Teacher, collector, and archivist of urban folk traditions. Born and raised in a Quaker
family in Detroit, Michigan, James joined folklorist Emelyn Elizabedi Gardner in 1923 as
a junior lecturer in the English Department at the Colleges of the City of Detroit, later to
become Wayne State University. James had received her B.A. in 1920 and her M.A. in
1923 from the University of Michigan. She took graduate courses there and at the
University of Chicago in the historic-geographic method of folklore scholarship. She was
president of the Michigan Folklore Society in 1949–1950 and of the American Folklore
Society in 1950–1951. She was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society in
1961. She retired from Wayne State University in 1967 after forty-four years of teaching.
James and Gardner, both involved in the settlement-house movement, founded the
Wayne State University (WSU) Folklore Archive in 1939. They conducted folklorecollecting projects in the city with students until Gardner’s retirement in 1941. James
continued collecting projects, supervising student collectors, and archiving urban, ethnic,
and occupational traditions until her retirement. Her pioneering recognition of the
diversity of urban traditions emerges in an early report to her department chair in which
she wrote that she recorded an old-time fiddler, a roof shingler and a singer of AlbanianMacedonian folksongs on Edison wire recordings in one spring term. Although she did
not publish many articles about her fieldwork research, her legacy lives on in the WSU
Folklore Archive and in publications by her students, such as Susie Hoogasian-Villa’s
100 Armenian Tales and Their Folkloristic Relevance in 1966 and Harriet
M.Pawlowska’s Merrily We Sing: 105 Polish Folksongs in 1983.
Janet L.Langlois
References
James, Thelma G. 1933. Frances J.Child and the English and Scottish Ballads. Journal of American
Folklore 46:51–69. Reprinted in The Critics and the Ballad, ed. Tristram Potter Coffin and Mae
Edward Leach. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960.
——. 1948. Folklore and Propaganda. Journal of American Folklore 61:311.
Reuss, Richard. 1970. Thelma James Interview. Wayne State University Folklore Archive.
Accession No. 1970(155) Tapes 667–668.