The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #119613 Message #2595577
Posted By: Jack Campin
23-Mar-09 - 04:50 PM
Thread Name: Obit: Archie Green (22 March 2009)-Memorial Jun 21
Subject: RE: Obit: Archie Green
Update of the Wikipedia piece by Tim Lloyd of the AFS:
Archie Green (June 29, 1917 ? March 22, 2009) was a scholar of
laborlore, defined as the special folklore of workers. He gathered and
commented upon the speech, stories, songs, emblems, rituals, art,
artifacts, memorials, and landmarks which constitute laborlore. After
many years of tireless volunteer advocacy, he won Congressional
support for passage of the American Folklife Preservation Act of 1976
(P.L. 94-201), which established the American Folklife Center. A
Fellow of the American Folklore Society, he also received the Benjmain
Botkin Prize for outstanding achievement in public folklore from the
American Folklore Society. In August 2007 he received the Living
Legend award from the American Folklife Center of the Library of
Congress.
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 World War II. He was a member of the United Brotherhood of
Carpenters and Joiners of America for over sixty-seven years and was a
Journeyman Shipwright.
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's 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. He became known for his work
on occupational folklore and on early old-time 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. 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.
In retirement from teaching, Green continued to write and publish the
results of years of research. He completed books on tinsmiths' art,
using examples from northern California (Tin Men, 2002); a monograph
on millwrights in northern California over the twentieth century
(2003), and a collection of essays on the Sailor's Union of the
Pacific (2006). Most notable has been the 2007 publication of The Big
Red Songbook, featuring the lyrics to the 190 songs included in the
various editions of the Industrial Workers of the World's Little Red
Songbooks from 1909 to 1973. Green inherited the project from John
Neuhaus, a machinist and Wobbly who devoted years to collecting a
nearly complete set of the IWW songbooks and determining what music
the songs had been set to. When Neuhaus died of cancer in 1958, he
gave his unique collection of songbooks, sheet music and other
materials to Green, who vowed to carry on Neuhaus's vision of a
complete edition of IWW songs. Green deposited Neuhaus's original
materials in the folklife archive at the University of North Carolina.
At home in San Francisco, Green served as secretary of the nonprofit
Fund for Labor Culture & History. Founded in July 2000, the Fund has
worked with the National Trust for Historic Preservation to identify
labor landmarks in San Francisco and install commemorative plaques,
supported the publication of books on , labor songs and historic labor
landmarks, prepared guides to films on skilled union craftsmen, and
helped the United Mine Workers restore the Ludlow Monument in Colorado.
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 (The
University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
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).
Co-editor, The Big Red Songbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing
Co., 2007).