Botkin, Benjamin A. (1901–1975). Encyclopedia of American Folklore

Folklorist; best known for his annotated anthologies of folklore from oral tradition and print sources and for his early advocacy of applied folklore and multicultural studies. Botkin was educated at Harvard University (M.A., 1920, magna cum laude), Columbia University (M.A., 1921), and the University of Nebraska (Ph.D., 1931). He founded and edited the regional annual Folk-Say (1929–1932). “Folk-say” is a term Botkin “coined in 1928 to designate unwritten history and literature in particular and oral, linguistic, and floating material in general.” He went to Washington DC on a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1937 to do research at the Library of Congress in Southern folk and regional literature. From 1938 to 1941, he was, successively, national folklore editor of the Federal Writers’ Project, cofounder and chairman of the Joint Committee on Folk Arts of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and chief editor of the Writers’ Unit of the Library of Congress Project; in 1941 he became a Library of Congress Fellow in Folklore (Honorary Fellow 1942–1956). In 1942 he was named head of the library’s Archive of Folk Song. In 1945, while president of the American Folklore Society, Botkin resigned from the library and moved to New York to devote himself to writing full time. About that time, his interest shifted from rural to urban folklore, work helped by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951. Botkin’s first book was The American Play-Party Song (l937), a study of frontier game songs. Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (1945), based on WPA interviews with ex-slaves, is one of the key documents in the development of oral history. His other books were annotated collections of regional or occupational folklore culled from oral, printed, and archival sources. The first and best known of these was A Treasury of American Folklore (1944). Botkin’s background and interests were broadly humanistic. He knew folklore, but he also knew literature, politics, and music. His brother was a painter, his cousins George and Ira Gershwin, a composer and a lyricist. Botkin himself published poetry before he published folklore, and he continued publishing it for many years. When asked his occupation, Botkin responded “Writer,” not “Folklorist.” Botkin saw the study of folklore as part of the study of culture rather than a field of independent value in its own right. He was less interested in survival folklore (which was the focus of concern of many of his contemporaries in the field) than in multiculturalism, urban folklore, occupational folklore, and especially applied folklore, which he said was “folklore for understanding and creating understanding.” Bruce Jackson References

Botkin, B.A. [1937] 1963. The American Play-Party Song. New York: Frederick Ungar. ——. ed. 1944. A Treasury of American Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the People. New York: Crown. ——, ed. 1945. Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——, ed. 1947. A Treasury of New England Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the Yankee People. New York: Crown. Hirsch, Jerrold. 1987. Folklore in the Making: B.A.Botkin. Journal of American Folklore 100:338. Jackson, Bruce. 1976. Benjamin A.Botkin, 1901–1975. Journal of American Folklore 89:1–6. ——. 1986. Ben Botkin. New York Folklore 12:23–32. Widner, Ronna Lee. 1986. Lore for the Folk, Benjamin A. Botkin and the Development of Folklore Scholarship in America. New York Folklore 12:1–22.

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