[1] The first of six children, Korson was brought by his parents Joseph and Rose from Bobrynets, Ukraine to the United States in 1906 when he was seven years old.
After a brief time in Brooklyn, New York, the family relocated to the coal-mining city of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, when George was thirteen years old.
He briefly attended Columbia University to pursue studies in English and history in 1921-1922, but was forced to return home by his family's financial difficulties.
The collection was unprecedented because folklorists previously had concentrated mostly on rural Anglo-American balladry of mountaineers, cowboys, and lumbermen.
His collection drew attention for showing emergent folklore of industrial life, labor movements, and immigrant traditions in a mixed-ethnic social context.
In 1927, he issued his collections in book form as Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miner, followed by publications that included narrative and customary traditions of coal miners, such as Black Rock: Mining Folklore of the Pennsylvania Dutch (1960, winner of the Chicago Folklore Prize in that year), Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry (1943), and his essay on "coal miners' for Pennsylvania Songs and Legends (1949), which he edited.
During the 1950s, Korson worked for the UMWA and the Red Cross in Washington, D.C., and travelled to Pennsylvania to add to his field collections in song and story.
[citation needed] In 1965 he donated his collection of papers and recordings to the D. Leonard Corgan Library at King's College in Wilkes-Barre.
Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Division of Music, Recording Laboratory, AFS L16.
Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Division of Music, Recording Laboratory, AFS L60.