Benjamin A. Botkin - Career

Career

He taught at the University of Oklahoma in the early 1920s, traveled throughout the United States, and married Gertrude Fritz in 1925. He edited the annual Folk-Say from 1929 to 1932 and a "little magazine," Space, from 1934 to 1935. Contributors to Folk-Say included Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Henry Roth, J. Frank Dobie, Louise Pound, Alexander Haggerty Krappe, Archer Taylor, Stanley Vestal, Alain Locke, Sterling Brown, Paul Horgan, and Mari Sandoz. He became national folklore editor and chairman of the Federal Writers' Project in 1938, a post he held until 1941. Along with Charles Seeger, he organized a massive research and recording campaign centered on American music. From 1942 to 1945 Botkin headed the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress where he focused attention on the emerging aspects of folklore in modern life. During that time he also served as president of the American Folklore Society.

At a panel of the 1939 Writers' Congress, which in addition to him included Aunt Molly Jackson, Earl Robinson, and Alan Lomax, Botkin spoke of what the writer had to gain from folklore: "He gains a point of view. The satisfying completeness and integrity of folk art derives from its nature as a direct response of the artist to a group and group experience with which he identifies himself and for which he speaks." Botkin called on writers to utilize folklore in order to "make the inarticulate articulate and above all, to let the people speak in their own voice and tell their own story."