They might have begun to doubt the musician would make it home that night. John Burrison and his young student had been told by a neighbor the man and his wife were attending a funeral in town and were expected back. But as the pair of city folk waited on the porch of a farmhouse outside Cumming, Ga., the hour got later and the sky got darker.
They’d been sent to Sam Hawkins’ house by the barber in town, Buell Martin.
“We went into this barbershop in Cumming, and the barber and one of his customers were arguing about the length of Jesus Christ’s hair,” Burrison jokes.
Martin, a fiddler himself, recommended the pair of scholars from the big city find Hawkins if they wanted to hear something special. They were looking to capture the sound of rural folk music, played by a rural folk musician.
“We wanted to record Sam’s music,” Burrison says. “He had inherited his guitar from his aunt, and he played the guitar and banjo, but he was known as a fiddler.”
Finally, around 11 p.m., Hawkins and his wife Leta arrived home to find the strangers on their porch. Burrison explained why they were there and, given the late hour, offered to come back another time.
“But Sam said, ‘No, no, no. Come on in.’ And he got his fiddle case and went into the parlor. I had a tape recorder and set it up, and by the time we were ready to quit, it was about 2 or 3 in the morning.”
The recording of Sam Hawkins, the rural musician and farmer known for his delicate playing style and the repertoire he learned from other musicians in the area and from AM radio, is one of countless documents in the John Burrison Georgia Folklore Archives at the Atlanta History Center, collected and donated by Burrison and his students over a six-decade career at Georgia State University.
A faculty member in the Department of English, a Regents’ Professor and the creator and director of the university’s folklore curriculum, Burrison is a giant of Southern folklore — indeed, inarguably the foremost expert on Southern folk pottery — and a beloved teacher, scholar, mentor and colleague.
His folklife exhibit, “Shaping Traditions: Folk Arts in a Changing South” at the Atlanta History Center, a precursor of which was once on display in GSU’s General Classroom Building (now Langdale Hall), ran for an incredible 29 years.
And though he, himself, is considered an institution at the institution, what has become a 60-year career very nearly started down a different path.
‘You’re Not Cut Out For This Work’
A city kid who grew up in Philadelphia, Burrison was training as an advertising copy writer in Penn State’s journalism program when one of his advisers gave him some, well, advice.
While interviewing for an internship with an ad agency, Burrison’s pitch for an automotive campaign veered into the proverbial ditch. When he walked into his adviser’s office to talk it over, the man, smoking a pipe with his feet on his desk, said: “John, you’re not cut out for this work. You’re like me. You need to go into academia.”
So, Burrison did. It was one of the rare times Burrison’s life and line of work changed directions.
As he became focused on his new path, Burrison began absorbing not just his lessons in grad school at the University of Pennsylvania, but the teaching styles of his various professors. He practiced delivering lectures and leading classes. After all, a life in academia is as much about teaching as it is about scholarship — imbuing young minds with the lessons learned through one’s own focused study.
“My mother was an actress,” Burrison says. “And the classroom is a stage where I can share all of the things I’ve learned over the years with my students.”
While focusing his Ph.D. studies on sentimental ballads of the Victorian era, Burrison got a call from a friend finishing her own Ph.D. at Penn who’d been recruited for a job at Georgia State College teaching a folklore course. She’d decided to stay in Philly after marrying a lawyer, but gave Burrison a lead on the job.
After meeting with the college dean and department chair, Burrison moved to Atlanta in 1966 to develop courses as part of a folklore curriculum. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t finished his Ph.D. (the English Department didn’t even have its own Ph.D. program at the time), though Burrison did have to change the focus of his dissertation after losing access to the ballad materials at Penn.
“When you’re offered a job as I was at Georgia State College — as it was then — in a field where very few departments are hiring, you jump at the opportunity,” Burrison says.
Before long, Burrison had committed to what would become a throughline in his life’s work — the study and appreciation of the tradition and the art behind North Georgia folk pottery.
The Meaders Tradition
Burrison’s dissertation became the first of his seven books, “Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery” (University of Georgia Press, 1983), which has been republished in paperback twice.
In it, Burrison inscribed a message to its inspiration: “For Lanier Meaders, without whom all this would be just history.”
The two had met on a cold, rainy day in 1968 while Burrison was shepherding an Atlanta reporter around North Georgia for a story on Burrison’s folklore program. Burrison had heard Lanier’s father Cheever had died, so the pair stopped by the Meaders home in the Mossy Creek community of southern White County, southeast of Cleveland, Ga., to see if anyone had taken up the mantle.
“I met Lanier just after he had unloaded his first kiln load of his own wares, after his father had died, and he had committed himself to becoming a full-time traditional potter,” Burrison says. “And before I left, he gave me two gifts of pottery. That was the beginning of our friendship and the beginning of my research.”
Burrison’s subsequent books include a follow-up to “Brothers in Clay” titled “From Mud to Jug: The Folk Potters and Pottery of Northeast Georgia” as well as “Global Clay” on ceramic traditions around the world.
His book “Shaping Traditions: Folk Arts in a Changing South” sprang from his collection of folk objects that was, for a time, on display in Georgia State’s General Classroom Building, but went on to be on permanent display at the Atlanta History Center in a long-running exhibit of the same name.
His office, on the 23rd floor of Georgia State’s 25 Park Place building, overlooking an expanse of downtown, is its own kind of mini-museum filled with folk art, folk pottery and folk instruments — each with its own story and provenance.
According to Professor of English LeeAnne Richardson, who has been chair of the department for two years and on its faculty for 25, Burrison’s classes remain popular not just with English majors, but with students from a variety of disciplines, from anthropology to studio art.
“Of all the English classes, his students are from the widest variety of majors,” Richardson says.
Fieldwork
The John Burrison Georgia Folklore Archives at the Atlanta History Center may be named for him, but Burrison is quick to note: “It’s really not my work. It’s the work of my students.”
As part of every class Burrison teaches, he offers students the option to complete a fieldwork project in folk life, documenting, cataloging and archiving materials from their research. In 1993, Burrison donated the first installment of the collection to the Atlanta History Center, and for the past 32 years, students have continued to add to it.
“It’s an example of the kinds of things students can do when they’re mentored well,” Richardson says.
More than 800 of the nearly 1,600 interviews that comprise the collection so far are available online, with more in the process of digitization.
“This interview begins with Johnny Lee Menuel sharing a tale about a preacher who would leave church to drink whisky,” reads the description of a recording titled “Barbara Lanier interview with Johnny Menuel, Henry Malcolm, John Matte, Kenneth Davis and Wilson Lewish.”
“Menuel then tells a story about Roy, who stole a witch’s pot of gold.”
“He gave me my first book credit,” says T.J. Smith (B.A. ’03), who took Burrison’s classes as an undergrad and went on to complete a Ph.D. in folklore at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “In his book ‘Roots of a Region,’ he used some of my photographs from my field project and gave me photo credit.”
As an undergrad studying creative writing at Georgia State, Smith was hooked on Burrison’s classes.
“I took more folklore classes than I did creative writing classes. I basically took every class I could fit that he taught,” says Smith, who’s now executive director of the International Friendship Center in Highlands, N.C. “He always gave you the option to do a field project and I jumped. I always did the field project.”
As a mentor, Burrison helped Smith land an internship with the Atlanta History Center that helped him finish his undergraduate degree. Burrison later generously agreed to write the foreword to a book Smith edited on Appalachian oral traditions, “Foxfire Story: Oral Tradition in Southern Appalachia” (Penguin, 2020).
He says Burrison is a consummate scholar who takes his role as a teacher just as seriously.
“He is so enthusiastic about what he teaches, and that comes through in an authentic way. He’s excited to be there, and if you engage him, he will engage you wherever your interests are,” Smith says. “It’s a rare thing for somebody trained like that, as a scholar, to put that much emphasis on his responsibilities as a teacher as well.”
A Titan Of Traditions
And though he marked his 83rd birthday in October, teaching remains very much at the heart of Burrison’s day-to-day life.
Five days a week, he walks to his office from the nearby condo he’s lived in for decades, and whether in a classroom at 25 Park Place or through his longtime association with the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia, he continues to imbue minds young and old with an appreciation for folklore and folk art.
“He’s always had a student-centered pedagogy,” says Distinguished University Professor Lynée Lewis Gaillet, who has been on the faculty at Georgia State since 1992 and served as chair of the English Department from 2015 to 2021. “He’s a historian who’s always had his eye to the future.”
The Folk Pottery Museum, which sits on the campus of the Sautee Nacoochee Center just east of Helen, Ga., recently began offering clay pottery classes inside a purpose-built pottery studio they named for Burrison, who’s been the museum’s curator since its opening in 2006. While Burrison is admittedly not a potter himself, inside the center’s studio, artisans are sharing skills and techniques with new generations of artists.
Accompanying Burrison to the studio’s opening weekend event this fall were colleagues from Georgia State including Richardson, Regents’ Professor Emeritus of English Randy Malamud and Gaillet, who all got a private tour of the museum’s collection from its curator.
“He took the time to take us from room to room and tell us the significance of the pieces, and it was really so John-like,” Gaillet says.
“It just pours out of him without any of the pomposity some of us academics can be subject to,” says Malamud. “He communicates simply, and he listens a lot before he starts talking.”
Perhaps that comes from his journalism training, or perhaps it’s a skill he’s honed accompanying countless students on field research excursions where listening and documenting the tales and ways of life of a nearly bygone era were just part of the job.
In October, during the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in Atlanta, Burrison was honored with the group’s Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award, a testament to what Smith, the International Friendship Center director, called a “staggering arc of influence.”
Across nearly 20 pages of recommendation letters to the award committee, friends and colleagues at Georgia State and those associated with institutions across the South wrote of his academic contributions to not just GSU, but to the field of folklore in general and the impact he’s had on generations of students, some of whom turned into scholars themselves.
“I have known John for over 50 years, having met when I was an undergraduate at Georgia State University in the early 1970s,” writes Linda F. Carnes-McNaughton, an archaeologist who recently retired from service in Fort Bragg’s Cultural Resources Management Program. “He has shared his extensive research with every student he has had the pleasure of instructing over the past 50 years. And I say pleasure because to hear him speak and describe his decades-long teaching experience, he exudes pride and a sense of accomplishment.”
And as accomplished as Burrison is, he shows no signs of taking a bow and receding into the annals of history himself. With a slate of classes to teach each semester, and a steady stream of students across disciplines — from art and design to anthropology to history to music — discovering his courses and his infectious enthusiasm for the work, he continues to inspire curiosity and wonder while passing on knowledge of cultures around the world.
“I love teaching and can’t think of anything else I’d rather do,” Burrison says. “Teaching a group of students who understand what I’m trying to get across — that’s the most satisfying thing in the world to me.”
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