Archie Green (1917-2009)

Abstract

Archie Green's magnificent Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs bore this dedication: To my father Samuel for whom the skills of hand and head are one. This encomium applied equally well to Archie himself. He was born Aaron Green on 29 June 1917 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where his Ukrainian parents had fled after Samuel's involvement in the failed 1905 Russian revolution. In 1922 the family--Aaron, his parents, and two sisters--relocated to Los Angeles's Boyle Heights, where 'Archie' continued his father's involvement in socialist labour politics. In 1939 he earned his undergraduate degree in political science from the University of California at Berkeley, but came to feel that a career as a labourer was philosophically more congenial. When the war broke out, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, spending a year on the Klamath River as a road builder and firefighter. Then he became a carpenter's mate in the US Navy. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] After the war, Archie returned to San Francisco and turned his career from shipwright to carpenter. During some fifteen years in the building trades, he honed his hand skills, advocated union causes, and developed an abiding interest in the language, music, and lore of working men and women. In 1958 he returned to academe, to continue studying and promoting labour causes from a different vantage point. Two years later he earned an MLS degree at the University of Illinois library school. Off and on until 1972 he held joint appointments in that university's Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations and the English Department. In 1965 Archie enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's Folklore Program, where, as he wryly noted later, he became a classmate to students the age of his children and a student of professors he regarded as his peers. He combined his long-time interests in hillbilly music and labour songs in his dissertation (1968), the case studies of coalmining songs that, as Only a Miner, launched the University of Illinois's then new (and still ongoing) series Music in American Life. Through the 1960s he organized and mentored the University of Illinois Campus Folksong Club, brought programmes presenting workers' traditions to the national folk festivals on Washington's Mall, and established the John Edwards Memorial Foundation, an archive and research centre at UCLA devoted to the study and preservation of vernacular music. He was instrumental in establishing the JEMF Quarterly and contributed to it a long series of provocative, insightful essays on the relationship of vernacular music to the visual arts. In 1962 a talk by Sarah Gertrude Knott at an American Folklore Society meeting drew Archie's attention to the troubled public image of the folklore profession. Soon began his long struggle to confer national recognition for American folklore and folklife through an institution more or less parallel to the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. In 1972 he and his wife, Louanne, relocated to Washington, DC. Unemployed except for part-time stints working for the AFL-CIO and the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival, he became a self-appointed lobbyist, patrolling the halls of Congress to garner support for bills to create a folklife centre. The initial effort to place this at the Smithsonian Institution failed, but success finally came in 1976, when President Ford signed into law the American Folklife Preservation Act, establishing the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. …