Sat, Mar 13, 1965
CBS Camera Three presented a strong sample of the work of musicologists Guy and Candie Carawan who had spent a number of years living on Johns Island (fifth largest island on the east coast). Their intent was to document and record the stories, songs, and traditional culture of the rural Island population. The Island's elders held in memory knowledge passed through oral tradition from slavery times, and from Africa. The largely agricultural Island's isolation had been changing with the construction of a bridge to the Island, radio, television, and real estate development. The Carawans recorded hundreds of hours of audio, and enlisted Robert Yellin, a documentary photographer and fellow musician, who produced a strong and ethereal photographic record of the Island, and the lives of the keepers of the culture. Yellin met many of those who had contributed to the Carawan archive. He created black and white images, which appeared with the transcripts of oral history, folk tales, and traditional music, in the book "Ain't You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?: The People of Johns Island, South Carolina--Their Faces, Their Words, and Their Songs (Hardcover)", by Guy and Candie Carawan, photographs by Robert Yellin, with forward by Charles Joyner, afterward by Bernice Johnson Reagan (currently revised, 264 pp, published by University of Georgia Press). Camera Three broadcast some of the audio and some of the still photographs as well as commentary putting the history and culture of the Carolina low country into perspective for viewers of CBS in the United States in 1965. The program was a window into a world of strong self-sufficient communities existing in a centuries-old tradition outside the popular conception of mainstream American culture and, as the New York Times put it, "[with courage] preparing to meet the future."