Remembering Joe Hickerson, 1935-2025

Note: When Joe Hickerson passed away last August, we immediately noted it on the AFC Facebook page, and intended to follow up with this blog post on October 20, which would have been his 90th birthday. A government shutdown and the holiday season intervened, but here is our delayed celebration of the life and legacy of Joe Hickerson. 

Joe Hickerson, a folklorist, archivist, folksinger, and longtime staff member of the American Folklife Center, passed away peacefully in his care home in Portland, Oregon on August 17, 2025. He is survived by his son Mike, his partner Ruth Bolliger, a grandson, and many friends and fans. Joe was an important public face for folklore and folk music, and his passing will be seen as the end of an era among folk music enthusiasts, as well as for those of us at AFC.

Joseph Charles Hickerson was born on October 20, 1935, in Lake Forest, Illinois, and spent his early years in New Haven, Connecticut, where he graduated from high school in 1953. He learned to sing and play the guitar as a child and became seriously interested in folksong while at Oberlin College. During his senior year he was elected first President of the Oberlin Folk Song Club. In this capacity he met many of the leading folk musicians of the day, including Pete Seeger, and helped organize the first Oberlin Folk Festival in May 1957.

During that school year Joe also made his first contact with the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress. He already knew of the archive through books by Alan Lomax and Benjamin Botkin, and later through folk albums edited by Kenneth S. Goldstein, which featured songs learned from the archive. But his first real contact with the archive came out of a meeting with Ohio folksinger and folklorist Anne Grimes (whose collection is now also part of the AFC archive). Joe mentioned to Grimes that he might want to pursue graduate study in folk music. Grimes suggested that Joe write to her friend Rae Korson, then head of the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song, for advice. In a November 1956 letter still preserved in the archive’s correspondence files, he wrote:

“Dear Mrs. Korson, I am a senior at Oberlin College and I am interested in folk music, even though I’m a physics major. At the moment, I have made no plans for next year, but the possibility of pursuing a career in folk music is present in my mind. However, I have little idea of what avenues are open to college graduates in such a field. Upon speaking to Mrs. Grimes of the Ohio Folklore Society, she suggested that I write to you, for you might be able to advise me as to what colleges offer graduate work in folk music and folklore, and to whom I may write for further information about schools or jobs. Thank you very much for your trouble.”

Rae Korson wrote back, suggesting Indiana University at Bloomington. Joe took her advice and applied. While waiting to hear from Indiana, he joined an eight-piece folk group called “The Folksmiths,” which toured in the summer of 1957 and then recorded an album for Folkways.

In September 1957, Joe Hickerson entered graduate school at Indiana University, studying folklore, ethnomusicology, and anthropology under Richard M. Dorson, George Herzog, and other prominent scholars. During his first summer in graduate school, Joe visited the Library of Congress and met Rae Korson in person. In 1961, on a National Science Foundation grant, he returned to the Library of Congress to do research in the archive, which led to his master’s thesis, an annotated bibliography of Native American music.

Joe stayed in school until 1963, continuing his graduate work in folklore and ethnomusicology. He began a doctoral dissertation about the ballad “Our Goodman,” for which he compiled a comprehensive list of published and recorded versions. During his graduate school years, Joe began to appear as a solo artist at folk clubs and coffeehouses, hosted a radio show, and got his start as a folklore archivist, directing the Indiana Folklore Archive.

In late 1962, Joe came to Washington D.C. again for the American Folklore Society meeting and paid another visit to Rae Korson. He later recalled:

She called me in and said ‘sit down.’ And she said, Joe, we have an opening for a reference librarian. How would you like to apply? And here are the forms. And so I applied, and I got the job.

Joe returned to Indiana and finished his coursework, then reported to the Library in June 1963. His new job effectively put an end to his graduate studies, and he never finished the PhD. However, his time at the Library of Congress proved to be a very successful career. In 1974, he became the head of the Archive, and in 1978, when the Archive was transferred to the new American Folklife Center, Joe came with it.

During his career at the Library of Congress, Joe helped countless researchers, singers, and musicians find materials in the archive for their books, articles, albums, and performance repertoires. In addition to providing innumerable individual reference responses, Joe improved research tools by continuing to annotate the archive’s card catalog and by compiling topical finding aids.

Jennifer Cutting, who worked with Joe for over a decade at the Archive, remembered Joe’s friendliness as a major part of the researcher experience:

Whoever walked through that door to our Folklife Reading Room, Joe would find out where they were from, and within 30 seconds he had found umpteen mutual friends or songs they both knew that had been collected in their state; and told them a joke; and within one minute, they’d been given a subject file to peruse on the songs and topics closest to their hearts. And, however long they stayed, by the time they left us, they left as friends.

As Jennifer remembered, Joe told each researcher a joke or two (or more). This introduces another aspect of Joe that will be long remembered: his sense of humor. In addition to jokes of all kinds, he was always on the lookout for humorous folksongs, whether clean or bawdy. He loved song parodies and maintained a file of some of the ones he considered funniest. Most prominently, he loved puns, the sillier the better. One of the last times I saw him in person he was wearing a T-Shirt that said “a pun at maturity is fully groan,” which manages to be a pun about puns and also a wry commentary on most people’s feelings about them!

In addition to presiding over the reference desk, Joe managed a successful intern and volunteer program. For 30 years he encouraged students to work with the ethnographic materials here, and as a result many people in the professional folklore and ethnomusicology community were able to develop archival and library skills, pursue research interests, and make serious contributions to the Archive and to the field. Ann Hoog, who overlapped with Joe for about 6 months and inherited the volunteer internship program from him, commented: “His model of creating deep archival research projects for interns resulting in our geographic finding aids series provided invaluable experience and joy for what must have been about 500 people over the years.”

Joe also took steps to help the Center financially. In 1978, with help from his friend, musician Michael Cooney, he helped establish the Friends of the Folk Archive fund, to which you can still contribute at this link. The fund allows donors to give money to the Library of Congress specifically to help with projects involving the American Folklife Center’s archive.

Joe retired as head of the Archive of Folk Culture on July 1, 1998. He always had a mind for details, and he chose his retirement date because it was the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Archive. His own 35 years there, he reckoned, were one-half the life of the archive to that date. “This half-life phenomenon resonated with me,” he explained, “having been a physics major at Oberlin College.”

Five years after Joe retired, in 2003, he visited the Library and sat for a long interview with Jennifer Cutting. He passed on his memories of the archive so they could become part of the institutional memory of AFC. Those interviews are available for viewing in the Folklife Reading Room. During that visit, he also met Nicole Saylor, the current Director of the American Folklife Center, who was then a Parsons fellow doing research in the archive. Nicki remembered:

I met Joe while researching at AFC during my Parsons Fellowship in 2003. As I read through correspondence between Sidney Robertson Cowell and Alan Lomax, Joe regaled me with stories about them. I was so struck by the cast of characters who built this archives, Joe included. He was generous and spirited, and the whole research experience turbocharged my interest in this work.

In 2014, Joe visited the Library again for another interview with Jennifer, which was shot on video before a live audience as part of the Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series. You can watch that video online at this link.

Joe was an important resource for the public beyond the Library of Congress as well. For years he ran the “Song Finder” column in “Sing Out!” Magazine, in which he answered people’s questions about traditional songs. It was a form of pre-emptive reference work, in which he looked for people with questions rather than waiting for them to come to the Library. Joe was also bibliographer, council member, and secretary of the Society for Ethnomusicology, chairman of the archiving committee of the American Folklore Society, founder and president of the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, and member of the advisory boards for “Sing Out!” and “Foxfire,” as well as a book review editor, music critic, and lecturer.

As a musician, Joe recorded several albums of his own, and played at folk festivals and coffeehouses all over North America. He introduced a lot of songs to much more widespread use in the folk revival, including “Bright Morning Stars are Rising,” “Drive Dull Care Away,” and “Good Fish Chowder.”

Two of Joe’s accomplishments were particularly important to him, to the point that he included them on his business card for many years. One was that he was the lead singer on the Folksmiths’ recording of “Kum Ba Yah,” which he reckoned to be the first folk revival recording of the classic spiritual better known as “Kumbaya.” The second was that, inspired by an early version of Pete Seeger’s song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” Joe wrote two additional verses, creating the song’s circular structure. Seeger liked Joe’s additions so much he incorporated them into the song and credited Joe as co-author.

Joe was also proud to have come from a musical family. His great-grandfather was the prolific hymnodist John R. Sweney, whose compositions include a popular melody for “Beulah Land.” Among his family possessions, Joe found some wax cylinders of Sweney singing his own compositions. He donated the cylinders to the Library of Congress.

One of them contains the hymn “Only Remembered,” with music by Sweney and lyrics by Horatius Bonar. Bonar’s words, as sung by Sweney, provide a moving epitaph for Sweney’s great-grandson, Joe Hickerson:

Fading away like the dew in the morning,
Soaring from earth to a home in the sun–
Thus would I pass from the earth and its toiling,
Only remembered by what I have done.

Chorus: Only remembered, only remembered,
Only remembered by what I have done;
Only remembered, only remembered,
Only remembered by what I have done.

Shall I be miss’d if by others succeeded,
Reaping the fields I in springtime have sown?
No, for the sower may pass from his labors,
Only remembered by what he has done.

[Chorus]

Only the truth that in life we have spoken,
Only the seed that on earth we have sown;
These shall pass onward when we are forgotten,
Fruits of the harvest and what we have done.

[Chorus]

Oh, when the Saviour shall make up His jewels,
When the bright crowns of rejoicing are won,
Then shall His weary and faithful disciples,
All be remembered by what they have done.

[Chorus]

Let’s hear the clylinder in the player below. (The transfer was made by David Giovannoni and comes to us courtesy of Archeophone Records.)

Joe Hickerson will long be remembered by what he has done.