The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a grant of $150,000 to the American Folklore Society (AFS) for work on the publication of a scholarly edition of the American Folklife Center's James Madison Carpenter Collection, one of the most significant collections of British traditions of the 20th century. The grant will be administered by the AFS and managed by a team of British and American folklorists in consultation with the American Folklife Center (AFC) and the AFS.
![From the James Madison Carpenter Collection in the Library's American Folklife Center: "Pace-eggers" in Yorkshire, England, perform a traditional folk play in return for decorated "pace eggs" (also known as "paste eggs") and gifts at Easter, ca. 1925.](images/carpenter.jpg)
From the James Madison Carpenter Collection in the Library's American Folklife Center: "Pace-eggers" in Yorkshire, England, perform a traditional folk play in return for decorated "pace eggs" (also known as "paste eggs") and gifts at Easter, ca. 1925.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress was created by Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife." The center incorporates the Archive of Folk Culture, which was established at the Library in 1928 as a repository for American Folk Music. The center and its collections have grown to encompass all aspects of folklore and folklife from this country and around the world.
The American Folklore Society, founded in 1888, is an international association of people who create and communicate knowledge about folklore throughout the world. Its more than 2,200 members and subscribers are scholars, teachers and librarians at colleges and universities; professionals in arts and cultural organizations; and community members involved in folklore work.
AFC staff will aid in the preparation of the edition through consultation and reference work. The grant will allow this major collaborative effort to continue so that the public will have complete access to one of the most important collections of British folk music, dance and drama in the future.
The NEH grant will allow the completion of the first phase of the critical edition, which will cover the ballads, sea shanties, folk plays, songs associated with folk play and folk dance, and instrumental music. For the first time, Carpenter's extensive treasury of texts and transcriptions will be available in print, taking its place in importance alongside other great compilations such as the Frank C. Brown Collection and the Grieg-Duncan Folk Song Collection.
Folklorist James Madison Carpenter (1888-1983) was born in Blacklands, Miss. He became a scholar of traditional song under George Lyman Kittredge at Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1929. Immediately he set off for Great Britain, where over the next six years he collected more than 6,000 song texts and 500 versions of folk plays, as well as narratives, games and other traditions. In addition, Carpenter's subsequent work in the United States yielded an important body of material, including some of the earliest and best African American narrative recordings.
In 1972 the Library of Congress purchased the collection from Carpenter, and in 1999 Julia Bishop, leading a team of British folklore scholars, created an item-level catalog of the collection at the Library, making the Carpenter materials more accessible to the public. This catalog is available at www.hrionline.ac.uk/carpenter/, and it was the first step toward the scholarly publication of this rare musical archive.
A preliminary finding aid to the collection is available on the Library of Congress' Web site at www.loc.gov/folklife/guides/carpenter.html. The American Folklife Center has completed the digitization of all items in the Carpenter collection and plans to place the whole collection online in the near future, with links to the online catalog.