Izzy Young, Founder NYC’S Folklore Center, Dead at 90

In 1973 Izzy moved to Stockholm where he ran the Swedish incarnation of the Folklore Center and taught contra dancing. When I spoke with him by Skype in 2011 he told me, “Everyone wants to interview me, nobody wants to pay.” Some things never change.

According to his obituary in the New York Times, Izzy was also "a writer with a regular column in Sing Out!; a broadcaster with a folk music show on WBAI in New York; an agitator (in 1961 he helped organize a successful public protest after the city banned folk music from Washington Square Park); a ferocious keeper of the castle. 'He was even known to throw people out of his store,' Dick Wissman, a former member of the folk group the Journeymen, wrote, ‘simply because they irritated him’...."

I can personally attest that the part about throwing people out is true.

"If at the end of the day, the Folklore Center was a less-than-successful capitalist enterprise," the NYT wrote, "who, after all, goes into folk music to get rich?"

He is survived by his daughter, Philomene Grandin, son Thilo Engenberger and three grandchildren.

LINKS

Our original story Nov. 2011: www.rarebookhub.com/articles/1189

New York Times obituary published Feb 5, 2019:

www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/obituaries/izzy-young-dead.html

Feb. 12, 2019 article in the Villager.