On Christmas Day, 1989, folklorist and writer Eleanor Long-Wilgus suffered a stunning loss — the sudden death of 71-year-old D.K. Wilgus, her husband and partner in research and writing on traditional ballads.

When the two married in 1986 they expected to have many more years together. D.K. Wilgus, widely published, was winding up a distinguished academic career at UCLA, and he and Eleanor were planning many new projects, including a study of ballads about the 1808 murder in Randolph County of Naomi Wise by the father of her unborn child. (Versions of Omie Wise are still sung in western North Carolina and Tennessee; Doc Watson, Bob Dylan and Clarence Ashley have recorded it.)

Eleanor Long-Wilgus faced many decisions after D.K.’s death. What should she do with their large shared archive of notes, correspondence, ballad transcriptions, books and articles? How could she best honor D.K.? And what would she do with the rest of her life?

Her dear friend, folklorist Archie Green, suggested to Eleanor that Carolina’s Southern Folklife Collection in the Academic Affairs Library would be just the right place for the archive — especially since he had donated his own to UNC. Green also had worked with D.K. Wilgus to bring to Carolina the renowned John Edwards Memorial Collection of country music recordings and sheet music — music that forms the core of the Southern Folklife Collection.

In 1992 Eleanor Long-Wilgus gave most of the Wilgus archive to Carolina, and in 1993 she followed it to Chapel Hill, where she planned to keep on working. UNC, she says, has “the most focused collection for ballad study on this continent. And I’m so pleased when I think of Archie’s and D.K.’s archives over there side by side.”

To honor D.K. she gave stock valued at $100,000 to the University’s pooled income fund. This life-income gift pays her about $6,000 a year for the rest of her life. (The pooled income fund is much like a mutual fund in that participants’ gifts are “pooled” for investment.  In return, the net income of the entire fund is distributed on the basis of the number and value of the shares held by each contributor.)

At her death, the remaining principal will endow the D.K. Wilgus Fellowship in Comparative Ballad and Folksong Study.

“It seems to me so much more satisfying than any other way to use the money,” she says.

Long-Wilgus had thought she would not need the income from her gift. Instead, after being diagnosed with macular degeneration, she found the income essential for meeting unforeseen healthcare expenses.

“It really was an unexpected blessing,” she says.

Meanwhile, her study of the Naomi Wise ballads is almost complete. And she hopes to see in her lifetime the founding of an annual seminar to introduce musicians and scholars to the Southern Folklife Collection archive.

Out of hardship she’s made a handsome legacy. Like her beloved ballads, it will last. 

— Ginger Travis ’78

For information on life-income gifts please contact June Steel at 919-962-3439 (or P.O. Box 0309, Chapel Hill 27514-0309). 

Visit the gift-planning web site at www.dev.unc.edu/Development/giftplan.htm 

To visit the Southern Folklife Collection online, go to www.lib.unc.edu/mss/sfc1/

Back to Table of Contents  |  Home