The United House of Prayer Band and Oscar Brand performed during the two-day celebration of Botkin's life and legacy. - James Hardin
In Benjamin A. Botkin's house in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., where he lived for the last 30 years of his life, the rooms were full of books. In some, they were stacked in piles from floor to ceiling, along with papers, boxes of file cards and ephemera. And Ben Botkin knew just where everything was. He could identify a book near the bottom of a stack, whether or not its spine was showing, and he would return it there when the book had served its purpose.
So reported singer Peggy Seeger at a session of remembrances on the second day of "Living Lore: The Legacy of Benjamin A. Botkin," a two-day celebration of the life and work of the great American folklorist on the 100th anniversary of his birth, sponsored by the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center, Music Division and Center for the Book; the National Council for the Traditional Arts; and the New York Folklore Society, with support from the Shakespeare Theatre, the National Endowment for the Arts and U.S. Airways. Again and again, the story of Ben Botkin's important work came back to books.
Benjamin Botkin - National Council for the Traditional Arts
Nebraska folklorist Roger Welsch gave the keynote address that opened the program on the morning of Nov. 15. Mr. Welsch first encountered Botkin's work at the Lincoln, Neb., city library, where he was shelving books and Botkin's treasuries and collections occupied a full shelf. "I read them all," said Mr. Welsch. He described the famous differences between Botkin, who had a grand and inclusive view of folklore, and folklorist Richard Dorson, who insisted on academic standards for the folklore profession and regularly disparaged the more popular manifestations, such as festivals, folk song revivals, "treasury" anthologies, hootenanies and the like. Through stories of his own family and career, Mr. Welsch dramatized his allegiance to Botkin and his uneasy relationship with Dorson. But, he reported, at their last meeting, he and Dorson agreed that there is "room for all of us in folklore and a need for all of us in folklore."
Following Mr. Welsch's keynote, musician, storyteller and writer Stephen Wade delivered a tribute to Botkin's A Treasury of American Folklore, one of many Botkin books that line his shelves at home. All have become worn with use, he said, but "open to any page and they start to talk." Mr. Wade then demonstrated just how "living" the "lore" could be with a virtuoso performance of banjo playing, clogging, storytelling and old-fashioned American flimflam. He enacted Mark Twain's story of Tom Sawyer whitewashing Aunt Polly's fence, told a tall tale about the mosquitoes in Arkansas and raced up and down the aisle of the Coolidge Auditorium in the persona of a fast-talking pen salesman, selling pens for a quarter to eager members of the audience, all the while keeping up his banjo playing and patter.
Benjamin A. Botkin (1901-1975) was a pioneering folklorist who believed that people are always creating folklore out of their collective experiences. According to historian Jerrold Hirsch, "He attempted to formulate an approach to the study of American folklore that took into account the nation's different regions, races and classes and showed the interrelationship between folk, popular and high culture. In his work on the interregional Folk-Say anthologies (1929-32), as national folklore editor of the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project (1938-39), as chief editor of the Writers' Unit of the Library of Congress Project, (1939-41), as head of the Archive of American Folk Song (1942-45) and as the author of numerous folklore treasures, beginning with A Treasury of American Folklore (1944), Botkin continually sought new ways to achieve his vision for the role of folklore and folklife in American culture. … He rejected traditional folklore scholarship's privileged hierarchies regarding what constituted the object of study—the lore over the folk, the past over the present, the rural over the urban, the agrarian over the industrial, survivals over revivals, older genres over newer emergent forms, oral transmission over technological media, homogeneous groups over heterogeneous ones" (from Jerrold Hirsch, "Benjamin Botkin's Legacy in the Making," American Folklife Center Web site at www.loc.gov/folklife/botkin/hirsch.html).
Botkin's children, Dan Botkin (left) and Dorothy Rosenthal (center), spoke at the event; right, former Folk Archive head Joe Hickerson and folk legend Pete Seeger performed at a concert held during the celebration event. - James Hardin
The first Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, in 1967, the creation of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in 1976 and the creation of a network of public-sector folklorists funded by the National Endowment for the Arts are all legacies of Botkin's scholarship. He was one of the first scholars to assert that all people create culture, regardless of where or how they live, and he insisted that democracy is strengthened by valuing many different cultural voices. Botkin has been called the father of public-sector folklore, and today folklorists widely accept the idea that folklore is creative expression used to communicate and instill social values, traditions and goals.
Benjamin Botkin was also a longtime board member for the National Council for the Traditional Arts, and NCTA Director Joe Wilson described the early National Folklife Festivals created by Sarah Gertrude Knott, in St. Louis (1934), Chattanooga, Tenn. (1935), Dallas (1936), Chicago (1937) and Washington, D.C. (1938). Botkin "had an expansive, wondrous way that took in everybody," said Wilson, and the popularity of the festivals convinced many academic deans to establish folklore programs at their institutions. Alan Jabbour, former director of the American Folklife Center, described the cultural climate in New Deal Washington as an "interlocking directorate," and noted how excited Botkin and others were to be working on large cultural projects. Botkin's editing of the ex-slave narrative project was the first great accomplishment of oral history in America, he said.
"Living Lore" was not a scholarly conference. According to Thea Austen, American Folklife Center events coordinator, it was a celebration of Botkin's legacy, with performances, interviews and discussions that embodied the spirit of his work. "We worked closely with Ben Botkin's children, Dan Botkin and Dorothy Rosenthal," said Ms. Austen. "There had been a scholarly program at the University of Nebraska, where the Benjamin A. Botkin papers have been deposited. We thought that, for the Library of Congress program, we might find a way to embody Botkin's ideas about festivals, the folk music revival and engaging audiences in a participatory way in the cultural process." In that spirit, Ms. Austen assembled public sector folklorists, musicians, artists, writers, actors and others whose worked has been touched by Ben Botkin: the United House of Prayer Band played a noontime concert; historian Henry Sapoznik spoke about Yiddish radio in New York City in the 1930s in "Radio and the Transmission of Folk Culture Literacy"; Center for the Book Director John Y. Cole, Folklife Center Director Peggy Bulger, author Ann Banks and historian Jerrold Hirsch talked about the Federal Writers' Project; City Lore Executive Director Steve Zeitlin showed photographs taken by Martha Cooper of the memorial tributes in New York City that have sprung up to honor the people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center; and the band Cherish the Ladies gave an evening concert of traditional Irish music, featuring a new work commissioned by the Music Division's McKim Fund.
Pete Seeger (left) was joined by his sister and half-brother, Peggy (center) and Mike Seeger (right).
Folklorists David Taylor and Marjorie Hunt acknowledged a personal debt to Ben Botkin, in that both have specialized in the study of occupational culture, an area of interest that is one example of Botkin's inclusive view of contemporary folk culture. Taylor introduced Ron Brooks, Dean Kalomas and Pauli Zmolek, three decorative painters who have been working on the renovation of the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, and Ms. Hunt interviewed Frank Baiocchi, a master mason who has worked on many Washington historic buildings and monuments. New York folklorist Nancy Groce interviewed Ed Gero, Floyd King and Catherine Weidner, who told stories of their work as actors with the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington.
At the start of a noontime concert on the second day, musician and former Folk Archive head Joe Hickerson made a few remarks about the folk song revival of the 1950s and '60s, more a personal remembrance than a dissertation. He told how, as a teenager in New Haven, Conn., and a physics major at Oberlin College, he himself had picked up a guitar and learned to play folk songs through the books and records he discovered. Pete Seeger joined Mr. Hickerson on stage, and together they explained how Mr. Seeger had composed the extraordinarily popular "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," beginning with words from a Russian folk song, employing the tune from another song that had been echoing in his head. In 1960 Mr. Hickerson heard a Seeger recording of the song and added verses four and five, so as to make it circular. Later that summer, Mr. Hickerson was working at Camp Woodland, a progressive children's camp in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where Mr. Seeger happened to hear him and his campers singing the extra verses. Mr. Seeger adopted them and they have become standard in most renditions, but Mr. Seeger commented that he preferred the line in the verse "Where have all the soldiers gone" to read, "When will we ever learn."
Pete Seeger was then joined by his half brother and sister, Mike Seeger and Peggy Seeger, along with Oscar Brand, and before a full house in the Coolidge Auditorium they made magic. Oscar Brand sang songs representing his Canadian heritage, Mike Seeger played a splendid solo on the jew's harp, and Peggy Seeger demonstrated that the unaccompanied voice is still one of the loveliest instruments. Pete Seeger spoke a moving tribute to the people who had been killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, and then sang, and taught the audience to sing, a song composed by Tom Paxton memorializing the tragedy—a wonderful moment for the audience, the great American folk singer, banjo strung around his neck, his familiar voice still strong, inviting and cajoling, a living embodiment of his and Ben Botkin's deep belief in the goodness of people and the power of song and lore. It was a great day for those who remember the songs and spirit of the times recalled.
During his time at the Library of Congress, Benjamin Botkin did his part for the wartime effort, tending a victory garden (June 1943 photo). - Joseph Horne
The final program (with panelists Joanna Cazden, Karl Finger, Joe Hickerson, Joan Studer Levine and Pete Seeger) consisted of remembrances of Camp Woodland, the progressive educational brainchild of Norman Studer, which provided experiences of folk song, dancing, storytelling and community interaction for young people from New York City during the '40s and '50s. And the day ended, appropriately enough, with a hootenanny, that folk singers' invitation to the audience to catch the spirit and join in the celebration of their own traditions.
Benjamin Botkin was a pioneer. He made connections among diverse fields others failed to notice. He abandoned the path of convention and was not afraid to alienate the powers-that-be. He inspired the young folklorists of the 1960s who were intent on breaking away from the purely academic study of folk texts and encouraged the direct involvement of professionally trained folklorists with public policy and programming. He insisted that democracy is enhanced by valuing many cultural voices. Above all, he believed that folklore belongs to the folk, as all his treasuries testified. "If giving back to the people what we have taken from them and what rightfully belongs to them, in a form in which they can understand and use, is vulgarization," he wrote, "then we need more of it" ("WPA and Folklore Research: Bread and Song," Southern Folklore Quarterly 3, 1939, 10).
