The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #162371 Message #3863979
Posted By: Joe Offer
03-Jul-17 - 02:53 AM
Thread Name: Obit: Folklorist Roger Abrahams (1933-2017)
Subject: RE: Obit: Folklorist Roger Abrahams (1933-2017)
The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress posted this obituary on Facebook:
Roger D. Abrahams 1933-2017
AFC is sad to pass on the news that folklorist Roger D. Abrahams has died. Roger recently celebrated his 84th birthday. We heard the news from his children Lori Ann Wilson Abrahams and Rod Abrahams.
Roger was a mentor to many staff members at AFC. In addition to his formal teaching, his thoughts on the importance of folklore inspired generations of students, ethnographers, and folklorists.
Roger spent over 30 years at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the Hum Rosen Professor of Humanities and taught in the Department of Folklore and Folklife. He taught previously at the University of Texas and at Scripps College and Pitzer College in Claremont, California. Roger was awarded the Kenneth Goldstein Award for Lifetime Academic Leadership by the American Folklore Society (AFS) in 2005, and was also an AFS Fellow.
In a series of classic articles, Roger helped re-theorize the discipline of folklore in the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, he published brilliant analyses of traditional culture, in particular African American verbal culture. He was the author of many books, including "Deep Down in the Jungle," "African Folktales," "Afro-American Folktales" (later retitled "African American Folktales), "The Man-of-Words in the West Indies," "Deep the Water, Shallow the Shore," "Singing the Master," and "Everyday Life." Roger was also a folksinger and a student of folk music, and wrote "Anglo-American Folksong Style" (with George Foss) and "Almeda Riddle: A Singer and her Songs."
AFC has several collections associated with Roger. Of special significance is documentation of the Swarthmore College Folk Festivals in 1958 and 1959, donated to AFC by Lee Haring. Roger was a performer at the festivals, and wrote a reminiscence which we preserve in his file, which identifies the festivals as the turning point that made him a folklorist. Roger also collected with Alan Lomax in the the Caribbean in the 1960s, and those recordings are in AFC's Alan Lomax Collection.
Above all else, Roger loved to talk about folklore, so we are delighted to preserve one of his engaging lectures, which he gave at AFC in 2007. Follow the link to hear Roger talk about one of his own inspirations, Benjamin Botkin.
https://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4345&loclr=fbafc