Roger David Abrahams (June 12, 1933 – June 20, 2017[1]) was an American folklorist whose work focused on the expressive cultures and cultural histories of the Americas, with a specific emphasis on African American peoples and traditions.
Abrahams was the Hum Rosen Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught in the Department of Folklore and Folklife.
He was the author of a large number of books and was the founding Director of Penn's Center for Folklore and Ethnography, a research and public outreach unit associated with the Department of Folklore and Folklife.
[2] Abrahams was born in Philadelphia in 1933 and grew up in a "cultivated, affluent ... family of German-Jewish descent".
[3] For his Ph.D. research, Abrahams studied forms of speech play he had first encountered from African American Doo-wop singers in South Philadelphia.
[4] His Ph.D. - "one of the first studies exploring urban Black expression on its own terms"[3] - formed the basis of his book Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (1970).
For a period, Abrahams lived in Greenwich Village, where he recorded with Dave Van Ronk.
As a performer, Abrahams influenced "among others, the young Robert Zimmerman (Bob Dylan)".
[3] In 1962, Abrahams released a solo LP, Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor and Other Folk Songs (International, INT 13034).
[3] He became a full professor at Texas in 1969 in the departments of English and Anthropology and remained there for ten years.
[3] During his time at Texas, Abrahams drew on his research to produce policy documents and teaching materials for the Texas Educational Agency, which refuted the prevailing “deficiency” approach to teaching African American students.
[5] Abrahams was a strong advocate for public folklore and was major force in the creation of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.
[3] Abrahams has been described as one of the "first researchers to engage in nuanced intelligent discussions on the folkways of the African Diaspora in the Americas".
Abrahams, Roger D. 1983 The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture.
Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South.
Abrahams, Roger D. (2005) Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices.
Abrahams, Roger D., with Spitzer, Nicholas, Szwed, John F. and Thompson, Robert Farris.