Torching the Fink Books and Other Essays On Vernacular Culture

by Archie Green xxvii + 232 pp.

Torching the Fink Books and Other Essays On Vernacular Culture. By Archie Green, foreword by Robert Cantwell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xxvii + 232. Index, bibliography, photos, sketches, afterword, bibliography of Green's writings 1959--2001. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

In this welcome collection of one new essay and eleven previously published articles sampled from the writing career of folklorist and labor activist Archie Green, it is clear that Green's contributions to the discipline and to public policy have been profound and extensive. The afterword, which Green titles "Looking Back," traces his eclectic influences and life decisions in a way that illustrates his advocacy for the importance of collecting and preserving laborlore in folklore studies, unions, and public art. But it is the essays themselves that best demonstrate how wide-ranging and important his work as a folklorist has been. As Robert Cantwell writes in the book's foreword, it is "the whole range of [Green's] activities from labor activism to congressional lobbying (for the passage of the American Folklife Preservation Act of 1976) to teaching, writing, and organizing on behalf of folklore, that more than anything else points to the nature of a uniquely human communicative power whose products . . . remain precious precisely because the thing itself can only be tracked or traced, but never captured" (xiv). Further, Green's work underscores the idea that "we are all social beings, and that from pride and selfishness nothing, of any kind, is ultimately to be gained" (xxv).

Green's essays cover topics ranging from the expressive nature of labor lore and the intersections between ethnicity and labor (in the essays "Laborlore" and "Dutchman: An On-The-Job Etymology"), to folk music and cowboy culture and the politically-charged words that are used to describe them ("Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol, "A Folklorist's Creed and a Folksinger's Gift," "Austin's Cosmic Cowboys: Words in Collision"). Also included is an insightful detour into the archival detective work necessary to illuminating such strands of culture ("The Archive's Shores"). Green's work in these articles is intensely etymological, tracing the history, development, and current usage of a term, idea, or practice. As he writes in "A Folklorist's Creed," Green "traces the philosophic travel---the shaping of a particular folklorist's values against a background touching the intersections of folklore and ideology in the U.S." (55). Green's own priorities include public programming that is culturally equitable, and his knowledge of and contributions to public sector work helped pave the way for NEA and NEH support of vernacular arts. In the essay "Stitching Patchwork in Public," Green examines the rise of public sector folklore and the political and ideological tensions that cannot be extricated from such work, while positing a theoretical model to explain what enables academics, curators, and archivists to "step across the public threshold" (157).

Other essays in this collection discuss notable folklorists, including Thomas Benton (1889--1975), an artist and political commentator who focused on subjects related to folk artists and vernacular culture and whose pupils included Jackson Pollack. Green includes many prints of Benton's lithographs in this collection. And in "Remembering Jack Fitch, Pile Butt and Artist, on Labor Day 1994," Green paints a vivid portrait of an "everyday artist" and laborer (175). In still another piece reflecting on his mentor, Peter Tamony, Green emphasizes Tamony's creative scholarship both inside and outside the academy as an etymologist and as a "keeper of a Celtic clan's lore" (185).

And finally, the title essay examines the 1934 Sailor's Union of the Pacific strike, when sailors burned their "fink books" (booklets of identification and performance records that seamen were expected to carry in their pockets). Green carefully traces the usage of the derogatory term "fink" and succeeds in illustrating how "words shift about and are recycled as social conditions change." Few folklorists have so keenly observed such changes and shifts or articulated their significance as well and as variously as Archie Green has in this collection and in his life's work.

Jacqueline L. McGrath
University of Missouri, Columbia