Christmas Watch, 1964

The Guy and Candie Carawan Sea Island recordings collection, 1960-1969, contains field recordings and oral history interviews documenting Gullah Geechee life and culture in rural Johns Island. The field recordings include worship services and watch nights at the Moving Star Praise House, spirituals and songs, stories, and children's games and rhymes. The interviews focus on the storytellers' upbringings, family, life, culture, and conditions on the Island, and the ways the Island is changing. The recordings were primarily created, first, during the Carawan's time assisting the Island's Citizenship School and, later, when they lived on the Island from 1963 to 1965. The materials gathered during their time on Johns Island were used to write 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.

The recordings are held on reel-to-reel tapes and audiocassettes and many of the oral histories have been transcribed. The collection is arranged by the type of material.

Series I: Reel-to-Reel Tapes, 1960-1969

Series II: Transcripts, 1960-1969

Series III: Audiocassettes, 1960-1969

The materials in this collection are access copies of the originals preserved in the Guy and Candie Carawan Collection, 1955-2010, housed within the Southern Folklife collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The copies within this collection were provided to the Avery Research Center so that access copies could be more easily available to the people of Johns Island.