Fundo - Kenneth S. Goldstein fonds

Kenneth S. Goldstein (1927-1995) was born in Brooklyn, New York to Tillie Horowitz from Rega, Latvia and Irving Martin Goldstein from London, England. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in business administration in theoretical mathematics and statistics from the City College of New York. After Army service in the 1940s, he went to work with Fairchild Publications in New York as a market researcher and analyst. During this time he also served as folk music director for Stinson, Folkways and Riverside records, and as folk and blues director of Prestige records. He married Rochelle Judith Korn in 1949 and they had five children: Rhoda, Diane, Michael, Karl and Scott.

Goldstein's career in folk music and his influence on the discipline began in the 1950s. 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 north-eastern Scotland (1959-60). 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. But late in the 'fifties he enrolled at Penn for an advanced degree, won a Fulbright Scholarship to Edinburgh University's School of Scottish Studies, and emerged as the first Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife at Penn (1963). He joined the faculty immediately and meanwhile helped to start the Philadelphia Folk Festival.

Goldstein held eight editorships and led many organizations both academic and mainstream: editor and president of Folklore Associates, president of Pastime Books, president of the American Folklore Society and the Pennsylvania Folklore Society, council member of The Folklore Society of England are but a few examples. He also advised the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian Institute in the United States. His fieldwork in England, Scotland, Australia and many other sites resulted in the production of some 525 long-playing records, which he produced and annotated as well as the publication of ten books and countless articles. He became head of the Department of Folklore at Memorial University in 1976, a post he held until 1978. From then until his death on 11 Nov. 1995 he was a Research Associate in the Department. In this capacity, from 1978 until 1990, he deposited a quantity of materials in MUNFLA, most notably a body of folksongs he collected, along with several local collaborators, from various parts of Newfoundland and Labrador.