Here's a remembrance circulated by Jeff Titon:
As director of National Endowment for the Arts-Folk Arts, Bess was the driving force in establishing the network of state folklorists in the US, chiefly attached to state arts councils since the 1980s. Besides this critical infrastructure work, without which public folklore in the US would have had a much diminished presence in the last 30 years, under her direction NEA-Folk Arts pioneered in the efforts to aid communities develop and maintain their expressive culture (what UNESCO today calls intangible cultural heritage), giving grants totalling nearly $3 million annually during the 1980s. The current major efforts by UNESCO and WIPO to safeguard traditional culture can be seen as emanating in part from the pioneering US public folklore efforts of Bess Hawes--along with others such as her brother Alan, Archie Green (who also died this year), Ralph Rinzler, Joe Wilson, and Alan Jabbour. Unlike her brother, she kept out of the spotlight and worked behind the scenes to bring along scores of folklorists and, later, ethnomusicologists out of the academy and into the public arena. Behind the scenes at the NEA she exercised her considerable charisma and was effective in bringing and keeping folk arts at the table. She was a steward over American folklife and her numerous "children" (public folklore workers for two decades and beyond). Her efforts, and those of Joe Wilson, angered some musical revivalists who felt that NEA-Folk Arts, and the NCTA, and the Smithsonian, exercised purist notions of authenticity in determining who should, and who should not, be recognized and funded as folk artists. To some, these purist notions are anachronistic in a postmodern world of diasporas, blurred genres, multiple identities, interpretive communities, and contested authenticities. To others, they remain a worthy ideal. The outpouring of affection from public folklorists and applied ethnomusicologists has just begun.
