23 Facts About Archie Green

Archie Green was an American folklorist specializing in laborlore and American folk music.

Archie Green grew up in southern California, began college at UCLA, and transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1939.

Archie Green joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and spent his year of service in a camp on the Klamath River as a road builder and firefighter.

Archie Green then worked in the San Francisco, California shipyards and served in the US Navy during World War II.

Archie Green was a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America for over sixty-seven years and was a Journeyman Shipwright.

Archie Green's parents were Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants from Chernigov, where his father had participated in the uprising against the Russian czar in 1905.

Archie Green spent his career not only collecting material from laborers, but encouraging workers themselves to document and preserve their own lore.

In 1942 Archie Green purchased the album Work Songs of the USA performed by folk singer Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter.

Archie Green combined his support for labor and love of country music in the research that became his first book, Only a Miner.

Archie Green joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1960, where he held a joint appointment in the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations and the English Department until 1972.

Archie Green became known for his work on occupational folklore and on early hillbilly music recordings.

Archie Green was awarded the Bingham Humanities Professorship at the University of Louisville in 1977, and was a Woodrow Wilson Center fellow in Washington, DC, in 1978.

Archie Green's articles have appeared in Appalachian Journal, Journal of American Folklore, Labor's Heritage, Musical Quarterly, and other periodicals and anthologies.

Archie Green retired from the University of Texas at Austin in June 1982, and established an archive for his collected materials in the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In retirement from teaching, Archie Green continued to write and publish the results of years of research.

Archie Green completed books on the tinsmiths' art, using examples from northern California ; a monograph on millwrights in northern California over the 20th century ; and a collection of essays on the Sailor's Union of the Pacific.

Archie Green inherited the project from John Neuhaus, a machinist and Wobbly a who devoted years to collecting a nearly complete set of the IWW songbooks and determining what music the songs had been set to.

When Neuhaus died of cancer in 1958, he gave his unique collection of songbooks, sheet music and other materials to Archie Green, who vowed to carry on Neuhaus's vision of a complete edition of IWW songs.

Archie Green deposited Neuhaus's original materials in the folklife archive at the University of North Carolina.

Archie Green brought together unionists, activists, scholars, and artists in "Laborlore Conversations," a series of conferences on working class culture.

Archie Green was unable to attend the fourth of these conferences in August 2007, where he was honored with the Living Legend Award from the Librarian of Congress.

In 2011, University of Illinois Press published Sean Burns' biography of Archie Green entitled Archie Green: The Making of a Working Class Hero.

Archie Green died of renal failure at his home in San Francisco, California on March 22,2009.