George Korson was an unlikely folklorist. A Ukrainian Jew who immigrated to America as a child, he grew up poor in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Unable to afford college, yet bright and hard-working enough to forge a successful career as a newspaper reporter, he traded on a brief association with Bucknell to advance his standing as a folk-music eminence. Now, 85 years after he led a Bucknell festival that showcased the music and culture of coal miners, Conestoga wagoners, canal boatsmen and more, the University is rediscovering Korson and his work in the coal region.
Korson was drawn to the music of coal country while chronicling the lives of Schuylkill County miners for the Pottsville Republican. Taken with their stories and songs, he did a deep dive into the folklore of the mines — and never came up for air.
“I think every writer in scholarly folklore acknowledges that Korson was the inventor of occupational folk life,” says Angus Gillespie, an American studies professor at Rutgers University and author of Folklorist of the Coal Fields: George Korson’s Life and Works.
Beginning in the 1920s, Korson began collecting songs and making recordings — in the mines, by homely hearths, on back porches — which are now part of the Library of Congress American Folklife Center collection.
By the early 1930s, Korson had gained a reputation as the nation’s leading industrial folklorist, catching the eye of Bucknell president Homer Rainey, a Texan with a keen appreciation for folklore. Korson organized the first Pennsylvania Folk Festival in Allentown on May 3 and 4, 1935. After reading positive newspaper coverage, Rainey contacted Korson and arranged a visit to campus. Korson left his newspaper job in September and became the full-time director of the Pennsylvania Folk Festival at Bucknell University. Just one month later, Rainey resigned to take another job, raising doubts about the festival’s future. But the new president, Arnaud Marts, recognized the public relations value of having Bucknell host the festival.
For the next two years, Bucknell sponsored the festival, which featured a wide range of performers — from Ukrainian and Pennsylvania German folk singers, to re-enactors portraying river raftsmen and sailors to real-life farmers, coal miners, square dancers, ballad singers, street singers, folk dancers, fiddlers and more.
In 1936, Bucknell’s first folk festival was held in Memorial Stadium over three days, achieving “a good balance of different genres from different ethnic groups,” Gillespie wrote in his definitive 1980 Korson biography. However, the anticipated large crowd never materialized, and the 1937 festival program was designed to be less costly and smaller in scale. Heavy rains, which required a move to Lewisburg High School, ensured the second festival would be another money-loser for Bucknell during cash-strapped times.
A trove of documents and photos from the two folk festivals resides in Bucknell’s Special Collections/University Archives. Included is a scathing letter that presidential assistant Paul Hightower sent to “Boss Man.” Hightower complained about Korson’s lack of organizational skills, writing, “When it comes to handling people, he is a complete flop, and when it comes to looking after details, his mind disappears.”
Despite Hightower’s condemnation of Korson’s management skills, Marts held firm that the festival should continue — just not at Bucknell. Beaver College, now Arcadia University, agreed to sponsor the festival in June 1938, but after that, it fizzled. As Gillespie writes, “educational institutions in Pennsylvania like Bucknell University and Beaver College in the late ’30s did not have enough money to sponsor the festival long enough to make it self-supporting.”
In a recent interview, Gillespie points out that Bucknell’s first festival “cost $8,000 to put on, and they recovered $5,000 in costs. So there was only a $3,000 deficit. I think in normal times that deficit would have been acceptable. It was just crushing because of the Depression.”
B. “It is important to capture these cultural expressions of secluded groups before they are lost” was written on the back of this photo.
C. A couple dance a waltz.
D. A minstrel-miner strikes up “Tim Finnegan’s Wake” for a champion jig dancer.
E. Helen Showalter holds folk art, a feature of the festivals.
F. Songs of the Conestoga wagoners were popular at the festival.
Of Hightower’s high dudgeon, well, Gillespie feels it was misplaced: “Hightower, with the Bucknell administration of the day, set Korson up to be a flop. They didn’t give him a staff. I ran a folk festival [in New Jersey] for 40 years, and I had a large staff. You can’t have one person run such a complex event as a folk festival. They brought people into Bucknell from all corners of a very large state. Korson by himself had to arrange for everything — for food, housing and scheduling. And then Hightower blamed him for not being able to take care of everything.”
Korson’s brief but unspectacular association with Bucknell, however, represented “a turning point. His affiliation with Bucknell gave him an imprimatur, a seal of approval,” says Gillespie. “He was on the Bucknell staff, and people just assumed he was a professor and had a Ph.D. Korson did not bother to disabuse them of that notion.”
While at Bucknell, Korson was also able to continue his fieldwork, accompanied by Melvin LeMon, a Bucknell music professor and first director of the University Band. The pair cut 50 acetate discs, according to an article in the journal Ethnomusicology.
After leaving Lewisburg in 1937, Korson continued his journalism career, but also his avocation as a folklorist — collecting, recording and writing about the songs and stories of coal miners. He authored five well-regarded books, including Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miners, Minstrels of the Mine Patch and Black Rock: Mining Folklore of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Korson died in 1967, but his reputation lives on. As does the spirit of his work at Bucknell.
“Part of my long-term vision with our Coal Region Field Station is to honor Korson’s work — getting more light shining on it,” says Shaunna Barnhart, Place Studies Program director in the Bucknell Center for Sustainability & the Environment.
“I’d like to highlight some of his work, but then showcase work that’s happening today that is in the same vein and hopefully use that as a rallying cry to get more people involved in the field station with oral histories.”
Barnhart points out that in the last few years, students and faculty have become more interested in doing not only oral history projects with coal country residents, but arts-focused projects in the region.
Prompted by Barnhart, there are plans to introduce Korson’s work in the classroom this fall. Professor Bret Leraul, comparative & digital humanities, will include Korson in his seminar Arts of Extraction: Hemispheric Representations of Ecological Injustice. “Students will be working with the materials as part of research projects into the legacies and cultures of extractivism, in this case, mining in the Anthracite Coal Region,” he says.
Learning of Bucknell’s renewed interest in Korson delights his biographer. Gillespie’s mind races, imagining a resurrection of the festivals Bucknell hosted 85 years ago: “I would love to see Bucknell pick up the pieces and try again.”
B. Anthracite miners tune up.
C. The Pennsylvania Street Criers came from Philadelphia to perform.
D. The WPA Gypsy Ensemble of Allegheny County sang and danced.
E. The Jungletown Quartet of Canton offered songs of the lumber camps.
B. Anthracite miners tune up.
C. The Pennsylvania Street Criers came from Philadelphia to perform.
D. The WPA Gypsy Ensemble of Allegheny County sang and danced.
E. The Jungletown Quartet of Canton offered songs of the lumber camps.