| As he said of his own father, a veteran of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Archie Green is one for whom the skills of head and hand are one. Since his student days at Berkeley in the 1930s, Archie has commanded his energies, kept the faith, kept himself clear, and kept going. |
| As a skilled shipwright on the San Francisco waterfront, Archie worked to democratize the maritime union and began his lifelong quest to comprehend the complex culture of working people. For twenty years as a carpenter and keen ethnographic and political observer by day and a scholar by night, and as an activist in the union and engaged public citizen, he listened to workers' speech, studied their work habits, collected their pranks, jokes, and rituals, and listened to their songs. In the process, he became a pioneer collector of occupational songs and country music. After taking a degree in library science when he was already in his mid-forties, Archie spent some years as a labor librarian before going on to his Ph.D. in folklore and a new career as a professor of English and labor studies. Especially since the mid-1960s, Archie has been a constant and crucial source of guidance and encouragement to several generations of students. Countless books and articles on labor lore, old-time music, country music, vernacular culture, and cultural work in the public sector acknowledge his help explicitly and show many a mark of his counsel. And now in a retirement that has been more productive than most people's active working lives, he continues his lifelong political-cultural work. |
| Meeting Archie twenty-five years ago was one of the most fortunate events of my life. In his inimitable way, he praised my own fledgling work far beyond its merits, and introduced me to more people than I could keep straight, commending me to their attention by assuring them I knew all sorts of things about culture and the politics of culture that I emphatically did not know. During all the years since, I have been buoyed up constantly by his generosity of spirit, his political insight, his confidence in the intelligence and dignity of working people and the worth of their expressive culture, his commitment to forging equitable public policy and building humane public institutions, and his determination never to give up trying to understand, never to lose faith in the project. |
| For more than fifty years, Archie has kept at it-for ballad singers in the mountains and corrido singers on the border, for hillbilly pickers and gospel singers, for lintheads and coal miners, for honky-tonkers and midnight cowboys, for John Henry and Mother Jones, Joe Hill and Jimmie Rodgers, Ella Mae Wiggins and Sarah Ogan Gunning, Merle Travis and Merle Haggard, indeed for all of us. To him this one stone in the wall that continues to be built by many hands is respectfully and gratefully dedicated. |
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