The James Madison Carpenter Collection of Traditional Song and Drama

“Dr Carpenter from the Harvard College in America”

Well, this Dr Carpenter came to my house one night, late, aboot twelve o’clock, an’ I knew, whenever I went to the door, that he was somebody! So he introduced himself an’ said he was Dr Carpenter from the Harvard College in America. … He came collectin’ a lot o’ this stuff.

(Henderson 1981-82:417)

Fig 1.

James Madison Carpenter, circa 1938.

(The James Madison Carpenter Collection, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, AFC 1972/001 PH099.) Reproduced with permission.

Fig 2.

James Madison Carpenter in his Austin roadster, circa 1929.

(The James Madison Carpenter Collection, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, AFC 1972/001 PH101.) Reproduced with permission.

James Madison Carpenter (1888-1983) was until recently a relatively unknown figure in the history of Anglo-American folksong and British folk play scholarship (Jabbour 1998; Bishop 1998). Born and bred in Mississippi, he was university-educated and worked as a minister and teacher prior to entering Harvard in 1920 to do a Ph.D. in English. Under the supervision of George Lyman Kittredge, he wrote a thesis on “Forecastle Songs and Chanties,” based on fieldwork with retired seamen in the United States and in ports that he visited in the summer of 1928 on a Dexter scholarship around England, Scotland, and Ireland. After gaining his doctorate in 1929, and encouraged by Kittredge, Carpenter returned to Britain in order to continue fieldwork. Armed with a portable typewriter and a Dictaphone cylinder machine, he bought a car and struck off northwards up the east coast (Figure 2).¹

Discovering the relative ease with which he could locate performers, Carpenter recorded folk music of all kinds, later including folk (“mummers’”) plays² and other genres. Such was his success that his one-year sojourn turned into six and involved, by his own account, 40,000 miles of traveling. At a time when hardly any folksong collectors were active in Britain and the general view was that the business of collecting was more or less accomplished (see, for example, Howes 1932), Carpenter gathered some 3,000 songs, including ballads of the Francis James Child canon, bothy ballads (Northeast Scottish farmworkers’ songs), shanties, and carols, as well as children’s singing games, fiddle tunes, and folk plays. He recorded performers from whom collectors such as Cecil Sharp and Gavin Greig had noted items 30 years previously, such as Sam Bennett (Figure 3), and also a large number of other performers never before recorded. These latter included Bell Duncan (Figure 4), an 82-year-old Aberdeenshire woman who had some 300 songs in her repertoire. Carpenter claimed that she had “one of the most marvelous [sic] rote memories of all history” and regarded her as “the greatest ballad singer of all time” (Bishop 1998, 2004).

Fig 3.

Sam Bennett, Ilmington Morris fiddler, Warwickshire, circa 1933.

(The James Madison Carpenter Collection, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, AFC 1972/001 PH036.) Reproduced with permission.

Fig 4.

Bell Duncan of Lambhill, Aberdeenshire, knitting outside her home, circa 1930.

(The James Madison Carpenter Collection, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, AFC 1972/001 PH095.) Reproduced with permission.

Returning to the United States in 1935, Carpenter gave occasional lectures and went on to take up a series of teaching posts in universities and colleges. Initially he continued to work on editing and transcribing parts of his collection for publication, a goal he never realized. He eventually retired to Mississippi and in 1972 at the age of 83 sold the collection to the Library of Congress (American Folklife Center 1996).

The Carpenter Collection

The Carpenter collection thus contains materials documenting British and American traditional song and drama. It also contains a smaller amount of instrumental folk music, traditional dance, children’s folklore, custom, folktale, and dialect...