Each year, the Public Programs Section of the American Folklore Society joins with the AFS Executive Board to award the Benjamin A. Botkin Prize. This annual award honors an individual for significant lifetime achievement in public folklore. New York Folklore joins with the folklore community in congratulating North Country folklorist, Varick Chittenden, for receiving this highest honor at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society, held in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
This prize is given in recognition of the work of Benjamin A. Botkin (1901-1975). An eminent New Deal-era folklorist, national folklore editor of the Federal Writers’ Project in 1938-1939, advocate for the public responsibilities of folklorists, author and compiler of many publications on American folklore for general audiences, and head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress from 1942 to 1945, Botkin had a major impact on the field of public folklore and on the public understanding of folklore.
Prize recipients are nominated by their peers with the following criteria:
- Engagement of a broad public audience in the materials of folklore
- Impact on the field of public folklore: development of models, methodology, visibility, advocacy
- Impact on communities/constituents and their traditional culture
- Contributions to the body of materials of folklore/public folklore
- Quality of their scholarship
- Quality of their public programming and presentations
- Their impact on the discipline of folklore
Varick Chittenden aptly deserves this honor. Here is some of the nomination that was submitted to the American Folklore Society for consideration:
“Varick was born and raised in Northern New York. As a native New Yorker, he has devoted his life’s work to raising the value and understanding of the traditional culture of New York’s North Country. He made his first career as a professor of American Studies and Folklore at the State University of New York at Canton, a school that attracts rural students, those who are first generation college students, and students that are largely from the Adirondack or North Country region. As a professor, he encouraged folklore collecting by his students and focused the lens of folklore and folklore scholarship on his own community. After obtaining a degree from the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Folk Culture (1976), Varick created the Center for North Country Folklife, and the following year he organized the first Festival of North Country Folklife.
Expanding his vision ever wider, Varick founded the non-profit Traditional Arts of Upstate New York (TAUNY) in 1986, as a collecting and presenting organization that now serves as an important cultural organization for the region and for the state. There is no other folklore or folk arts organization that so completely serves the North Country of New York. Today, through his vision, TAUNY is a vibrant arts center that offers folklore and folklife research, exhibitions, ongoing programming, and collections preservation and maintenance. Housed in a former Woolworth’s Five and Dime, the TAUNY Center serves as an important economic driver for the small city of Canton. To read more about their work, visit their website https://tauny.org/
From 2000 until 2020, Varick served as a columnist for the New York Folklore Society’s publication, Voices: the Journal of New York Folklore. In keeping with the original format of the journal and its original column of Upstate/Downstate (for which Benjamin Botkin was the “Downstate” writer), I asked Varick in 1999 to be our “Upstate” columnist (opposite Steve Zeitlin’s “Downstate). For twenty years, Varick graced our journal with his illuminating writing about the North Country, its communities, and its folklore and folk arts.
Varick is an innovator who is a leader for the field of folklore. He has worked to create curriculum connections for North Country folklore with k-12 educators; he has trained folk artists to be better entrepreneurs in a partnership with then- NY Senator Hilary Clinton; and he has created two programs for public recognition of North Country people and landmarks: The North Country Heritage Award and The Register of Very Special Places (RSVP). RSVP has been an influencer for the current Legends and Lore Program of the Pomeroy Foundation, a program that began in New York State but went national in 2019. From its beginning, Varick served as an advisor to this program that provides cast iron “markers” for locations that are connected to local historical and contemporary legend.”
Varick was one of the nation’s pioneers in the movement of focusing on the folklore of one’s own area. In 1979 he wrote that one of the goals of the Center for North Country Folklife was to foster this new movement – “to collect and record the experiences and folk traditions of the North Country; not just for future generations, but for the enjoyment and enrichment of those living here now.” New York State and its North Country have benefited from the visionary leadership of Varick Chittenden. The next time you see him on the streets of St. Lawrence County, give him your congratulations.