A: Know him? I made him famous. I had a coast-to-coast radio program when Woody first came to New York. I introduced him when he first sang on radio. He stayed at my house. ... They offered him a huge contract, but he just walked off and went to Oklahoma. He was a deeply passionate person, and tremendously gifted. First of all he was the funniest man that ever talked. And Woody was so quick: talking to him was like playing jai alai. He got up in the morning and wrote 25 pages before breakfast just to warm up. And there was always a slightly strange thing about woody -- an itchy feeling that he had. It might have been beginning of the disease which later killed him. Q: What's your connection with Pete Seeger? A: Peter Seeger is my protege. I gave him his banjo. The banjo was a dead issue, and he came to me and asked what he should do with his life. He was a Harvard hippie. ... We got to be colleagues. We worked on the whole revival of the American folk music. I taught him most of his early songs. Q: Were you ever a performer yourself? A: Yes, I've made a few records. But I was always more of a funnel. I regarded myself as a dredge, dredging up the rich subsoil of American folk and putting it back on the developing music scene. We set out to revive the American folk music in 1938, and by God we did it. By 1950 it was a national movement. Q: What are some other things you've done? A: I did the first oral history -- the Leadbelly book and the book on Jelly Roll Morton. The Leadbelly movie (1976) was taken from that oral history. For Jelly Roll Morton, I transcribed the tape and made it into a piece of literature. The story has been bought for a movie by the same people who made the Woody Guthrie movie, _Bound for Glory_. Q: Have you done a lot of research outside the United States? A: Yes, I spent 1950 to 1960 in Europe assembling all the best material that had been collected into 14 albums, geographically arranged. Then I started thinking about what I heard on albums -- not what musicians or literary people heard, but what I heard. Then I met some people at the National Institute of Mental Health who were interested in the norms of healthy behavior. I indicated to them that I was that getting at the behavior styles of the people of the world. They gave me some dough and I got a staff together. Q: How was the American folk music scene then? A: I was very shocked when I came back to the United States in 1960. The musical scene at Washington Square made me sick. They said, "Alan, those people you talked to are all dead." I kind of withdrew from the whole business. ... Later I set up a concert in Carnegie Hall and brought in the first bluegrass group and the first gospel group to perform in New York. People stormed the stage. There were fistfights and everything. Well, that was the whole end of people saying New York was the center of the folk scene.