Finding Aids to Individual Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture

THE JAMES MADISON CARPENTER COLLECTION

AFC 1972/001

Library of Congress
Washington DC
June 1996

SUMMARY

The James Madison Carpenter Collection consists of manuscript materials, sound recordings, and graphic materials that document primarily British and American folk music, dance, and British ritual drama. The materials span the years 1928-55, with some dated 1972 and 1987. The bulk of the material was collected between 1928-35 by Carpenter during fieldwork in England and Scotland; other material was collected in the United States between 1937 and 1941 by Carpenter and his Duke University students. Through this effort, Carpenter amassed a collection of an estimated 1,000 ballad texts and 850 tunes of the Francis Child canon; 500 sea songs (including chanteys); 1,000 other ballads and songs (texts and many tunes) from Britain and America; 200 children's singing games, riddles, and nursery rhymes (texts and many tunes); 300 British folk plays (texts and some tunes); miscellaneous folktales, African- American spirituals, Cornish carols, and so forth; and approximately 500 related photographic images and 40 drawings. The collection was purchased from Carpenter by the Library of Congress in 1972. An oral history interview with the donor in 1972 and subsequent programs based on the materials complement the collection.

Access and Reproduction: Listening and viewing access to the collection is unrestricted. Duplication of the recorded materials may be governed by copyright.

Key Subjects: Afro-American spirituals, ballads, bothy ballads, castles, chanteys, Chedworth, Child ballads, children's games, children's songs, Christmas plays, Cornish carols, dreg songs, English Folk Dance Society, English folk plays, Hadrian's Wall, Helston Furry dance, mummers' plays, May Day festivals, morris dance, Pace Eggers, ritual drama, Roman baths, songs, Stonehenge, sword dance, wassailers

Primary Languages: English, Gaelic, Scottish

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
SERIES I: ORIGINAL COLLECTION MATERIAL

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
SERIES II: ORAL HISTORY, PROGRAMS, AND PRODUCTS

SCOPE AND CONTENT NOTE

Introduction

The James Madison Carpenter Collection spans the years 1928- 1987, with the largest portion dated 1928-35. It is arranged into two groups or series. Series I, the bulk of the collection, consists of the materials purchased from Carpenter and includes manuscripts, sound recordings, and graphic materials. It contains the results of Carpenter's fieldwork, his subsequent work on the collection, and documentation of other professional activities. Series II consists of material about the collection, primarily generated by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. It includes manuscript material, sound recordings, and graphic materials. It is an open series.

Carpenter spent most of his life as an American university lecturer. However, he began his collecting activities while conducting research on sea chanteys in the northeast United States (1927-28) and 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 Scotland and 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 tenure abroad, Carpenter focused, successively, on collecting chanteys (particularly in eastern coast ports of northern England and Scotland, 1929-30), ballads, and songs (chiefly in Scotland and the English counties of Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire, and Yorkshire, 1929- 33), and folk plays (in England and Scotland, 1934-35). 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 (1938-41).

Through multi-format documentation Carpenter captured approximately 1,000 ballad texts and 850 tunes of the Francis Child canon; 500 sea songs and chanteys; 1,000 other ballads and songs (including bothy ballads and dreg songs) from Britain and America; 200 children's singing games, riddles, and nursery rhymes; 300 British folk plays; miscellaneous folktales, African-American spirituals, Cornish carols, and so forth; 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 findings.

The collection represents not only the results of Carpenter's fieldwork, but also documents his fieldwork process. Traveling throughout Britain and Scotland 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 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 balads 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 text 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 one.

While Carpenter's focus was on the spoken and sung word, his collection includes some documentation of dance and related dance activities (see Appendix A). Many of the mummers' 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.

Series I

Series I contains Carpenter's fieldwork documentation as well as notes, drafts, and miscellanea accumulated during the ensuing years of work. The fieldwork materials are interrelated; however, these relationships are not always readily apparent. That is, many of the ballads and songs are documented by written texts, recorded tunes, and notated tunes (often with texts). The photographs often depict the subjects of the ballads and songs (castles, rivers), the informants (mummers, wassailers, fishwives), and their environment (cottages, ports, villages). The inventories and indexes are limited at this time; no concordance links all the works together. 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 6,500 type- and handwritten leaves, bound and unbound. It contains documentation of Carpenter's fieldwork, subsequent work on the materials, and documentation of Carpenter's other professional activities. After the materials arrived at the Library they were microfilmed in the order in which they were arranged at the time: by "box," "packet," and "mailsack" number (folders 13-184). Since the microfilm has been distributed world-wide and references and guides use this arrangement, that arrangement has been maintained. Therefore, the materials in general are not organized systematically by subject type. Related notes, correspondence, iterations of indexes, and drafts of lectures or publications may be filed separately.

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 mummers plays, Christmas plays, sword dance plays, guyzards, pace-eggers, plough boys, and riding the stang.

The manuscripts represent several stages of work, from rough field notes and transcriptions to more complete, alphabetically arranged versions. 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 sound recordings in Series I include the wax cylinders and the 12-inch discs used by Carpenter to record in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1928-41. Carpenter copied many of the cylinders onto the discs; he also used the discs for original 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 the ballads. The types of recordings include ballads, lyric songs, sea chanteys, fiddle tunes, folk tales, folk plays, children's songs, and African-American songs and tales. A contents list of the sound recordings prepared by Carpenter can be found in folders 9-10.

The graphic images in this series include film negatives, photoprints, glass negatives, glass positives (lantern slides), and drawings, totaling more than 1,000 items. The photographic materials were not indexed or inventoried by Carpenter, and no apparent order to the materials existed. Consequently, they are arranged by subject into the following general categories: performance/ritual, people, structures, ancient structures and artifacts, town and street scenes, landscapes and maritime scenes, and miscellaneous. For the most part, the photographs are not dated, but seem to span the years 1925-35; they depict subjects from England and Scotland. 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 commerical photographers and others. At some point Carpenter made glass negatives of the photoprints, and then glass positives. Therefore, identical images often appear in different mediums.

Although his use of the photographs and their relationship to the other materials is not explicitly stated, it can be discerned that he used the lantern slides to illustrate lectures and planned to use the photographs to accompany publications of the materials. The images cover a range of people, places, and activities, from Carpenter himself (seated in his car), to Christmas wassailers, dancing children, Scottish castles, Roman baths, and market squares. 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 create a visual record of these structures as they existed before World War II. For a detailed inventory of the photographic materials, see the "Photograph Inventory" in folder 1.

The 40 ink and pencil drawings were drawn by George Baker, a British dry mason who was the son of a mummer. Undated, the drawings depict characters and scenes from mummers 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

Series II consists of materials generated by the Library of Congress concerning the collection. It contains manuscipt material, sound recordings, and photographs documenting the 1972 interview with Carpenter as well as a 1987 lecture that drew on collection materials. This is an open series.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH JAMES MADISON CARPENTER

James Madison Carpenter (1888-1984) was born in Booneville, Mississippi. He received both a bachelor of arts degree (1913) and a master of arts degree (1914) from the University of Mississippi. He furthered his graduate training at Harvard University, where he came under the tutelage of Professor G.L. Kittredge, a ballad scholar. At Harvard, Carpenter became interested in British and American folk songs; his dissertation, "Forecastle Songs and Chanties," was completed in 1929.

From 1929 to 1935 Carpenter traveled throughout England and Scotland primarily as a Harvard Fellow, collecting folk songs, folk plays, and other folklore materials. Upon his return to the United States, Carpenter taught himself to notate the tunes he had recorded, and transcribed approximately 1,000 tunes in the next few years. At the same time Carpenter became a college lecturer, giving presentations based on his research at institutions such as Harvard, Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, Radcliffe, Amherst, and the University of Vermont. In 1938 he taught English at Duke University, and continued his collecting of folk songs and children's games, often as part of his curriculum. After five years at Duke, Carpenter taught for one year at William and Mary and then became chairman of the English Department at Greensboro College. His tenure at Greensboro lasted ten years; he formally retired from the department in 1954. Carpenter returned to his hometown of Booneville in 1964, where he lived until his death in 1984.

COLLECTION INVENTORY AND DESCRIPTION

MANUSCRIPTS

Archive of Folk Culture Administrative Material:

SERIES I: ORIGINAL COLLECTION MATERIALS

"B" and "P" in parentheses refer to "box" and "packet" numbers corresponding to those referred to in the microfilm. It is not known if this is the original order of the materials or the arrangement imposed by the Library for microfilming. "MS" refers to "mail sack."

SERIES II: ORAL HISTORY, PROGRAMS, AND PRODUCTS

* A "bothy" is a lean-to in the horse's stable where farm hands slept. "Dreg" refers to the men in small rowboats who would pull a dredge to harvest oysters.

APPENDIX A: DANCE-RELATED MATERIAL

Carpenter was primarily interested in collecting ballads and songs and folk plays; however, since dance is often an integral part of these folk expressions, the materials in the collection include some documentation of dance or dance-related activities, as described below.

MANUSCRIPT MATERIALS

The majority of the folk plays can be found in folders 29-35, "Mummers Plays." Carpenter's documentation of the plays focused on texts. Many of the plays include dance sections, whether or not this was noted by Carpenter. Some of the texts make references to dance within the speeches or lyrics of the characters; other times Carpenter makes a reference to action within the play ("they danced"). A few of the plays, most notably the sword dance plays, contain more description of the dance movements and formations. Based on review during processing, the following are plays (listed using Carpenter's title, informant, and sometimes location) in which Carpenter noted dancing occurs or that feature some description of dancing.

SOUND RECORDINGS

The sound recordings probably contain some tunes used for morris dance, sword dance, and dance interludes in mummers' plays. It is difficult to tell from the titles listed in the recordings content list. However, "fiddle tunes" (Carpenter recording numbers 232-249) probably include dance tunes. See "Recordings--content list" in folders 9-10.

GRAPHIC MATERIALS

The photographs listed below include images of dancing as well as of actitivies that include dance, such as mummers' plays, May Day celebrations, and the English Folk Dance Society (EDFS) festivals. For a more detailed list and explanation, see the Photograph Inventory in Folder 1.

Film Negatives/Photoprints

Glass Lantern Slides