Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero

Chapter 12. New Labor History and American Cultural Studies

Chapter 12 New Labor History and American Cultural Studies Archie was there before any of us were, when there was no such thing as Appalachian studies. —David Whisnant In 1959, when Bernard Karsh recruited Green for a job in the Labor and Industrial Relations Library at the University of Illinois, it was on the strength of his knowledge of labor history and worker culture. Once in Urbana, Green efficiently handled his library duties and devoted much energy and time to directing the hugely popular Student Folksong Club. This combination of employment and personal interest gave Green, for the first half of the sixties , a unique platform from which to conduct research into the connection between labor song and labor history. During school breaks he would frequently join other aficionados of old-time music such as Ed Kahn and Norm Cohen on lengthy road trips in hope of locating obscure hillbilly musicians, who in some cases had not recorded or performed in decades. Drawing from such research, Green began his lifelong practice of prolific publishing. In the early sixties he wrote articles for regional magazines, essays for academic journals, and a steady number of liner notes for the burgeoning folk record industry. By 1966, through seminal articles like “The Death of Mother Jones” and “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Green had made a name for himself in the American Folklore Society and larger folk revival circles. The initial conference presentation and subsequent publishing of his paper “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol” was particularly significant in firmly establishing hillbilly music as a fecund and academically legitimate area of study for folklorists. Encouraged by this influence, Green decided to enter University of Pennsylvania’s doctoral program in folklore in order to deepen 12. New Labor History & Cultural Studies . 11 9 his studies and lend authority to his scholarly contributions. Taking a leave of absence from Illinois, Green began doctoral work under the supervision of MacEdward Leach, one of the few ballad scholars at the time who encouraged his unorthodox historical work.1 Green’s dissertation on recorded coal-mining songs became the groundbreaking book Only a Miner, which the University of Illinois Press published in 1972 as the inaugural study in its now-extensive Music in American Life series. Green recognized that Only a Miner advanced, through scope of inquiry and methodology, beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. “Many scholars,” he asserted, “place no importance on the intimate relationship of the disciplines of folklore and history. But even folklorists (like [George] Korson) and historians (like [Philip] Foner) who clearly understand the relationship find it difficult to blend disciplinary skills.” As a corrective, Green proposed an “integrated historical-folkloric technique—one that assumes . . . that folk composers and formal historians both cope with narrative art [and that] not only [is] the folk ballad a historical document but that the historian is also a special kind of singer of tales.”2 In Only a Miner, song study becomes a portal into the complex intersections of technological development, worker migration, Appalachian history, social movement study, artist biography, record industry history, shifting race and gender relations, prison history, and the formation of workingclass identities. The book, which is representative of Green’s larger laborlore project, expresses and foreshadows many of the intellectual and political commitments of two emergent and related scholarly transformations of the day: the rise of new labor history and the impact of cultural studies–ethnic studies on American studies. In a 1965 article written with an uncharacteristically theoretical focus, Green posed questions that were ahead of their time: “Does a [scholar] station himself at the furnace hearth, the personnel office, or the juke joint? Are our commitments strong enough to push us to steel not only where it is shaped physically, but also where the expressive life of its workers is shaped? It is entirely possible that future research in industrial culture will belong more to labor historians, industrial sociologists, or ethnic studies specialists than to folklorists.”3 Such questions illustrate the disciplinary shift that would come to be known as writing “history from below” or, in academic parlance, new labor history.4 New labor history’s emphasis on workers’ identity, culture, and struggles emerged as a response to the limitations of the Wisconsin School or Commons School of labor history. In the first half of the twentieth century labor 120 . Part 4. “Always on Stolen Time” studies was practiced as a subset of economics...