconnection between these things back home.<\/p>\n when i think of europe, especially when i think of flanders – the way in which folk music remains associated with the right, with nationalism. my thoughts wander back to the music project in slovenia that i was part of, many years ago, during the war. we wanted to work through – with instruments and our voices – the mobilization of folk music for war and nationalism. half of us from former yugoslavia, half from other european countries. seriously heated discussions about different approaches: in search for authentic versions, as a defense against political manipulation, or creating versions that say something about our politics. or as i insisted, working with the recognition that also “authetic” folk music grew out of concerns and struggles in people’s lives, and continuing a living tradition of creating musical expression of what people struggle with. (our CD became a testimony to the fact that the first tendency was more popular…) candie tells us that guy’s teacher of folk music was a staunch defender of authenticity, and it seemed that guy recognized the value of that, but in their involvement with the civil rights movement people’s songs of freedom became central to their lives.<\/p>\n my thoughts also go to the analogy with religion: how religion tends to be disconnect from the left and progressive movements back home. then candie talks of a group of Catholic sisters in the mountains who radicalized in the struggle of the rural community in which they were living.<\/p>\n before we leave them, they give us a video about the Highlander to watch – You’ve got to move it.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" waking up with the view. today we meet guy and candie carawan, whose lives have been intertwinned with the Highlander since the early 1960s. after many years of an itinerant existance, also following the Highlander’s move to New Market, they built a house on the farm land, a cosy log cabin filled with music and … Continue reading “we shall overcome”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}