Kenneth S. Goldstein, 1927-1995.

[From Dirty Linen #62 February/March 1996]

During a blindingly powerful rainstorm at 10:24 PM on the evening of Saturday, November 11, Kenneth S. Goldstein died of cancer at his home in Philadelphia. He was 68 years old.

To sum up Goldstein's accomplishments on a cold white page is impossible, nonetheless the effort must be made. Goldstein devoted his professional and personal life to folk song and folk music; a mere list of his different roles is impressive. He was a folklorist, an educator, a scholar, a record producer, a festival organizer, a collector, a publisher, an author, an editor, and a fervent folk song enthusiast. The overlapping worlds of folk music, folk song, and academic folklore study are immeasurably richer thanks to Goldstein's efforts.

Goldstein's career in folk music, and his influence on the field, began in the 1950s. As a fieldworker and a record producer, the work he did during the 1950s and early 60s alone made him a towering figure in the folk music revival. He conducted short-term field studies in upstate New York (1951), in North Carolina (1952-1957), and in Massachusetts (1953). He also did ethnographic folklore fieldwork in northeastern Scotland (1959-60), on a Fulbright scholarship. During the same years, he served as folk music director for Stinson and Riverside records, and as folk and blues director of Prestige records, issuing over five hundred LPs of various kinds of folk music, on which he was listed as editor, producer, or both.

Using the knowledge and experience he picked up in the field, as well as a sharp mind for business (he earned both his Bachelor's and his Master's degrees in Business Administration), Goldstein set out with one goal in mind: to sell folksongs to people. He involved himself both with folksingers (that period's term for people who performed folksongs of and for their own community) and with singers of folksongs (their term for revivalists). Not only did he genuinely enjoy and appreciate the various styles within the revival, he also saw the revival as a way to bring economic clout into the service of the tradition. "One Oscar Brand record would pay for four Jeannie Robertson records," he once said, "it was that simple." His larger concern was always to make folksongs available to the general public.

Some of the albums of which Goldstein was proud include recordings by Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd, by Jean Ritchie, by the Rev. Gary Davis, by Sara Cleveland, and by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. A few of these were definitive moments in the histories of their particular genres. The Clancy Brothers' albums, for instance, started a revolution in Irish music, introducing the guitar and the "ballad-group" sound into the popular mainstream of Irish folk music. Albums by Gary Davis, Lightnin' Hopkins, and other blues pioneers had a similarly profound effect on American Blues and Rock and Roll. MacColl and Lloyd's records were among the first of English and Scottish music to which Americans had access, and they opened up a vast new market that transformed the folk scene there. And within the American and Canadian revivals, Goldstein gave many people their first opportunities to record.

The recordings Goldstein produced were influential not only in the revival, but in academic folklore circles as well. Many now-established academic folklorists came into the field because they had been captivated by songs they had heard on records. The detailed liner notes, written by Goldstein, had whetted their appetites and sent them to universities to learn more. Some folklorists, like Roger Abrahams and Barre Toelken, got their start as guitar-wielding folk singers, and recorded albums with Goldstein. Some of Goldstein's recordings were created with teaching in mind; one nine LP set by MacColl and Lloyd contained a representative sampling of Child Ballads, while one LP featured nothing but versions of "The Unfortunate Rake," juxtaposed in order to demonstrate different kinds of variation. These contributions aside, Goldstein's main impact on the academic field was yet to come.

In 1958, Goldstein entered graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. He went there to work with MacEdward Leach in the English department, but took more coursework in anthropology, expressing in his curriculum the classic dilemma of the folklorist. But the young folklorist was lucky; while he was a student, Folklore became a separate department, and Goldstein was its first Ph.D. His doctoral dissertation, entitled A Guide for Fieldworkers in Folklore, was quickly published as a book. It was the first manual of its kind and an invaluable companion for generations of students in the field. Goldstein remained at Penn after graduation, was hired as a professor, and rose steadily to the top rank of American folklorists.

At Penn, Professor Goldstein ("Kenny" to his colleagues and graduate students) had a reputation for excellent teaching and a knack for administration. The courses he taught most frequently were Folklore of Britain and Ireland, American Folksong and Ballad, and Folk Narrative. His lectures were fascinating and engaging, serious but laced with humor. Both undergraduates and graduate students left his courses feeling they had learned from a scholar of breadth and depth. He chaired the graduate program for a total of about twenty years, during which time he built the department into one of the best in the world. His excellence as a teacher and scholar was also recognized elsewhere. He spent a brief period as the head of the Folklore Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and was in demand as a lecturer all over the world; during the period of his illness, he had been scheduled to spend the semester in Edinburgh, Scotland, teaching by invitation at the School of Scottish Studies. He was a fellow of both the American Folklore Society and the American Anthropological Association, and a council member of England's Folklore Society. He served as president of the American Folklore Society in 1975 and 1976.

While his academic career was advancing, Goldstein maintained an interest in the folk revival. He continued to produce records occasionally, but was more active as an organizer. One of the things of which he was most proud was having brought so much overseas talent--people from Britain and Ireland--to perform at American festivals. Some musicians, like Mick Moloney, were bitten by the folklore bug and emigrated to America to study with Goldstein. The Philadelphia Folksong Society (which runs the Philadelphia Folk Festival) and the Philadelphia Ceili Group (which runs an annual festival of Irish music and dance) have both benefited enormously over the years from his consulting and his organizing. In the last year of his life, Goldstein was recognized by a special award from each of these folk music institutions.

Goldstein took every moment he could to go and do fieldwork. Scotland, Ireland, England, and Australia were favorite destinations, but his most sustained interest was in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. He made a summer field trip there in every year since 1976, collecting thousands of songs and other items of folklore in their natural context: often the kitchens of houses in small outports. Every country he visited was transformed by his presence--that of a foreigner who nonetheless was convinced that local traditions were crucially important to the world. At his funeral a Canadian folklorist said of him, "Kenny changed the way we looked at ourselves as Canadians." There is a special entry on Goldstein in the Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore, testifying to his importance in that country. The well-wishes that he received from English, Irish and Scottish friends during his illness were staggering both in volume and in heartfelt emotion. He was a man who touched lives wherever he went.
Every academic knows the proverb "Publish or Perish," but Goldstein gave it new meaning. In addition to the Guide, Goldstein authored or edited seven books and published some thirty academic articles on different kinds of folklore, including such diverse material as folk art, riddles, children's games, and bawdy monologues. But his commitment to publishing went still deeper. In 1960, he started a publishing company to make out-of-print classics of folklore scholarship available to new generations of scholars--ensuring that the classics of the discipline and the discipline itself would not perish in his lifetime. This service to academic folklore was inestimable, and will remain one of his lasting legacies.

No celebration of Goldstein's accomplishments would be complete without mentioning his collections. Goldstein collected folklore during his fieldwork, of course, but he also collected other things, including books about folklore and recordings of folk music. His house was a library, and more than one student came into the discipline after staying at the Goldsteins' and being thunderstruck at the vast and fascinating collection. In addition, Goldstein was one of the world's great collectors of street literature: the broadsides, chapbooks and songsters on which folksongs, rhymes, artwork, and other treasures of poor people's culture were published for centuries in Britain, Ireland, Canada and the U.S. Several libraries in the U.S. and Canada have given space to housing parts of Goldstein's remarkable collections, another legacy he has left to the scholarly world.

Although he accomplished a remarkable amount in his years of scholarship, there are several projects in progress that Goldstein was not able to complete. A book of Canadian bawdy songs that he was editing with Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke will most likely be the first to see publication. Other books that Goldstein projected include songbooks covering the repertoires of three of his star informants: Sara Cleveland of New York, Dorman Ralph of Newfoundland, and Lucy Stewart of Aberdeenshire. In addition, he hoped to prepare an edition of an important manuscript song collection from Long Island, a scholarly book on the importance of broadsides and songsters to the American folksong repertoire, a work on the songs of African-American slaves and their descendants in upper Canada, and a multi-volume, annotated edition of the four thousand songs he collected in Newfoundland and Labrador. He was also editing a series of ten recordings of English-language storytelling, four of which are complete and ready to be issued.

Kenny Goldstein wore many hats (many vests would be more literally accurate; he included them in his passion for collecting). None suited him as well as his favorite role, that of a dedicated husband, father and grandfather. He is survived by a wonderful and loving family: his wife Rochelle, daughters Rhoda and Diane, sons Karl and Scott, and grandsons Russell and Matthew. He is also survived by numberless friends, colleagues, students, and singers to whom he gave so much.

--Steve Winick

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