Green, Archie

GREEN, ARCHIE (1917-2009). A highly influential figure in the scholarship of workers’ culture, folk music, Appalachian studies and folk lore, and in promoting the importance of labor culture to democracy and a robust Left.

Green was born Aaron Green in Winnipeg, Manitoba, among the radicalized Jewish population of that time and place. His father, a participant in the 1905 uprising against the Russian Czar, had become an ardent supporter of Eugene Debs and, later, Upton Sinclair. Archie Green moved with his parents to Los Angeles before his sixth birthday, growing up there in multi-ethnic Boyle Heights, attending UCLA until transferring to UC Berkeley. After college, he worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps. He was trained as a shipwright in the booming Bay Area ship industry and served in the Navy during World War II.

Young Archie Green, a member of a relatively conservative Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, felt hostile toward the large, pro-Russian movement of the Bay Area Left. Aligning with other cultural figures such as Kenneth Rexroth, he advocated an IWW style of anarcho-syndicalism. His critique of the Popular Front mainstream, along with a skepticism of how mainstream music eroded cultural pluralism, prompted him to reject the popular folksong movement of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and later Joan Baez and Bob Dylan among others so influential during the 1960s and after. He celebrated instead the traditional, regional sounds of Sarah Gunning, Glen Ohrlin and Hazel Dickens among others.

By 1958, Green had returned to school. He gained an MLS degree at the University of Illinois in 1960 and in 1968 acquired a PhD in Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. During these years, he had become a folksong and “labor lore” magus of sorts. Launching the influential Folksong Club at the University of Illinois while becoming a faculty member in both Labor Relations and English Department, he took advantage of the rising interest in folk music of all kinds, choosing to host concerts and produce records by musicians and singers of the “authentic,” homespun variety.

By the early 1970s, Green had moved to Senior Staff Associate of the AFL-CIO Labor Studies Center and helped initiate the prestigious Smithsonian Festival of Folklife held on the National Mall. He devoted himself for many years to lobbying successfully for the American Folklife Preservation Act, a major development in public recognition and preservation for vanishing generations of musicians and folk artists. By the middle 1970s, he accepted a professorship at the University of Texas at Austin and began an extended career of encouraging young scholars to research deeply and write with wide influence on the field of folk music and related subjects. Meanwhile, he published widely on folk music, crafts and (via an anthology that he edited) the Sailors Union of the Pacific. Taking retirement from Texas in 1982, he returned to the Bay Area for the rest of his life.

In later years, Green remained highly active, expanding the famed Little Red Songbook of the IWW into the Big Red Songbook, while leading the Fund for Labor Culture & History that offered small grants for various projects. He convened conversations between scholars, union members and others almost until the end of his life. Honored with the Living Legend Award by the Library of Congress in 2007, he left behind a field of scholars and scholarship and also a wealth of radical admirers.

Burns, Sean. Archie Green: The Making of a Working Class Hero. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2011.