Archie Green

Infobox Person
name = Archie Green


image_size = 180px
caption = Archie Green at home, ca. 1993; photograph by Hazen Robert Walker
birth_date = June 29, 1917
birth_place = Winnipeg, Canada
occupation = folklorist, musicologist

Archie Green (born 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. [citation from the American Folklore Society, Botkin Prize, 1995.]

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 is a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America for over sixty-six years and is a Journeyman Shipwright. 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,” [Robert Cantwell, "Introduction" to Green, "Torching the Fink Books": xv.] Green has combined a sensitivity for working people, an abiding concern for democratic processes, and a pragmatic willingness to lobby for reforms.

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 from 1969 to 1976 led the successful legislative campaign to enact the American Folklife Preservation Act. [Benjamin Feline, "Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music" (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 179-180.] 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. 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.

Recent work

In retirement from teaching, Green has 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 has deposited Neuhaus's original materials in the folklife archive at the University of North Carolina. [Jesse Hamlin, "Historian completes a labor of love -- "The Big Red Songbook"," "San Francisco Chronicle", June 18, 2007, B1, B3.]

At home in San Francisco, Green serves 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 roots music, 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. [Fund for Labor Culture and History, Activities List, July 2000 - December 2006, 14 pp.]

Honors

*In 1995 he received the Benjamin A. 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. [http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2007/07-150.html]

References

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). 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

External links

* [http://www.loc.gov/folklife American Folklife Center]
* [http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/sfc1/sabout.html Southern Folklife Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill]
* [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5764742&ft=1&f=1033 Archie Green interviewed on National Public Radio about The Big Red Songbook]
* [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/18/DDG0GQH1PJ1.DTL San Francisco Chronicle feature on Green and The Big Red Songbook]