[Character, possibly The Turkish Knight], by George Baker. The James Madison Carpenter Collection, AFC 1972/001, Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, June 1996, ©Library of Congress, reproduced with permission.
The James Madison Carpenter Collection spans the years from 1928 to1987, with the largest portion dated 1928 to1935. It is arranged into two groups or series. Series I, the bulk of the collection, consists of the materials purchased from Carpenter by the American Folklife Center, including manuscripts, sound recordings, and graphic materials. The entire collection represents the results of Carpenter's fieldwork, his subsequent work on the collection, and the documentation of other professional activities. Series II (which is not included in this web presentation) consists of material about the collection, primarily generated by the American Folklife Center. It includes manuscript material, sound recordings, and graphic materials.
Carpenter spent most of his life as a university lecturer. However, he began his collecting activities while conducting research on sea chanteys in the northern United States (1927-1928) and in England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland (1928) for his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. This year of fieldwork extended into six more as Carpenter traveled throughout Britain as a Harvard Fellow, covering (by his estimate) 40,000 miles and recording the texts and tunes of thousands of ballads and folksongs as well as hundreds of folk plays. During his time abroad, Carpenter focused, successively, on collecting chanteys (particularly in eastern coast ports of northern England and Scotland, 1929-1930), ballads, and songs (chiefly in Scotland and the English counties of Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire, and Yorkshire, 1929-1933), and folk plays (in England and Scotland, 1934-1935). After his return to the United States, Carpenter continued collecting activities while a professor of English at Duke University, concentrating on children's songs and singing games (1938-1941).
Carpenter collected approximately 1,000 ballad texts and 850 tunes of the Francis James Child canon; 500 sea songs and chanteys; 1,000 other ballads and songs, including bothy ballads (a "bothy" is a lean-to in the horse's stable where farm hands slept) and dreg songs (a "dreg" refers to the men in small rowboats who would pull a dredge to harvest oysters), from Britain and America; 200 children's singing games, riddles, and nursery rhymes; 300 British folk plays; miscellaneous folktales, African American spirituals, Cornish carols, etc.; and 500 related photographic images and 40 drawings). Although Carpenter used his collections as the subject of numerous lectures in colleges and universities, he never was successful at publishing his extensive collection.
The collection represents not only the results of Carpenter's fieldwork, but also documents his fieldwork process. Traveling throughout Britain in a small roadster (an Austin Seven), he searched for singers and dancers. While Carpenter found many of his best informants through chance and circumstance, he purposely tracked down some of the singers and performers documented by Francis James Child, Gavin Greig, and Cecil Sharp. One of his most prolific informants, Scottish singer Bell Duncan, gave him 300 songs and ballads, of which 62 ballads were previously collected by Child. Using a dictaphone powered by a six-volt battery, Carpenter recorded his informants on wax cylinders. He also typed the song texts with a manual typewriter while the singer dictated. Later, he transferred many of the recordings to 12-inch acetate discs, and also taught himself music notation to transcribe approximately 1,000 of the recorded tunes. To record the folk plays, Carpenter usually enlisted several informants to recite the entire ritual drama, thus obtaining multiple versions of each play.
While Carpenter's focus was on the spoken and sung word, his collection includes some documentation of dance and related dance activities. Many of the mumming play texts, particularly the sword dance plays, include references to and some description of dance. The sound recordings include fiddle tunes used in morris dance. In addition, photographs depict morris dance (with broom dancing), sword dance, the Helston Furry dance, and dancing at May Day and English Folk Dance Society festivals.
Collection Arrangement
Series I: Original Collection Materials
Series I contains Carpenter's principal fieldwork documentation as well as associated notes, drafts, and miscellanea. The fieldwork materials are interrelated; however, these relationships are not always readily apparent. Many of the ballads and songs are documented by written texts, recorded tunes, and transcribed tunes (often with texts). The photos often depict the subjects of the ballads and songs (castles, rivers), the informants (mummers, wassailers, fishwives), and their environment (cottages, ports, villages). Many ballads and folk plays are represented by several versions recorded by different informants. In addition, Carpenter's documentation of the informant, place, and date of recording is not consistent or complete.
The manuscript material in Series I consists of approximately 13,500 typed and handwritten pages, some bound and some unbound. These pages document Carpenter's fieldwork, subsequent work on the materials, and Carpenter's other professional activities.
The materials fall into several categories, each of which may have several iterations: texts of ballads, songs, and plays; transcriptions of tunes; lists and indexes; correspondence; lecture notes and drafts; plans and drafts of publications; curriculum and administrative material from Duke University; newspaper clippings; and miscellaneous notes. The music texts and transcriptions include sea songs and chanteys, Child ballads, bothy ballads, dreg songs, children's songs and games, and carols. The ritual drama texts include mumming plays, Christmas plays, sword dance plays, guyzards, pace-eggers, plough boys, and riding the stang.
The manuscript materials represent several stages of work, from rough field notes and transcriptions to more complete, alphabetically arranged versions of these writings. Some of the manuscripts, particularly the correspondence, notes, and lecture/publication drafts, shed light on the relationship of the photographs to the rest of the materials, Carpenter's fieldwork experiences, and his scholarly analysis of the collection. They also inform the reader about Carpenter's concerns and work after his years as a collector.
The collection also includes papers that represent the work of Carpenter's students at Duke University. Some of the papers are complete; others have had pages removed (presumably by Carpenter) and interfiled with other manuscript materials in the collection. Student papers usually have a surname in the upper right corner of each page, so they are easy to distinguish from Carpenter's own documents and handwriting. These papers include research on folk songs and tales, and often include original art for the cover pages.
The sound recordings in Series I include wax cylinders and 12-inch acetate discs used by Carpenter to record in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1928-1941. Carpenter copied many of the cylinders onto the discs; he also used the discs to make new recordings. According to Carpenter, he recorded approximately 3,000 tunes (many are repeated by the same or different singers), and was the first to make sound recordings of some of these ballads. The types of material recorded include ballads, lyric songs, sea chanteys, fiddle tunes, folk tales, folk plays, children's songs, and African American songs and tales. A content list of the sound recordings, prepared by Carpenter, can be found in Folders 9-10.
The graphic materials in this series include film negatives, photographic prints, glass negatives, glass positives (lantern slides), and drawings. For the most part, the photographic materials are not dated, but seem to span the years 1928-1935; they depict subjects from England, Scotland, and Wales. Carpenter or other annotators sometimes noted cryptic descriptions on the backs of photographs, on the front of the lantern slides, or on accompanying paper or enclosures (see Folders 185-89, "Notes Relating to Photographs"). While Carpenter was the primary photographer, he also obtained many photographs from commercial photographers and other sources. At some point Carpenter made glass negatives of the photographic prints, and then glass positives. Therefore, identical images often appear in different formats.
Although his use of the photographs and their relationship to the other materials is not explicitly stated, Carpenter probably used the lantern slides to illustrate lectures, and planned to use the photographs to accompany publications about the materials. The images cover a range of people, places, and activities, from Carpenter himself, to Christmas wassailers, dancing children, Scottish castles, Roman baths, market squares, mumming plays, May Day celebrations, and the English Folk Dance Society (EDFS) festivals. They represent the content of the ballads and songs, the informants themselves, and subjects whose relationship to the collection is not yet known. Of particular note is the documentation of castles in Scotland and England that creates a visual record of these structures before their decline or in some cases renovation.
The 40 ink-and-pencil drawings are the work of George Baker, a British dry mason and the son of a mummer. Undated, the drawings depict characters and scenes from mumming and Christmas plays. Often a caption identifies the characters, and multiple drawings of the same ones ("the doctor," "belsebub") exist. Carpenter planned to use these drawings as illustrations for publications on the folk plays.
Series II: Oral History, Programs, and Products
Series II consists of materials generated by the Library of Congress concerning the collection. It contains manuscript material, sound recordings, and photographs documenting a 1972 interview with Carpenter as well as a 1987 lecture that drew on collection materials. This material is not currently included in the online presentation.
Importance of Collection
The value of the corpus arises from its quantity, quality, and chronology. In the British context, it is one of the most extensive and diverse collections of traditional song and mummers plays ever made, the first to use sound recording consistently, and the first by an academically trained collector. It bridges the gap between the folksong collections made at the turn of the 20th century (e.g., those of Cecil Sharp, and Gavin Greig and James Duncan), and those made at the mid-20th century (e.g., those of Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson). It has some singers in common with these earlier and later collections and also some significant singers only ever documented by Carpenter. It contains some rare and unique items of balladry as well as distinctive variants of better-known ballads. The sea shanties were documented from the last generation of British and American (including African American) seamen to work in the era of commercial square-rigged sail.
Carpenter also made the only sound recordings of well-known English fiddle players, such as Sam Bennett, when they were in their prime. The British mummers plays in the collection are some of the earliest noted down from performers rather than "elite" observers. Among the American materials in the collection are recordings of African American folktales that are some of the earliest and best African American narrative recordings. The children's singing games include examples dating back to the late 19th century, as well as some of the earliest sound recordings of children performing themselves, while the nursery rhymes and songs furnish early field-collected evidence in a genre that has historically been largely documented in literary sources (Opie and Opie 1951). Carpenter's sound recordings and documentation of Cornish Christmas carols and bothy (North-East Scottish farm) ballads are also unique for their period and for the light they shed on regional traditions.
Thus Carpenter's collection complements and supplements other folklore collections, making its items of outstanding importance to scholars and students of oral and popular culture, folklore/folklife studies, and ethnomusicology, and professional and amateur folk arts performers (as a source of new repertoire). Its roughly 800 contributors are also of interest to genealogists and to local/community history groups.