Archie Green (1917-2009)

~ By Julie Ardery

Archie Green (1917-2009): Called to Labor

The man who taught us "laborlore" and persuaded Congress to establish a National Folklife Center has died.

The smallest giant I’ve ever known is dead. Archie Green, former shipwright, Congressional lobbyist and a pioneer of American labor history and folklore studies, died Sunday, March 22, at his home on Caselli Avenue in San Francisco. He was 91.

“Many of us owe him a huge debt,” wrote filmmaker Mimi Pickering, of Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. “We will not see the likes of him again.”

Archie, as he was universally known, was a scholar of what he called “laborlore” – the expressive culture of working people. For five decades he studied hillbilly music and pile-drivers’ tales. He made inventories of “tin men” – the showpieces of sheet metal workers -- and analyzed sailors’ slang. He recorded songs by millworkers and miners’ wives.

Working on until just months before his death, he wrote countless articles, both academic and popular, and five books, including Only a Miner, his landmark study of coal-mining music. But the debt Pickering acknowledges is not so much scholarly as personal. For Archie incited Mimi and me and scores of others to quit whatever we had been doing and join him in documenting the culture of working people.

Read the full article about this remarkable man here...IMAGE: Jerry Telfer, San Francisco Chronicle (Archie Green in 1987, at an exhibit of poster art of the Industrial Workers of the World)

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