NANCY SWEEZY: OBITUARY DRAFT
uary-draft/
2010/02/15 | 15:58
Nancy Sweezy, a leading folklorist in the United States, died in
Cambridge, Massachusetts on February 6. She was 88. Her daughter,
Martha, confirmed that she died peacefully after a long illness but
added that she had continued her work until very near the end.
Ms. Sweezy was known to a generation of musicians for her role as
president of the board of directors of the Club 47, a key venue in
the folk music revival of 1960’s and early ’70’s in Harvard Square
that hosted talents as varied as Joan Baez, Doc Watson, Bob Dylan,
Bill Monroe, Libba Cotten, Tom Ashley and John Hurt among others. Ms.
Sweezy helped to guide a generation of performers, producers, managers
and folk music enthusiasts. Her house on Agassiz Street in Cambridge
served as the gathering place for out-of-town performers and for
aspiring musicians to sit at the feet of mentors.
In 2006 the National Endowment for the Arts celebrated Ms. Sweezy’s
leadership in the field of folk arts by presenting her with the Bess
Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship at the Library of Congress.
In declaring her a National Treasure the presenters made particular
note of her seminal role in reviving North Carolina’s famed Jugtown
Pottery. Living, working and applying her management, advocacy and
people skills at Jugtown in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Ms.
Sweezy helped inspire a revival of the traditional pottery community
and watched it grow from seven potteries in the Seagrove area when she
first arrived to more than 115 today. In the fall of 2008, Ms. Sweezy
returned to Jugtown to be interviewed for the award-winning PBS series
Craft in America.
Also acknowledged during the National Heritage Fellowship presentation
were Ms. Sweezy’s work with Ralph Rinzler, Director of the Smithsonian
Institution’s annual Folklife Festival on the Mall in Washington D.C.,
her seminal book, Raised in Clay for the Smithsonian Press on the
Southern pottery tradition, her founding of the Refugee Arts Group
which collaborated with the Cambodian, Hmong and other Southeast
Asian communities in the preservation of their traditional crafts and
performing arts, and her authorship of the book Armenian Folk Arts,
Culture, and Identity. This book was compiled during more than a dozen
trips to Armenia, often with the artistic and logistical support of
her son the photographer Sam Sweezy, made during a time of considerable
danger and unrest in Armenia when Ms. Sweezy was in her 70’s.
In 2005, when she was 84, Ms. Sweezy co-curated with potter Mark
Hewitt, the North Carolina Museum of Art’s highly praised exhibition,
The Potter’s Eye: Art and Tradition in North Carolina, and collaborated
with Mr. Hewitt on the companion book of the same title.
Born on October 14, 1921 and educated at the Boston’s Museum School of
Fine Arts and the Stuart School, Ms. Sweezy’s earlier life demonstrated
a similar taste for risk and adventure. When World War II broke out,
she was offered a job in the Research and Analysis Branch (R &A)
of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the
Central Intelligence Agency. Her job was to assist in the analysis of
Germany’s ability to fight the war. Soon, working with Chandler Morse,
the Director of R &A, she helped to coordinate this flow of information
among the various U.S. government agencies on a need-to-know basis.
In November of 1944, Ms. Sweezy moved with her R & A section from
Washington D.C. to London, zigzagging across the Atlantic on a
bitterly rough trip in a convoy of blacked-out troop ships shielded by
U.S. destroyers. In London she joined her mentor and friend American
Ambassador Gil Winant and his staff working in the streets during
post-V-2 bombing rescue efforts.
As the Allied armies prevailed, she moved with her section to the
Continent, focusing on an examination of the Morgenthau plan to
de-Nazify Germany. She was in Paris on Victory Europe day, walking the
city all through its wild night of celebration and was still there to
attend the memorial service for FDR in Notre Dame Cathedral. After
Paris, as the U.S. army moved rapidly across Europe to reach Berlin
before the Russians, Ms.Sweezy was sent to Weisbaden, Vienna, and
Berlin where she went down into Hitler’s bunker shortly after the
Fuhrer’s dual suicide with Eva Braun.
It was in Germany that Ms. Sweezy developed a romantic relationship
with her future husband, Paul M. Sweezy, the chief writer of the R &
A reports. In 1951 the New Hampshire Attorney General called upon Mr.
Sweezy, a Harvard economist who later became known as the dean
of American Marxists, to testify before the local New Hampshire
un-American Activities Committee. His refusal to take refuge in the
Fifth Amendment or to answer questions about others resulted in the
famous 1957 Supreme Court case based on the First Amendment, Sweezy v.
New Hampshire, which contributed to the end of the McCarthy era. It
also resulted in social and political pressure on Ms. Sweezy and her
family. She and Paul Sweezy divorced in 1960.
Throughout her life Ms. Sweezy was an advocate for human rights
and a believer in the magic of music, dance, and handmade objects
to preserve the soul of a culture and its community. As an intrepid
author, teacher, and mentor she was a force in supporting immigrant
traditions before there were public folklife programs, funding streams,
and endowed apprenticeships. In addition to her youngest daughter,
Martha Sweezy of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ms. Sweezy is survived
by her daughter Lybess Sweezy of New York City, their older brother
Samuel Sweezy of Arlington, Massachusetts, five grandchildren, and
four great-grandchildren.
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