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Chapter 9. Moments in the Making of a Laborlorist
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Chapter 9 Moments in the Making of a Laborlorist In the forties and fifties, when rainy San Francisco days cancelled work at building sites, Green frequently headed for a library. One day, when it was sunny, he asked his foreman whether he could have the day off to go to Stanford University for a meeting. The foreman asked, “What kind of meeting ?” “The Modern Language Association,” Green replied. Part amused, part baffled, the foreman approved the trip. Green wanted to hear a presentation on William Faulkner and meet Charles Seeger, the well-known ethnomusicologist who was keynoting the conference. A few years later, still a carpenter , Green traveled to Santa Monica to moderate a panel at the American Folklore Society’s annual meeting. Green read voraciously during any free moment. Louanne Green recalls that in this period of his life he spent countless hours intensely thinking about how ideas fit together, how a particular historical event or cultural phenomenon fit within larger regional, national, and global contexts. His intellectual mentors included Louie Adamic, Carey McWilliams, Horace Kallen, and his new friend, Peter Tamony. A homegrown intellectual and jazz enthusiast, Tamony founded the Hot Music Society of San Francisco, and Green met him at a society-sponsored concert. Tamony lived with his sister in a Mission District townhouse filled with books and cardboard file boxes in which he sorted thousands of clippings he had snipped of words used in different ways. He was obsessed with etymology and slang, publishing frequently in newspapers and language journals, including a series of articles in Ralph Gleason’s short-lived Jazz magazine on the words jazz, bop, jive, and swing. Similarly, in a 1963Western Folklore article, Tamony detailed the many meanings of the word hootenanny for folk revivalists. His use of etymology to open political and cultural history deeply impressed Green. The men shared an interest in workplace language, 88 . Part 3. A Decent Philosophy and Tamony encouraged Green’s pursuit of occupational folklife and suggested he begin his own study on the origins of hillbilly.1 Tamony’s friendship and mentorship was an important thread in the tapestry of influences that shaped and inspired Green’s meticulous detection in researching workers’ cultural expressions from the forties until his death.2 Not long after meeting Tamony, Green was introduced to John Neuhaus by a friendly San Francisco librarian who recognized their shared interest in work songs. Neuhaus was a long-time “doubleheader,” holding union cards in Lodge 68 of the International Association of Machinists and the Industrial Union 520 of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Featured in Joyce Kornbluh’s Rebel Voices, Neuhaus passionately researched Wobbly song history and regularly performed from the huge repertoire he had collected . Quite naturally, he and Green became very close friends. In a tribute to Neuhaus, Green highlighted his playful mastery of workers’ slang as well as the creative way Neuhaus “integrated and synthesized his experiences” as a worker and untrained folklorist.3 Their close friendship made Neuhaus’s untimely death in 1958especially tragic. Weeks before dying he gave Green a small metal machinist’s tool box holding twenty-six of the twenty-nine IWW “Little Red Songbooks” published to that date. Neuhaus asked that Green carry on his effort to publish a comprehensive catalogue of Wobbly songs and their history. The release of The Big Red Songbook in 2007marked a fifty-year journey to fulfill that commitment.4 It is from friends like Peter Tamony and John Neuhaus that Green learned invaluable research habits and the worth of having keen scholarly instincts for musical and textual analysis. Perhaps most valuable, he witnessed firsthand in the lives of Tamony and Neuhaus exemplary models of how creative and insightful intellectual work can flourish outside the academy. According to Green, by 1957he was seriously involved in record collecting and had begun compiling a coal-mine discography. Aside from frequenting Jack’s Cellar, a tiny record shop in San Francisco’s Western Addition, Green found most of what he wanted through mail-order catalogs. He also developed close relationships with many other serious collectors by corresponding with them. “At that time,” he claimed, “there were only ten or twelve serious collectors in the whole country, and I knew about ten of them.”5 Some, such as Wayland Hand, George Korson, and D. K. Wilgus, were professional folklorists , but many in this small group, including Bob Pinson, Fred Hoeptner, and Eugene Earle, pursued old-time music scholarship after work or in...