Folksong collector. A native of Maine, Gordon became interested in ballads during
courses at Harvard University. After graduation in 1910, Gordon briefly taught at the
University of California at Berkeley, where he directed graduate students’ theses on
folksongs. Disliking institutional expectations, Gordon attempted to balance his popular
and scholarly interests and returned to Harvard for advanced studies.
Harvard’s Sheldon Fellowship provided Gordon funds to collect Southern folksongs
during the early 1920s. Gordon built his own portable recording equipment for his
Appalachian fieldwork and was one of the first folklorists to use this equipment in the
Southern mountains and to interview a hill-billy singer. Basing his fieldwork from
Asheville, North Carolina, Gordon recorded more than 1,000 cylinders of songs and
photographed unusual folk architecture. In 1926 Gordon moved to his wife’s hometown,
Darien, Georgia, and initiated fieldwork to preserve African American folk traditions,
especially ex-slaves’ accounts, spirituals, and chants, along coastal Georgia and South
Carolina.
Gordon chose to use pulp magazines, not scholarly publications, to discuss his work.
As column editor of “Old Songs Men Have Sung” in Adventure magazine from 1923 to
1927, he acquired scvcral thousand songs. Unlike other scholars who sought obscure
folksong origins, Gordon focused on determining the precise historical events that
inspired each song.
Gordon consulted for the RCA Victor Talking Machine Company in copyright
lawsuits, most notably regarding “The Wreck of the Old 97.” He testified in court about
dating textual cvidence by studying ballad versions. He also wrote a series of articles
about folksongs in thc Sunday New York Times Magazine from January 2, 1927, to
January 22, 1928. In 1938 the Works Progress Administration’s federal theater project
published a compilation of these articles.
In 1928 Gordon was named the first archivist of the Archive of American Folk Song at
the Library of Congress. His private collection formed the nucleus of the archive, and he
acquired and indexed collections overlooked by scholars. In 1933, however, the library
dismissed Gordon for erratic work habits.
Gordon performed clerical and editorial duties for several government agencies,
collecting folksongs in his spare time. He participated in the American Folklore Society
and at folksong festivals but never published a scholarly book or an article in folklore
journals, and he remained on the periphery of his profession. His most lasting
professional contribution was his extensive collection gathered through rigorous
fieldwork.
Elizabeth D.Schafer
References
Allen, Lucy H. 1977. Manuscript Collections Acquired and/ or Indexed by Robert Winslow Gordon
in the Archive of Folk Song. Washington DC: Library of Congress, Music Division, Archive of
Folk Song.
Cohen, Norm. 1974. Robert W.Gordon and the Second Wreck of “Old 97.” Journal of American
Folklore 87:12–38.
Gordon, Robert Winslow. 1931. The Negro Spiritual. In the Carolina Low-Country, eds. Augustine
T.Smythe, et al. New York: Macmillan, pp. 191–222.
——. 1938. Folk-Songs of America. New York: National Service Bureau.
Kodish, Debora. 1986. Good Friends and Bad Enemies: Robert Winslow Gordon and the Study of
American Folksong. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
Rosenberg, Neil V., and Debora Kodish. 1978. “Folk-Songs of America”: The Robert Winslow
Gordon Collection, 1922–1932. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. AFS L68. Sound
Recording.