Archie Green
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| Archie Green | |
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 Archie Green at home, ca. 1993; photograph by Hazen Robert Walker
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| Born | June 29, 1917 Winnipeg, Canada |
| Occupation | folklorist, musicologist |
Archie Green (b. June 29, 1917) is a folklorist and musicologist. He is a scholar of laborlore, defined as the special folklore of workers. Devoted to understanding vernacular culture, he has gathered and commented upon the speech, stories, songs, emblems, rituals, art, artifacts, memorials, and landmarks which constitute laborlore. He is credited with winning Congressional support for passage of the American Folklife Preservation Act of 1976 (P.L. 94-201), which established the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.[1]
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[edit] Early Life and Work
Born Aaron Green in Winnipeg, Manitoba he moved with his parents to Los Angeles, California in 1922. He grew up in southern California, began college at UCLA, and transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a bachelor's degree in 1939. He then worked in the San Francisco shipyards and served in the U.S. Navy during Work War II. He has been a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America for sixty-six years. His pro-labor orientation owes much to his father, a socialist who supported Eugene Debs, the campaign of Upton Sinclair for governor of California in 1934, and became a supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Describing himself as an “anarcho-syndicalist with strong libertarian leanings,” or a “left-libertarian,”[2] Green has combined a sensitivity for working people, an abiding concern for democratic processes, and a pragmatic willingness to lobby for reforms.
[edit] Academic career
Green enrolled in graduate school in 1958, earning an M.L.S. degree from the University of Illinois in 1960 and a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. He combined his support for labor and love of country music in the research that became his first book, Only a Miner. Green joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1960, where he held a joint appointment in the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations and the English Department until 1972. Working as a senior staff associate at the AFL-CIO Labor Studies Center in the early 1970s, he initiated programs presenting workers' traditions at the Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife on the National Mall, and led the successful legislative campaign to enact the American Folklife Preservation Act. He became known for his work on occupational folklore and on early hillbilly music recordings. In 1975 he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. He was awarded the Bingham Humanities Professorship at the University of Louisville in 1977, and was a Woodrow Wilson Center fellow in Washington, DC, in 1978. In 1995 he received the Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for outstanding achievement in public folklore from the American Folklore Society. His articles have appeared in Appalachian Journal, Journal of American Folklore, Labor's Heritage, Musical Quarterly, and other periodicals and anthologies. He retired from the University of Texas at Austin in June 1982, and established an archive for his collected materials in the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
At home in San Francisco, Green serves as secretary of the nonprofit Fund for Labor Culture & History.
[edit] Notes
- ^ citation from the American Folklore Society, Botkin Prize, 1995
- ^ Cantwell, Robert, "Introduction" to Green, Torching the Fink Books: xv
[edit] Books by Archie Green
- Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs (University of Illinois Press, 1972).
- Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes (University of Illinois Press, 1993).
- Songs About Work (Indiana University Folklore Institute, 1993).
- Calf's Head & Union Tale (University of Illinois Press, 1996).
- Torching the Fink Books & Other Essays on Vernacular Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2001). ISBN 0-8078-2605-7
- Tin Men (University of Illinois Press, 2002).
- Millwrights in Northern California, 1901-2002 (Northern California Carpenters Regional Council, 2003).
- Harry Lundeberg's Stetson & Other Nautical Treasures (Crockett, CA: Carquinez Press, 2006). ISBN 0-9744124-3-0
- Co-editor, with David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Salerno,The Big Red Songbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 2007). ISBN 0-88286-277-4
