Folklorist Archie Green (91) dies

Tue Mar 31 17:58:05 UTC 2009

Sad news.

Archie along with other qualities was the world's greatest introducer. You
couldn't be in a room  with him for more than 5 minutes without being
introduced to ten people "you should meet." and he knew everyone.

And it went on beyond that because occasionally in later years I would be
introduced to someone who would say, "Archie Green always told me I should
meet you."

Academically I would place him at the top in terms of influence in folklore
studies in the latter half of the 20th century if for nothing else because
of his organizational abilities. He also was influential in cleaning the
augean folklore stables of the ideal types which took precedence of the
study of that which actually exists. Do you know that phonograph records
exist and are worth studying? Archie knew and studied them while others were
worried about all sorts of silliness that didn't exist.

Well, I guess I can ditch the letter I was writing Archie now and get in
touch with Glenn Ohrlin and those of his friends who probably haven't heard
the news.

Page Stephens

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerald Cohen" <gcohen at MST.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2009 9:21 PM
Subject: [ADS-L] Folklorist Archie Green (91) dies

Barry Popik has forwarded to me the NY Times article below about the passing
of folklorist Archie Green.  Archie was (among many other things) enormously
influential on my development as a researcher in slang; I owe him a great
debt of gratitude.

Gerald Cohen

Archie Green, 91, Union Activist and Folklorist, Dies
By WILLIAM GRIMES
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/william_grimes
/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published: March 28, 2009
Archie Green, a shipwright turned folklorist whose interest in union workers
and their culture transformed the study of American folklore and who
single-handedly persuaded Congress to create the American Folklife Center at
the Library of Congress, died last Sunday at his home in San Francisco. He
was 91.
The cause was kidney failure, his son Derek said.
Mr. Green, a shipwright and carpenter by trade, drew on a childhood
enthusiasm for cowboy songs and a devotion to the union movement to
construct a singular academic career. Returning to college at 40, he began
studying what he called laborlore: the work songs, slang, craft techniques
and tales that helped to define the trade unions and create a sense of group
identity.
³He countered the prevailing, somewhat romantic noti on that folklore was
isolated in remote, marginal groups,² said Simon Bronner, who teaches
folklore at Pennsylvania State University. ³He showed that each of us, in
our own work lives, have a folklore that we not only perform but that we
need.²
At the same time, Mr. Green energetically promoted the idea of public
folklore < that is, that folklorists should work outside the academy to
gather, preserve and publicize local cultures through government agencies,
museums, folk festivals and radio stations. His signal achievement in this
area was the lonely lobbying campaign he conducted for nearly six years to
create a national folklife center, which became a reality when Congress, by
a unanimous vote, passed the American Folklife Preservation Act, signed into
law by President Gerald R. Ford  in January 1976.
³By his energy, determination and enthusiasm he was able to impart his
passion to members of Congress,² said Peggy Bulger, the director of the
American Folklife Center in Washington. ³Without Archie, there would be no
American Folklife Center.²
Mr. Green was born Aaron Green in20Winnipeg, Manitoba. His father had fled
Chernigov, in present-day Ukraine, after taking part in the failed 1905
revolution in Russia. When he was a small boy, the family moved to Los
Angeles, where he listened to cowboy songs on the radio, absorbed socialist
politics from his father and developed a passionate dedication to the labor
union movement and the New Deal.
After earning a degree in political science from the University of
California, Berkeley, Mr. Green decided to throw in his lot with the working
class. He joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, working as a road builder
and firefighter along the Klamath River and became a shipwright and union
activist on the San Francisco waterfront. For the rest of his life, he
identified himself first and foremost as a worker and a union member.
Besides his son Derek, of Montara, Calif., he is survived by his wife,
Louanne Bartlett, whom he married in 1944; another son, David, of San
Francisco; his daughter, Debra Morris of Boone, Iowa; a sister, Mitzi Zeman
of Tarzana, Calif.; and four grandchildren.
After serving as a Navy Seabee during World War II, Mr. Green returned to
the waterfront and later switched to carpentry. But as the union movement
lost some of its energy, he went back to academia, enrolling at the
University of Illinois
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers
ity_of_illinois/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , Urbana- Champaign, to become a
labor historian. There, as an adviser to the campus folk music club, he sent
students out into the field to record the indigenous music of central and
southern Illinois and wrote a seminal article, ³Hillbilly Music: Source and
Symbol.²
He went on to earn a doctorate in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania
. His dissertation, on the songs of Kentucky coal miners, was published in
1972 as ³Only a Miner.²
Mr. Green wrote for academic publications like The Journal of American
Folklore, but starting in the late 1960s he spent much of his time lobbying
Congress for the folklife center, dressed in a T-shirt and sneakers.
³He looked like a hobo, and carried everything around in a paper bag,² said
Roger D. Abrahams, a retired folklore professor at the University of
Pennsylvania. ³He would just sit in the corridors of Congress and wait until
people let him in to talk.²
Persuasion was his strong suit, in the Capitol and on campuses. With gusto,
Mr. Green orchestrated the activities of a widening circle of professional
acquaintances. He was a notorious academic matchmaker and connector, issuing
orders to at least two generations of folklore students, directing their
attention to this or that neglected top ic in labor studies or folk music,
on occasion steering them to the large musical archive that he had deposited
at the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill.
His approach to occupational folklore was not far short of revolutionary.
³Before Archie, the field did not have a clear vision of what occupational
folklore was,² Ms. Bulger said. ³There was a huge disconnect between
academics, who took a literary, almost 19th-century, view of what folklore
was, and someone like Archie, who wanted to tell the pile driver, or the
auto worker, OYou have your own culture that is unique, that no other
occupation has.¹ ²
After teaching at the University of Texas
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers
ity_of_texas/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , where he spent quality time in
Austin¹s honky-tonks and analyzed the ³cosmic cowboy² phenomenon, he
returned to San Francisco and wrote a series of highly regarded books.
³Wobblies, Pile Butts and Other Heroes² (1993) and ³Torching of the Fink
Books and Other Essays on Vernacular Culture² (2001) included many of the
word studies that were among his most captivating essays .. ³Tin Men²
(2002), a description and analysis of tinsmith artistry; ³Millwrights of
Northern California, 1901-2002² (2003); and ³Harry Lundeberg¹s Stetson and
Other Nautical Treasures² (2006), about the Sailors¹ Union of the Pacific,
reflected a lifelong commitment to the writing of labor history.
In 2007, Mr. Green completed a project nearly 50 years in the making, ³The
Big Red Songbook,² which he helped to edit. It included the lyrics to more
than 250 songs in the various editions of the Little Red Songbooks published
from 1909 to 1973 by the Industrial Workers of the World, best known as the
Wobblies. They were gathered by John Neuhaus, an I.W.W. machinist, who left
his collection to Mr. Green when he died in 1958.
In his final months, Mr. Green continued to organize and agitate, issuing
directives from his deathbed to colleagues and friends. His pet project was
to convince Congress that it should, as in the days of the New Deal and the
Works Progress Administration, set aside money for artists, filmmakers,
photographers, writers and, yes, folklorists, to document the projects put
into motion by the stimulus bill. The last letter he wrote, his son Derek
said, was addressed to Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker,
telling her exactly what she needed to do.

                                                            #     #   #

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org