Expressive culture of the workplace, with special emphasis upon informally learned
narrative, skill, and ritual used to determine status and membership in the work group.
The earliest investigations of occupational folklore arose from interest in tracing the
derivation of words and songs used within particular trades, from seafaring and logging
to mining and farming. Later studies expanded into specific traditional crafts, followed by
an interest in increasingly industrialized, urban work groups. Contemporary research is
devoted to holistic studies of informal work cultures approached as contested landscapes
of power, gender, and ethnicity both internally and externally. Occupational folklorists
continue to develop methods for negotiating public representations of occupational
folklife to outsiders through a variety of presentational formats, from demonstrations of
industrial craft to museum exhibitions of skill retention and destruction over time.
The listing of occupational terms and indigenous folksong gave way in American
folklore studies to an increased sensitivity toward the way in which these forms reflected
historical and cultural change within types of work. John Lomax and Nathan Howard
“Jack” Thorp both concerned themselves with cowboy lore, in particular the ways in
which the songs and stories of buckaroos reflected a vernacular idiom unique to the
frontier. Thorp more than Lomax linked this interest in cowboy lore to its Mexican roots;
he also felt no constraints in revising and reshaping the traditional forms he collected
from ranchers and buckaroos. Thorp’s work of 1908 and 1921 was reprinted and
annotated by Austin E. and Alta S.Fife in Songs of the Cowboys (1966), while Lomax’s
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910) is widely available. Both Thorp and
Lomax published in formats that extended the study of occupational folklore beyond the
academy into the popular marketplace. They conducted fieldwork at a time when the
great cattle drives continued from Southwestern ranches to railheads in Colorado and
Montana.
The interest in uniquely American occupations also led regional collectors of folksong
into the logging camps, mining regions, and farming areas to collect the indigenous songs
and stories of work. Phillips Barry, Fannie Eckstorm, Mary Smyth, and others combed
bunkhouses and boarding houses to identify locally recognized singers and storytellers.
Although their published anthologies evinced comparative scholarship of some scope,
their studies remain somewhat limited because of bowdlerization and the alteration of
texts to appeal to local sensibilities. The regional collections also reveal comparative
material of some interest between regions (the crosscut saw of the Northeast becomes the “Swede-fiddle” or “misery-whip” of the West); however, these collections did not
attempt to place their material in broader occupational contexts.
Following Lomax’s published collection in 1910, a young newspaperman in
Pennsylvania, George Korson, became interested in the songs and stories of anthracite
coal miners. He compiled material from the mining communities of Pennsylvania in
Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miner (1927). Korson’s view was that the mine was
an occupational, but, more importantly, an industrial, site where workers were isolated
from contemporary American society, living in a semiprimitive state and exhibiting an
active “folk imagination” that generated a tremendous body of folksong and other lore.
As he continued his collecting and publishing of this material, Korson became aware of
the unique forms taken by occupational folklore in an industrialized setting. His
willingness to shift from a search for specific types of song and story among a peasantlike class of homogeneous workers in the mine patch gave way to an understanding of the
complexity and diversity of industrial expression. His ability to make this transition
places him in a unique position in American studies of occupational folklore. Korson
maintained an interest in publicly presenting miners and their lore through folk festivals
and through his recordings and publications at the Library of Congress’ Archive of
American Folk-Song. He challenged festival organizers who sought to popularize and
commercialize these expressive forms by demanding that the miners be presented as
skilled workers who performed traditions from their communities rather than as singers and storytellers who happened to be miners.
The impact of ideology on occupational folklore was most dramatically reflected in
concepts of social responsibility found in the works of Benjamin A.Botkin and Archie
Green. Botkin’s experiences as an editor for the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s led
him to recognize the power inherent in publishing the stories and experiences of
industrial labor. Botkin sought to present this lore to as many people as possible through
books, articles, and dramatizations so that the strength and the pathos of the occupational
experience could educate the general public regarding the realities (positive and negative)
of American industrial life. Botkin published many “treasuries” of his collections, with
the bulk of the occupational material appearing in Sidewalks of America (1954) and (with
Alvin Harlow) A Treasury of Railroad Folklore (1953). Botkin’s eclectic collections
combined personalexperience narratives of engineers, cab drivers, steelworkers and
policemen with material clipped from newspapers and other published sources.
Archie Green’s Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded CoalMining Songs (1972), in the
issues it raised and the background of its author, suggests a linkage to the impulses of
Botkin and his contemporaries that continues to shape research in occupational folklore.
A former shipwright and union activist in San Francisco, Green combined an interest in
industrial craftsmanship with an insider’s view of the world of work. His book chronicled
the role played by recorded music as it is actually received and reinterpreted in mining
communities. He illustrated how folklore both shapes and reflects an occupational
worldview that is at once political, linked to work-related concepts of skill and shared
knowledge, and in direct opposition to the occupational culture and worldview of owners
and managers. Like Korson, Green fought for the accurate presentation of workers’ skills
and lore in public contexts; largely through his efforts, the Smithsonian Institution has
included occupational folklore in the Working Americans section of the Festival of
American Folklife since the late 1960s. Green provided a link between the craft traditions
of organized labor and the academic study of occupational and labor lore that continues
to exert a strong influence on those conducting research in the field. In Only a Miner,
Green wrote that there is “…an observable blurring and overlap in the terms industrial,
occupations, labor, or worker when combined with folklore. Hence, industrial lore may
be an umbrella term broad enough to cover all job processes as well as urban living,
unionism, radicalism, social reform, civil disobedience, and political action” (Green
1972).
Perhaps the most influential comparatist and scholar in the field of occupational
folklore was Wayland D.Hand. In his article “American Occupational and Industrial
Folklore: The Miner” (Hand 1969), Hand traced the study of mining traditions
throughout the Western world and called for additional ethnological comparisons of
occupational tradition. Hand’s exhaustive comparative research and his initiation of an
international dialogue about occupational tradition across cultures provide a potential for
more global studies of work culture and its expressive dimensions.
In his treatment of the folklore of miners below and above ground, Hand deait with a
wide range of topics of current concern, including the role of occupational accident
accounts in a trade and their relationship to beliefs, customs, and expectations. He also
examined the naming and use of tools and skills, the development of clothing and
occupational gear, pranks and initiations, jokes and legends, and the impact of
occupational culture upon the wider community. Hand maintained in his work with Western miners that in spite of technological change, occupational folklore would
continue to form an important part of any work experience.
Although Hand and Green shaped and honed the concepts of occupational and
industrial folklore that continue to demarcate the field, there are a number of other
influences that directly or indirectly relate to the development of this specialty. These
include investigations of political forces or movements that affect or reflect occupational
culture, urban studies that include occupational culture in their investigations, studies of a
cultural-historic and materialistic nature that focus on work within a specific culture (both
folklife and ethnographic), investigations of specific expressive genres (narratives,
customs, belief systems, and the like) within occupational settings, and approaches to
occupational culture that attempt to apply their findings to specific problems or conflicts
within the community and link occupational folklore to political or oppositional strategies
for the amelioration of these conflicts.
The political dimension of occupational folklore has been most dramatically expressed
in the protest songs and laments generated in the early days of American industrial labor
organization. Korson documented the importance of disaster ballads and protest songs
sung by men like Con Carbon and Ed Foley about the Avondale mine disaster, the Coal
Creek rebellion, and the Ludlow massacre in Colorado. John Greenway provided the first
broad survey of protest songs in his American Folksongs of Protest (1953). Greenway
refuted the scholarly requirement that all folksongs must be traditional (that is, passed
over at least two generations) and must have lost their identity as a consciously composed
piece. He found that not only did many mining, lumbering, and agricultural communities
recognize poets and songwriters, but these individuals captured cultural history and
occupational experience in a compelling manner that resulted in the collective use of
these forms over time as traditional documents linked to place.
During the 1950s and 1960s, labor and protest songs moved even further away from
the local occupational community, yet their mass-audience impact through radio,
television, and records was felt strongly during the civil rights struggles and the antiwar
movement. Fully documented by R.Serge Denisoff and Richard Reuss, this era of protest
music and folksong revival in urban industrial settings (termed the “proletarian
renaissance” by Denisoff), revealed the adaptability of both labor protest tunes and texts
to fit the struggles, frustrations, and social contexts of a new generation. This shift from a
concentration on occupational folksong text to a closer examination of how that text is
consumed by an audience reflects a thematic and a theoretical shift in the production and
analysis of these materials.
Thematically the songs of the early days of labor organization (such as “Solidarity
Forever” and “Hold the Fort for We Are Coming”) are adapted to new audiences and new
struggles; folklorists are beginning to appreciate how the material is consumed by wider
audiences through the electronic media. As long as the material addresses itself to the
beliefs and cultural concerns of people who derive at least a portion of their social identity from their
work, these songs must be considered a significant aspect of occupational folklore. A
particular song or style of music—for example, a country-western song about an
alienated drifter or angry workers who quit their jobs as a matter of principle for unfair
treatment by the boss—can be used as a rhetorical device within the group to make
oppositional statements about parallel sentiments or feelings. The seminal work of
Américo Paredes and José Limón extends this social and cultural analysis of traditional
songs and texts as they emerge from ethnic and class conflict on the Texas-Mexican
border. The work of these scholars links the Mexican border ballad (corrido) and other
cultural forms such as the collective term “chicano” not only to specific historical
incidents between Anglos and Mexicanos—more important, they analyze how these
expressive forms provide political and personal opportunities for active opposition to
Anglo racism and violence toward Mexicanos.
In addition to the literature on labor protest songs and current approaches to urban
folklore that relate directly to any consideration of occupational folklife, a body of
materials that concerns historical and contemporary work processes and techniques has
been generated by folklife scholars, both in the United States and Europe. The concept of
“folklife” (German Volkskunde, Swedish folkliv) is more inclusive than “folklore,”
embracing the material as well as the verbal and “intangible” elements of traditional
expression. Articulated in early articles by Don Yoder and Warren Roberts, the folklife
movement gained increased recognition in the work of Henry Glassie, particularly his
empirical, cultural-geographic work on large patterns of material expression in the Eastern United States and later in his more critical and reflexive Passing the Time in
Balleymenone (1982). Glassie not only brings the fieldworker’s eye and ear for felicitous
detail, but also provides one of the more complete theoretical backgrounds to date (1995)
for the relationships among culture, material expression, and worldview as these elements
have been experienced over generations of crofters and peat cutters in Northern Ireland.
Other scholarly works in occupational folklore, such as Horace Beck’s Folklore and
the Sea (1973), Tristram Potter Coffin and Hennig Cohen’s Folklore from the Working
Folk of America (1973), Betty Messenger’s Picking up the Linen Threads (1975), Edward
Ives’ Joe Scott: Woodsman Songmaker (1964)—as well as Ives’ other fme biographies of
worker-poets—and Patrick B.Mullen’s I Heard the Old Fisherman Say: Folklore of the
Texas Gulf Coast (1978), reflect the comparatist and scholarly treatment of occupational
traditions begun by Hand. A more specific study of industrial folklore, completed by
Bruce Nickerson in 1974, adapted current theoretical approaches toward folk craft and
folk community to an industrial machine shop in New England. Nickerson’s linkage of
existing models of folklore that were based on the isolation and separation of a
community from outside influence, as well as his sensitivity to the variety of expressive
forms in the shop, makes his article “Is There a Folk in the Factory?” (Journal of
American Folklore 1974 87:133–139) a milestone. Research in the Irish textile industry
by Betty Messenger and Southern textile communities by Doug DeNatale and Allen
Tullos, extend the work experience into broader political and social constructs of
personal identity and collective notions of class.
In 1978 Robert H.Byington edited a special issue of Western Folklore titled “Working
Americans: Contemporary Approaches to Occupational Folklife,” which applied new
theories of folklore as communication to the study of work culture. In that issue, Robert
McCarl, Roger D.Abrahams, Jack Santino, Archie Green, and Byington illustrate the
significance of studying “occupational folklife”—the entire range of expressive behavior
in work settings, from the techniques required to succeed and survive on the job to the
customs marking passage through the work culture and the verbal arts that provide a
context for a range of experiences, both on and off the job.
The model of occupational folklife that forms the basis for that collection of essays
was derived from fieldwork designed to produce public presentations of work at the
Smithsonian’s 1976 Festival of American Folklife. The participation of trade unionists
and industrial craftspeople with folklorists in the development of the skills
demonstrations and narrative workshops represented more than sixty trades, from meat
cutting to firefighting, and from emergency-room technicians to air-traffic controllers.
These presentations provided an intensity of meaning for large-scale study and
presentation of occupational culture. At a time when de-industrialization,
computerization, and robotics were causing massive changes in industry, and the
constituencies of organized labor were shifting to adjust to a hostile political climate, this
celebration of skill, custom, and verbal art in the contemporary workplace provided a
glimpse into a historical plateau of American labor that may not recur.
Following the Smithsonian festival and the research that led to it, a number of
folklorists published studies devoted to the analysis of occupational culture in a variety of
settings. Jack Santino investigated the linkage of class, ethnicity, and organized labor
among Pullman porters; Robert McCarl addressed issues of cultural change among urban
firefighters; Maggie Holtzberg-Call documented the ethnohistory of hot-type printers;
Paula Johnson and Janet Gilmore portrayed the maritime trades on the eastern shore of
Maryland and boatbuilding on the Oregon coast, respectively; and Alicia Gonzales and
Suzanne Serrif used feminist and critical theory to analyze the relationships between
work technique and changing social relationships within Mexicano culture. Although
theoretically and methodologically distinct, all of these documentations of occupational
folklife draw upon the ethnographer’s goal of cultural holism, while at the same time
seeking to portray both the verbal and the non-verbal aspects of patterned communication
in the workplace. Contemporary scholars in occupational folklife have retained their
attentiveness of work-group values and ethics, and it is within these stratified yet
egalitarian social structures that they continue to operate.
The study of occupational folklore in the United States parallels the evolution of
folklore methodology in general, from the desire of the early ballad collectors to rescue
surviv-ing ballads and songs, to the impact of European-inspired interest in skill and
material expression, to the more recent interest in the intersection between work culture,
class, ethnicity, and gender. Concurrent with these theoretical and academic interests,
occupational folklorists—from Lomax to Green, Korson, and Hand—have maintained an
awareness that public presentation of private cultural materials must be negotiated by the
researcher with insiders. Public presentations of work culture from studies of firefighters
and textile workers by Robert McCarl, museum presentations of slate- and woodsworkers
by Catherine Schwoefferman in New York state, and publicly supported exhibitions of
transit workers developed by Steve Zeitlin and the organization City Lore in New York
City—all such presentations attest to the continued importance of this collaborative
posture. Contemporary cultural theories regarding the intersection of power and control
inherent within the documentary process suggest that only through a more democratic,
egalitarian relationship between folklorist and cultural representative will it be possible to
continue the study and presentation of occupational folklore.
Key questions remain concerning the rapid transformation of work as global shifts of
capital result in abrupt and sometimes disastrous changes in labor markets. The
challenge—for workers, trade unionists, and folklorists—will be to measure these
changes as they are reflected in the various human and oppositional forms that they will
inevitably create.
Robert S.McCarl
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