Sociologist and folklorist. Born in Texas, Johnson studied sociology at the University of
Chicago before attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He spent his
first year of doctoral work editing Howard W.Odum’s massive collection of African
American folksongs. The result was the joint publication by Odum and Johnson of two
important early studies of African American secular song (Johnson and Odum 1925,
1926).
In 1929 Johnson published the first full-length study of an American folksong, John
Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend. He continued his studies of African American
folk culture at St. Helena Island, South Carolina, and published Folk Culture on St.
Helena Island in 1930. The book is an early study of the gullah dialect, and Johnson also
investigated the origin of the African American spiritual.
After contributing these important works of collection and scholarship to the field of
folklore, Johnson returned to his earlier interest in race relations. In 1939 his research
contributed to Gunnar Myrdal’s study of African Americans, An American Dilemma, and
from 1944 to 1947 he served as the Southern Regional Council’s first executive director.
After his retirement from the sociology faculty at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, Johnson and his wife, Guion Griffis Johnson, published a history of the
university’s Institute fbr Research in Social Science (Johnson and Johnson 1980).
Johnson considered himself a sociologist rather than a folklorist, but he made
important contributions to the field, largely because of his musical knowledge and his
interest in African American folksongs as cultural products.
Lynn Moss Sanders
References
Johnson, Guion Griffis, and Guy Benton Johnson. 1980. Research in Service to
Society: The First Fifty Years of the IRSS at the University of North Carolina. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Johnson, Guy Benton, and Howard W.Odum. 1925. The Negro and His Songs: A
Study of Typical Songs in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
——. 1926. Negro Workaday Songs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.