Joseph C. Hickerson (1935–2025)

Former head of the American Folklore Center (AFC) archive and lifetime member of the AFS Joe Hickerson died peacefully on August 17, 2025 in his care home in Portland, Oregon at the age of ninety.

Joe Hickerson first became interested in folk music in 1948 under the influence of Pete Seeger. He attended Oberlin College from 1953–57, earning a bachelor’s degree in physics. At Oberlin, he cultivated his passion for folk music through extracurricular and professional activities. During his senior year, he was elected first President of the Oberlin Folk Song Club and helped organize the first Oberlin Folk Festival in May 1957.

After graduating from Oberlin, Hickerson applied his interest in folk music to his academic pursuits, studying folklore and ethnomusicology in graduate school at Indiana University Bloomington (IU). His master’s thesis consisted of an annotated bibliography of North American Indian music north of Mexico, for which he received funding from the National Science Foundation.

Hickerson left IU in 1963 to pursue a Reference Librarian position at the Library of Congress’s Archive of Folksong, which eventually became the AFC archive. He retired as head of the archive in 1998 and continued to write, lecture, and contribute to publications relating to folk music.

• Read how Hickerson is remembered from across the field in this AFC Facebook post.
• See and hear Hickerson tell the story of his time at AFC in his own words in this interview with AFC Ethnomusicologist and Folklorist Jennifer Cutting.
• Learn more about Hickerson’s life and work on this webpage of Indiana University Archives, in which his papers are deposited.
• Read an obituary of Hickerson on The New York Times.
• Listen to an appreciation of Hickerson featured on NPR.