Karen Baldwin (1943–2007)

The American Folklore Society has lost a member of long standing, a woman of high intelligence, perspicacity, and wit who devoted her life to teaching in all its forms and who three decades ago, at the start of her career, gave our discipline a great gift by theorizing a new way of looking at folklore.

Karen Baldwin, of the English faculty at East Carolina University, died of cancer on November 14, 2007, at her home in Greenville, North Carolina. Born on June 1, 1943, Karen grew up in suburban Philadelphia. She earned her bachelor's degree from Guilford College in 1964, excelling in English and journalism, and was admitted to the English graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she discovered folklore. Karen had a nimble and original mind capable of holding multiple images and ideas, and this afforded her an unusually high capacity for synthesis, as seen in her dissertation (1975), which has had a far-reaching effect on folkloristics. Through her field data—storytelling and folk-poetry recitations by members of her mother's extended family in rural Pennsylvania—she so broadened and deepened folk-group theory as to help move item-and-classification folkloristics off its pedestal: not only is the family a folk group, it is the first folk group anyone belongs to. A development like this makes us wonder why no one had thought of it before. Her dissertation provided the underpinning for what was becoming known as family folklore, and though she did not have the opportunity to be the first to express her ideas in print, she was credited by the team that did: "The major theoretical work on family folklore is an unpublished doctoral dissertation by Karen Baldwin. . . . Dr. Baldwin delineates the various genres, or types, of family folklore and relates them to their social contexts" (Cutting-Baker et al. 1976:92).

As a folklore professional, Karen was happiest in face-to-face communication. Her enthusiasm reflected her joy in talking directly with others, her quicksilver tongue articulated the kaleidoscope of her ideas, and her keen response to live audiences prompted her to deliver papers at most of the American Folklore Society's annual meetings from 1972 through 2006. Under the aegis of the North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction, the North Carolina Arts Council Folklife Program, or the North Carolina Humanities Council, and at the invitation of local civic groups, she made over two hundred folklore presentations to North Carolina audiences of every kind. When the U.S. Navy attempted to convert her beloved coastal plain into a jet fighter training range, Karen joined others and fought fiercely against it, at the same time documenting the artistic response of the coastal plain people engaged in the struggle—the last project of her life.

Writing was torture for her, due not to any lack of talent and skill but rather to a disabling self-doubt that kept many projects unfinished. Yet she did publish in most of her areas of interest: family folklore (1976, 1983, 1985, 1993b); folklore and education (1989); regional studies (Baldwin 2006a; Baldwin, Kimzey, and Stallings 1990); folklore of the deaf (1982); folk medicine (Baldwin 1992, 2006b; Kirkland et al. 1992); yard art (1991); bikers (1993a, 1996a); and birders (1996b). She also edited two periodicals—from 1990 to 1992 the newsletter of the Folklore and Education Section of the American Folklore Society (a group that she founded in 1988) and, from 1996 to 2002, the North Carolina Folklore Journal.

In the early 1990s, the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society had a large quilt made with signed squares donated by section members and friends. A fund-raising tool for Elli Köngäs-Maranda scholarships and prizes, the quilt had been placed in Karen's keeping, to be brought in for display at annual meetings. So deep was her feeling of connection to the quilt, and to the community of folklorists who had made it, that when she was diagnosed with cancer in mid-June 2007 she immediately garnered the section's permission to put the quilt up on her own wall at home, a source...