Howard S. Becker, 1928–2023

Popular Music and Society Editorial Board member Howard Saul Becker, born in Chicago, Illinois, on 18 April 1928, died at age 95 in San Francisco, California, on 16 August 2023. His near century of life began in Chicago with his mother Donna (Bertha Goldberg) Becker and his father Allan Becker (“Howard”).

At around age 10, Becker and his precocious friends began taking day-long rides throughout Chicago’s neighborhoods on the “L” train system. They got off the trains to walk in and out of buildings, to explore neighborhoods, to wander and to wonder (“Howies”). He was a young flaneur—a strolling close observer of big-city life.

Both Becker and American sociology were born in Chicago. The University of Chicago instituted the first department of sociology in the United States in 1892 (“University”), and some fifty years later Becker skipped his last few years of high school to attend his city’s university. He earned an undergraduate degree in 1946 and stayed on to do graduate work in that original sociology department. He achieved his Ph.D. at age 23—his dissertation was based on fieldwork observations of Chicago public school teachers (Becker, Role)—and stayed on for three more years to teach. He had considered cultural anthropology but chose sociology so he could do field work without leaving the country (see Gopnik).

But also, it turns out, so that he could continue his already-established Chicago career as a working musician. At age 12 he was so smitten by boogie-woogie piano music that he bought himself a book, sat down at his parents’ otherwise unused piano, and taught himself to play. He attended Chicago’s Austin High School, an incubator for talented young musicians of all skin colors, and played in “mixed-race” dance bands that were only allowed at black dances. He discovered that “if you didn’t play those pieces exactly the way they were on the record, you were in trouble” (quoted in Gopnik).

He studied jazz piano in a serious way—mentored by reclusive jazz legend Lennie Tristano. Even as he hung on at the university, he was also hanging around Chicago’s numerous bars and strip clubs, getting paid to play piano: ”[T]he reason I could get a job was that everybody who was over 18 was in the Army” (quoted in Dixler). He considered music his regular employment and sociology a hobby.

After reading notes taken for a fieldwork class, Everett Hughes, acting as Howie’s main academic adviser, convinced him to turn those notes into a master’s thesis that unpacked his Chicago work worlds of jazz music making and marijuana use. At the time, its alternative take on drug use (not wasted addicts but creative performers having fun) became an attention-getting 1953 article in the American Journal of Sociology, a University of Chicago Press publication (Becker, “Becoming”).

His sociology “day job” turned into a path leading to lifelong work as a professional sociologist, yet working with Tristano so elevated his playing that he was also prepared for lifelong work as a professional musician. He did not want to quit his nighttime “day job,” but his “choice now was to be the most educated piano player on Sixty-third Street or start taking sociology more seriously” (quoted in Gopnik). When he chose sociology, his mother—the only person in his life who called him Howard—was relieved. His father, a self-employed businessman, “would have had a kitten” if he’d stayed a jazz man” (quoted in Gopnik).

Howie shared his enthusiastic curiosity, carefully attentive competence, and eclectic imagination with other gifted innovators. Collaborative exchanges with his friend Erving Goffman, another of Everett Hughes’s students, link him with phenomenological ideas—sometimes mistakenly cast as “social psychology.” An early example is Goffman’s widely cited 1952 article about con artists, “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure.” Interestingly, this sociological “classic” was originally published in a psychiatry journal.

Howie was intrigued by sociologist Alfred Lindesmith’s research about addiction to opiates, so he integrated and expanded Lindesmith’s insights to show how drug-induced experiences are connected to forces that attempt to define and control them. Those themes continued to frame his breakthrough understandings of any conduct considered deviant. As a public-facing scholar he advocated for changes in ideas about crime and deviance and for moderation of laws about drug use. He became a founding board member of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (“Becoming”).

For more than a decade after graduate school, Howie’s work involved grants and research contracts. He became—and this is his own label for it—“a research bum.” He knew well how to approach and complete sociological projects grounded in close observations of actual humans as they lived and worked. Howie’s dual careers sensitized him to comparative insights about urban life, deviance, work, careers, occupations, and professions. Those topics typify what some social scientists call “Chicago School” sociology. Both original participant and observer, Howie revealed how “Chicago School” is a myth concept (Becker, “Chicago School”).

During the 1950s and 1960s he joined like-minded sociologists—among them Everett Hughes, Blanche Geer, and Anselm Strauss—to create “classic” fieldwork studies of medical school students (Boys in White) (Becker, Geer, Hughes, and Strauss) and undergraduate college life (Making the Grade) (Becker, Geer, and Hughes).

Throughout this time, though, Howie was becoming known for his ideas about deviance. That is how “labeling theory” started. By 1963 he continued to expand his original insights on drug use and musicians into a book he called Outsiders, which may be his “most classic” publication. Straightforwardly stated and engaging to read, Outsiders immediately became, and remains worldwide, a sociological “standard.”

Outsiders expanded Howie’s sociological notice in France, where he lived, part-time, in Paris. Eventually he shared some of Pierre Bourdieu's nearly exclusive sociological influence as a French public intellectual. Beckerisme (“Beckerism”) upended Bourdieu’s conflict-and-competition-based post-Marxist analyses of “fields” by emphasizing cooperative analyses of “worlds” (Becker and Pessin). These ideas may be found in a succession of French and English articles about values, arts (Becker, Propos), and music (Becker, Paroles), as well as in his influentially “classic” 1982 book, Art Worlds.

Howie studied art as “collective action,” a phrase that neatly expresses his take on most any world that he analyzed—education, drug use, crime, photography, music. His What About Mozart? What About Murder? lays out responses to “received-wisdom” criticisms of his sociological thinking, by showing how to “reason from cases.” Not one to spin deterministic theories, he’d point out that “you could always do something else” (Becker and Pessin 279).

Howie is rightly celebrated as an eminent sociologist and influential public intellectual. Yet interacting with Howie was straightforward—a “quality of mind” experience (see Becker, “Professional”), openly sharing ways to imagine actual lives as collective action. He encouraged and guided others to make close observation a core research method, while providing direct support about how to do it (Becker, Tricks), think about it (Becker and Faulkner), marshal evidence for it (Becker, Evidence), tell about it (Becker, Telling), and write about it (Becker, Writing).

Yet there was always music, as a portal to creative collaboration. With fellow sociologist and musician Rob Faulkner, Howie unpacked how ordinary musicians who “may not even know each other or have ever played together, and who have no written music in front of them, play together competently in front of an audience for several hours” (Faulkner and Becker 241). Music was not only his “favorite example” of collective action, it was listened to and played. For hours on end, Howie chose sociology and music.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

H. Stith Bennett

H. Stith Bennett is still one of Howie’s students.