Roger D. Abrahams

Early life and education

Roger D. Abrahams was a Philadelphia native, born in 1933 into a well-off German-Jewish household. After graduating from Swarthmore in 1955, he earned a master’s from Columbia in 1959, then completed a PhD in English and Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania in 1961. His dissertation examined the verbal play he’d heard from African American doo-wop singers in South Philadelphia, a study hailed as an early effort to treat urban Black expression seriously. This work later became his 1970 book Deep Down in the Jungle.

Career

Abrahams' career began almost immediately after he obtained his Ph.D., first at the University of Texas as instructor (1960–63), assistant professor (1963–66), and then associate professor (1966–69) in the Department of English. He became a full professor at Texas in 1969 in the departments of English and Anthropology and remained there for ten years. While a professor, he also served for two years beginning in 1968 as the associate director for the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Oral History and for five years beginning in 1974 as department chairman.

During his time at Texas, Abrahams drew on his research to produce policy documents and teaching materials for the Texas Educational Agency, which refuted the prevailing 'deficiency' approach to teaching African American students. From Texas he moved to Scripps College and Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he was Alexander H. Kenan Professor of Humanities and Anthropology for six years. In 1986 he returned to the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught Folklore and Folklife and was named the Hum Rosen Professor of Folklore and Folklife, and founded the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, before retiring in 2002.

Abrahams was a strong advocate for public folklore and was a major force in the creation of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.

Influence

Abrahams has been described as one of the 'first researchers to engage in nuanced intelligent discussions on the folkways of the African Diaspora in the Americas'. It has been argued that his early work on speech-patterns 'represented Black speech, and by extension, Black people in a different, more favorable light'. In an obituary in the Journal of American Folklore Abrahams was described as having 'the most fertile mind of the grand generation of American folklorists'. He was also hailed as a 'pioneer of the performance approach [to folklore studies], also contributing to our understanding of folk song, narrative and speech play, proverb and riddle, folk drama and festival, creolization, folklore and literature, folklore theory, and the intellectual history of folklore studies'.

Selected publications

Abrahams published extensively. His 1962 article 'Playing the dozens' appeared in the Journal of American Folklore. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (1970) was followed by 'The Negro Stereotype: Negro Folklore and the Riots' (1970) and Positively Black (1970). His 1972 essay 'Personal Power and Social Restraint in the Definition of Folklore' appeared in Toward New Perspectives in Folklore.

He wrote Man as Animal: The Stereotype in Culture (1976) and Talking Black (1976). He edited African Folktales: Traditional Stories of the Black World (1983) and The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture (1983), and co-edited After Africa: Extracts from British Travel Accounts and Journals (1983) with John F. Szwed. Afro-American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World (1985) was followed by 'Child Ballads in the West Indies: Familiar Fabulations, Creole Performances' (1987).

Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (1992) examined African American culture on plantations. 'Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism in Folkloristics' (1993) and 'Questions of Criolian Contagion' (2003) appeared in the Journal of American Folklore. Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices (2005) and Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul (2006, with co-authors) were his later works.

Did You Know?

• Abrahams recorded a solo LP in 1962 titled Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor and Other Folk Songs.
• He lived in Greenwich Village for a period and recorded with Dave Van Ronk.
• As a performer, Abrahams influenced 'among others, the young Robert Zimmerman (Bob Dylan)'.
• He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965.
• Abrahams served as president of the American Folklore Society in 1979 and was awarded the Kenneth Goldstein Award for Lifetime Academic Leadership in 2005.