'Dr Carpenter from the Harvard College in America': An Introduction to James Madison Carpenter and His Collection
By Julia C. Bishop
Folk Music Journal, Vol. 7, No. 4, Special Issue on the James Madison Carpenter Collection (1998), pp. 402-420
'Dr Carpenter from the Harvard College in America': An Introduction to James Madison Carpenter and his Collection
James Madison Carpenter (1888-1984) was a Harvard-trained scholar who undertook folksong, and later folkplay, collecting in Britain in the period 1928-35. His extensive and important collection, now held at the Library of Congress, was never published and Carpenter remained a relatively unknown figure in Anglo-American folksong scholarship. This article presents what is known about the man and the background of his work.
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 Amerca.... He came collectin' alot o' this stuff.[1]
Introduction
The year 1929 witnessed an interesting exchange of personnel across the Atlantic Ocean. From England, forty-four-year-old Maud Karpeles travelled to Newfoundland for the summer to undertake the folksong collecting trip planned but never carried out, by her mentor Cecil Sharp, who had died five years previously. Around the same time, a forty-one-year-old American, named James Madison Carpenter, who had recently graduated with a Ph.D. from Harvard for his work on sea shanties, travelled to England on a Sheldon Fellowship to collect folk songs of all kinds. Karpeles stayed for seven weeks searching for New World survivals of British ballads, and retumed to Newfoundland the following year for a similar period. Carpenter stayed in Britain for six years, broadening the scope of his collecting to include mummers' plays as well as songs.
As far as we know these two near-contemporaries never met, but it is instructive to compare something of the aims, methods and results of their respective collecting trips. Karpeles was hoping to uncover versions of British songs which had survived better in Newfoundland than in England, a quest in which she was ultimately disappointed compared to her experience in the Southern Appalachians.[2] Nevertheless, she found 191 English folk songs which she noted down by ear directly onto paper first, and most importantly to her, the melodies, then the words.[3] Her resulting book, Folksongsf rom Newfoundland,d id not appear until 1971, over forty years later, but remains 'among the most important and voluminous collections of British balladry
from the New World'.[4]
Carpenter had already spent the summer of 1928 in Britain and Ireland collecting sea shanties, and had a full year's funding from Harvard for his 1929 visit. He does not appear to have had a clear idea of what kind of songs he was looking for, apart from the shanties, but his success at collecting ballads and later folk plays led to his alma mater funding all but one year of what became a six-year stay. Although he was initially a less expenrenced collector than Karpeles, he had an academic background in folk song and this played a considerable part in influencing his fieldwork methods and interpretations of his findings. He was interested in both the words and the melodies of the songs, and from the first he employed the latest recording technology, the portable Dictaphone machine, to document these.
What is striking about the contemporaneity of Carpenter's and Karpeles's field trips is that an English collector should be turning for new material to what is now part of North America at precisely the time when a North American collector was looking to Britain for a living tradition of folk song. At the time of Karpeles's trip, there was little active folksong collecting being carried out any longer in England or Scotland, and indeed the prevailing view in the English Folk-Song Society was that traditional singing had more or less died out.[5]
Carpenter was one of the few folksong collectors active in this country at the time, therefore, and the results of his efforts were astounding. He collected around two thousand songs and ballads, including bothy ballads, sea shanties and carols, fiddle tunes, children's singing games, and three hundred munmmers' plays.[6] Furthermore, not only did Carpenter record singers from whom such luminaries as Cecil Sharp and Gavin Greig had previously collected, but he also encountered a large number of prolific singers never before recorded. It is thus no exaggeration to say that in terms of quantity, quality and chronology Carpenter's is one of the largest and most important collections of folk song and folk drama made in Britain this century.[7]
Yet the collection was never published, and its creator remained virtually unknown until, in 1972, Carpenter was traced by Alan Jabbour of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress and the collection purchased.[8] Copies of most of the materials are now available on microfilm and tape, but the Collection remains unpublished to this day.[9]
The aim of this article is to set out what is known of Carpenter's biography, and to trace as far as possible the progress of his 1929-35 collecting trip, of which Carpenter left no detailed chronology. As will become clear, the account is still rather an incomplete one. It draws heavily on two main sources of information: a tape-recorded interview with Carpenter conducted by Alan Jabbour in 1972,[10] and transcriptions, notes, drafts of letters and lectures written by Carpenter, or letters he received, contained in the Collection itself. [11]
From Early Years in the American South to Postgraduate Study at Harvard (1888-1929)
James Madison Carpenter was born in 1888, in the small town of Booneville, Mississippi [12]. Little is known of his family or his parents except that he had at least two sisters and that their father died in 1903.[13] The young James attended high school, first at Booneville and then at Hainesville in Louisiana; he went on to study at the University of Mississippi, gaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1913 and a Master of Arts the following year.[14] From 1914 to 1916 he was a pastor at the Central Church in Columbus, Mississippi, but it is not known whether he was an ordained minister in any faith.[15] In the autumn of 1916 Carpenter went to Harvard to do a Ph.D. in philosophy, but his studies were cut short by America's involvement in the First World War. Carpenter did not pass the medical examination for active service on account of a childhood injury and so he taught for three years as principal of various high schools in Louisiana and Alabama. Following this, he sought seclusion by camping for three months in an old army tent on Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, where he wrote a hundred thousand words towards a novel, a work which he apparently never completed. As we shall see, Carpenter was to display a similar disposition for camping and working on his own whilst collecting in Britain.
At this stage it seems that Carpenter had no particular interest in folk song. All was to change, however, when he returned to Harvard in 1920, this time to study for a Ph.D. in English. This brought him into contact with the redoubtable George Lyman Kittredge, a professor in the Department of English and an eminent literary scholar. Although primarily known for his studies of Beowuf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer, Kittredge was also a leading folklorist.[16] In particular, he had taken on the mantle of his predecessor at Harvard, Francis James Child, and had completed the task of editing the final volume of Child's monumental publication, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, following Child's death in 1896. He also published an abridged edition of Child's magnum opus, prefaced by his own introduction.[17]
Kittredge taught a graduate course on the ballad and throughout his career encouraged many of his students to collect ballads and folk songs in the field.[18] Amongst his proteges were John Lomax, W. Roy Mackenzie, Reed Smith, John Harrington Cox, and Arthur Kyle Davis junior. Carpenter found it something of a struggle academically at Harvard, and his studies were interspersed with periods when he taught courses in English and creative writing in order to fund his studies. Nevertheless, under Kittredge's supervision, Carpenter worked on a Ph.D. thesis concerning sea songs and shanties, based on fieldwork which he carried out in Massachusetts and at the Sailors' Snug Harbor,a home for retired seamen in Staten Island, New York, in the summer of 1927.[19]
Kittredge noticed Carpenter's aptitude for song collecting even at this early stage and, with Kittredge's backing, Carpenter was awarded a Dexter scholarship to collect shanties in Britain during the summer of 1928, while he was still working on the thesis. As Carpenter later acknowledged, Kittredge's influence on him was crucial:
'Professor Kittredge was my mentor. I was collecting this under his inspiration and enthusiasm and . .. instead of staying [in Britain] three months, I stayed four months, and ... they appointed someone to take care of my courses while I was there.'
During his stay, Carpenter roamed widely, collecting in England (London and Bristol), Wales (Cardiff, Barry Docks and Swansea), Scotland (Glasgow, Greenock and Lanarkshire), and northern and southern Ireland (Belfast, Dublin and County Wicklow).[20] He used the Dictaphone, powered by a six-volt battery, for his work although, on this first trip to Britain, he unfortunately shaved the cylinders after transcribing them, a practice which he later regretted.[21]
Returning to Harvard, Carpenter took his exams, finished his 564-page thesis, entitled 'Forecastle Songs and Chanties', and gained his doctorate in 1929.[22] Kittredge's support of his protege did not finish there, however, for shortly after this he obtained a Sheldon Fellowship from Harvard for Carpenter so that he could return to Britain and continue collecting for a whole year (Figure 1).[23] The exact focus of Carpenter's fieldwork under the terms of the Sheldon is not known but he may well have had a free hand. He had certainly encountered other kinds of traditional song besides shanties in 1928[24] and, although he concentrated on collecting shanties at first, he soon discovered a wealth of ballads and other forms of song.
Figure 1
Carpenter's Sheldon F ellowship Certificate
Collecting in Britain (1929-35)
Carpenter arrived in England in the autumn of 1929 to commence his second collecting trip. He purchased a car and immediately set out on his own. He later told Alan Jabbour: 'You can imagine how perfectly lost I felt. Didn't know anybody, and had no directions whatever. But I hugged to the coast, and first worked the coast towns: Whitby and Scarborough and Sunderland and Newcastle.'
Despite his academic training, Carpenter had had no specific instruction in fieldwork methods. Indeed, Kittredge had always remained a library scholar, despite his encouragement of fieldwork among his graduate students, and his advice to Carpenter was of little help:
When I left home, I asked Professor Kittredge-I knew he knew the ballads and so on-and I said, 'Now whom should I approach?' He said, 'Well, I guess you ought to approach t he parson and the domimie and the squire, the three top men....' So I undertook [laughs] to get ballads from the dominie and the parson and the squire, and I found they didn't know a thing in the world about ballads. So I just set out on my own; I'd already had the summer before, collecting the shanties, and I went up that east coast there and worked every town.
Nevertheless, he found it difficult to locate shanty singers during these initial months of his collecting. As already shown by his previous trip, he was willing to cover large areas of the country, but even with a car the results were meagre. Whilst in Dundee, however, Carpenter recorded his first ballad, 'The Dowie Dens of Yarrow'.[25] He quickly realized that finding ballad singers was an easier matter than finding shanty singers, since one singer often knew of others in the same locale.
Thus, Carpenter began to compile lists of recommended singers as well as relying on chance encounters, and he came to concentrate on collecting ballads in Scodand during the winter of 1929 and the following spring and summer.[26] Carpenter's success at collecting ballads during his first winter in Scodand meanwhile convinced Kittredge to obtain further funding for him, this time from the Humanities Fund.[27] The sum awarded was the same as the Sheldon Fellowship, namely $1500, and the grant, actually made to Kittredge, was intended 'for the collection of Chanteys and ballads and popular songs to be carried on by Dr. James M. Carpenter, under the general supervision of Professor Kittredge'.
Writing to Carpenter on 22 March 1930, Kittredge urged him: 'We are much interested in your collections. Don't drop the chanteys, however, in favour of the Child Ballads. Collect whatever seems to you worth collecting, but remember that the texts of the Child Ballads are pretty well known.'[28]
Figure 2
Bell Duncan
Courtesy of the James Madison Carpenter Collection, Arrhive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
It was at about this time, though, that Carpenter came into contact with Bell Duncan, an eighty-two-year-old woman whom he was later to describe as 'the greatest ballad singer of all time' (Figure 2).[29] She lived at Lambhill, near Insch, in Aberdeenshire. [30] Carpenter quickly discovered that Bell Duncan knew, and could still sing, over sixty ballads as well as numerous other songs. Having gained her consent, therefore, he immediately set to work recording her repertoire. His account of these initial sessions is worth quoting in frill for the detailed picture it paints of his collecting methods:
That's the secret, if you're working a place: when you find one folk singer, he's likely to know about two or three or four more others and. . . that way I set into my collecting, and he directed me to Bell Duncan.... He said he thought she'd know some ballads. And I went and knocked at the door, and finally an elderly woman with a fine forehead. . . and keen, clear eyes, with a beautiful shawl on her shoulder, came to the door, and I told her who I was, and she looked me up and down and tumed rights traight a round to her turnips that she was cooking on the crane over the peat fire.
And then her daughter came d ownstairs and heard me talking, and I told her that Mr Campbell had sent me. And she said, 'Well.' She called her mother round, and I said, 'I wondered whether you knew any ballads.'
She said, 'Well, I might. I might know some.'
And so the next day I came around with my typewriter and started copying down the titles. I'd say, 'Do you know so-and-so?' and she'd say, 'Aye.'
And I'd say, 'Do you know so-and-so?' and she'd say, 'Aye.'
And before I knew it, I had three or four pages full of titles. And I thought to myself, 'Well, this woman is certainly crazy.' But when I set into copying them... I'd have her sing on three or four, sometimes five stanzas, and then I'd start at the beginning with the words, and have her dictate two lines, and then I'd type the two lines, and then she'd dictate two more. And in that way, all summer long, I was copying her ballads-three hundred songs and ballads, mounting to four hundreds even stanza pages. And she never gave me a version without the tune with it.
Kittredge may have thought that 'the texts of the Child Ballads are pretty well known', but Carpenter realized that Bell Duncan was an exceptional singer, both in terms of the number of ballads that she knew and the completeness of her versions. Her repertoire also included a number of rare ballads, such as 'The Baron of Brackley' (Child 203), 'The Earl of Essex' ('The Young Earl of Essex's Victory over the Emperor of Germany', Child 288), 'Fair Janet' (Child 64), 'Fair Mary of Wallington' (Child 91), 'The White Fisher' (Child 264), and 'Young Akin' ('Hind Etin', Child 41).
Apart from one incident in which he was taken for a spy, Carpenter found that most of the people he met were well-disposed towards him and that his American nationality was a positive advantage when dealing with informants.[31] In particular, his ability to get people to co-operate in the arduous process of recording their songs on the Dictaphone and then reciting them for typing is remarkable:
Naturally I was eager for these folk songs: shanties and ballads and what have you. And I found when I discovered a person who knew some of these ballads, he had a feeling in his mind that he had something that was very valuable. He'd hoarded it there all those years, and it had rested in his memory, and he was pleased that someone else was interested. . . in his song, or in his tale, or in his play.... Naturally I, like people a nd, I don't know, I've been drawn to people. ... And in those days-back in '29- the Dictaphone was brand new; nobody had ever heard of it, and the idea of having anything that would record a voice was a wonderful thing to them. So they were excited about the Dictaphone-a machine that could record their own voice and when I was getting the little simple preparations ready for it, he was all, you know, needles and pins, ready to sing. And at first, I recorded the tunes; and so, then I'd say, 'Well, now, sing right straight along, two or three or four stanzas of it.' And often he'd sing too high or too low. And I'd just take it as a- [practice?], and let him have a chance to correct it, and get it where it ought to be. And then he'd sing through stanza after stanza, stanza after stanza. And I'd learned about how close to keep the instrument to his mouth to get a good recording.
Then, after this singing. . . I'd take the little portable typewriter on my knees, and say to him, 'Now dictate the song to me, two lines at the time.'
And so he'd say, for instance,' The king sot [sic] in Dunfermline to on/Drinking the bluder ede wine,' and I'd stop him and then type that out, and then hold up my finger for him, and ... he'd finish, 'Says whaur'll I get a skeely skipper/To sail this ship o' mine?' In other words, [he'd] give me the second two lines, and I'd type that right straight hrough.... There was no conversation went on at all; I'd just hold up my finger and ... he'd dictate another two lines, and then I'd record that, and then, right straight through.
Some of those ballads have forty and fifty stanzas. And when my old singer, Bell Duncan she was exceptionally intelligent- and so those long ballads just racked through like that, just as steadily as they could, with no interruption and no conversation, and no questions at all.
Carpenter's own enthusiasm for the material and his personal powers of persuasion must have played a large part in his success at fieldwork: 'It's a science learning how to pick their memories and get [the ballads]. You can irritate them, and they'll just quit, or they won't half try, you know. You've got to keep them eager and interested, and then keep on pumping . . . this elusive thing of the memory.' He was aware of the drawbacks in the methods he used, moreover, and took pains to make sure the versions he got were complete:
One thing that I attribute the value of my collection is the fact that I have the ability to hold great masses of stuff in my memory. And I go over the ballads until I know them consecutively, straight through like that, and. . . after the person has finished singing, very often the excitement of singing onto a Dictaphone makes him forget one or two or three stanzas that he knows. And so, with the thing in my mind, I say, 'Well, was there any stanza that began so-and-so?' He'll say, 'Oh yes!', and away he'd start with his things, you see.
Now that's the difference between my collecting and just the haphazard collector. I loved the stuff and was eager to get it perfectly. And I'd always jog their memory after they'd finished: 'Was this in it? Was that in it?' Naturally, I didn't pump him nor primeh im nor put my stuff in, but if he knew a stanza or two or three that he had forgotten, and it comes, you see, and makes your collection complete. So many people ... when you are waiting the two minutes for him to copy, then the sequence slips out of your mind and the next stanza that you were going to put in just slides through and you go to the third one instead.
Carpenter worked most intensively on the ballads for about a year-and-a-half, presumably from the winter of 1929 to the summer of 1931. In the late autumn of 1930, he broke off his collecting activities to return to England for a while, visiting London[32] before spending a month in Oxford, followed by a month in Cambridge, and two months in Devon and Cornwall.[33] It is likely that he was engaged in library research in Oxford and Cambridge, since he later described how he worked 'alternately among the folk and in adjacent libraries (at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Cambridge, and at Oxford)'. As he went on to explain,
my plan of collecting took point and definiteness, and my library work caught the zest of checking newly collected material. In this way my entire p oint of view gradually took form and developed, under the dual process of following current folk-lore theories and that of daily checking such theories by means of widely diverse folk material collected from widely separarate[dsic] areas, and transmitted u nderc onstantly varying conditions. [34]
Carpenter's visit to Devon and Cornwall at this time may have been when he encountered and started to collect Christmas carols, some of which were also Child ballads.[35]
Letters and other papers amongst Carpenter's collectanea suggest that he continued to collect Child ballads and was also collecting bothy ballads in Scotland from the summer of 1931 and into the early months of 1932.[36] In late 1931, however, he suffered a bout of ill health which restricted his fieldwork.
Carpenter had never displayed much care for his health and physical well-being. On his arrival in Britain in 1929, for example, he had set off northwards without apparently giving a thought to the approaching winter:
I was foolish enough to get a little open Austin car, instead of getting a closed car.... It had, of course, the top, but it was no good. I bought a big, heavy leather coat with the fleece on the inside,a nd as I went north, it got colder and colder, and .., at first I had my. . underwearth at I was used to wearing.... I first got a lightweight wool ... and then, as I drove farther north, I got the heavier and heavier suits, and finally when I got to Aberdeen, I said,' Give me the thickest, warmest[ laughs] woollen suit of underwear y ou have.' And it was like a coat, but I wore it.
John was very emphatic about Carpenter being 'an independent cratur', who seemed to be sleeping and even eating in his car.... He caught a severe chill, and John insisted on bringing him into the farmhouse and putting him to bed. In a few days Mary, John's wife, had nursed him back to health.[38]
In the winter of 1931-32, Carpenter contracted appendicitis, followed by a congested lung, and influenza. According to the interview with Alan Jabbour, Carpenter went south to Land's End in order to convalesce, selling his car and believing that his collecting work was at an end. He did not return to America, however, but instead went to live in Oxford for a year.[39] His decision to do so may have been connected with the fact that Kittredge came to England in 1932 to lecture at University College London, and to receive an honorary degree from Oxford on 17 May.[40] Carpenter had already moved to Oxford by this time and met up with him and his family on several occasions during the visit.[41]
It was during this year in Oxford that Carpenter became increasingly interested in collecting English folk songs and dance tunes.[42] In a letter to Kittredge, dated 21 November 1933 and written from London, Carpenter reports that he has recently collected sixty-three English folk songs, including wassail songs and carols, and forty morris and folk-dance tunes, together with nearly twenty sets of words that accompany them.[43] The same letter indicates that he has undertaken more ballad collecting during the summer of 1933, this time, one presumes, in England rather than in Scotland.
He comments to Kittredge that in dramatic pitch and romantic colouring English folk song, when placed beside the rich hues of the Scottish plaids, may seem pale and washed out, but their [sic] embodiment of the mysterious witches and ghosts instead of the fairies a nd supernatural heroes of the Scottish folk, their droll sense of humor and delightful human qualities will always keep them alive. It is marvellously interesting to find English and Scottish versions of the same songs and ballads and set them side-by-side.[44]
It is almost certain that the ballads and songs collected from Sam Bennett, Mrs Sarah Phelps, William Titchener, and Harry Wiltshire, amongst others, were collected at this time.
This renewal of his work and the fact that he subsequently bought a second car 'a limousine, closed in, with beautiful... blue leather lining'-is indicative of the fact that Harvard was once again funding Carpenter's research. According to Carpenter, Harvard funded all but one of his years in Britain. It is not known which year Carpenter had to support himself, but he partly met his expenses by writing articles for the New York Times Magazine and possibly other such publications in America. A series of three articles by Carpenter on sea shanties certainly appeared in the New York Times Magazine in July 1931.[45] To judge from correspondence in the Carpenter Collection, more such feature articles from this period by Carpenter may yet come to light.[46]
Carpenter's year in Oxford also occasioned him to broaden the scope of his fieldwork to include mummers' plays.[47] He first came acrosst he play in the following manner:
While I was at Oxford, staying there ... a woman's society there at Oxford had collected from Shotover, a little community just above Oxford, a mummer's play; and it occurred to me, well, why not? And if you can find it here, you can find it somewhere else. So, after I'd got my last fund from Kittredge-by the way, Kittredge and Dean Chase and Dean Moore worked together to get my funds, year after year, you see- and then I set out, left my material, a part of it, there at the place where I'd had digs for a year, and started south. And I must have gone from Oxfordshire down into Wiltshire. And I bought my car down in Wiltshire. And then I worked north and west from there. And I started finding them right off. I started finding play after play after play, and I saw immediately that there were lots of them. I wrote to Professor Kittredge after I'd found a hundred plays.... I said I believe I can find three hundred plays here.... I'd go from one town to another, and it was a rule, instead of the exception, that they had the mummer's play. And so you'd go into the town and sure enough there was the play.
The report to Kittredge indicates more precisely that during the summer and autumn of 1933 Carpenter searched for the plays in parts of Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and Warwickshire. Carpenter was clearly excited by his discoveries and asked Kittredge for further funding to explore the northern and eastern counties of England, the Southwest and Wales. Since his health had by now greatly improved, he planned to work through the winter and into the following summer in order to amplify his folk play collection. Although careful to stress to Kittredge that he had not lost interest in ballad-collecting, Carpenter was keenly aware of the importance of the mummers' plays in relation to the very limited collecting done by Edmund Chambers and R. J. E. Tiddy.[48]
The funding came through and once again Carpenter took to sleeping in his car, partly due to the fact that not every settlement had a pub where he could stay, and partly due to the dampness of the pub rooms he tried. By the spring of 1934, he had worked his way back up to Scotland again and returned to his ballad research.[49] At this stage he seems to have been thinking ahead to the publication of his ballads and trying to obtain photographs of locations in Scotland relevant to them.[50] There is evidence that Carpenter was in Cornwall collecting Christmas carols in December 1934, and back in Scotland in January, March, and May 1935.[51] He returned to America sometime between May and September 1935.[52]
Making a Name and Making a Living in America (1935-54)
Carpenter returned to the environs of Harvard, settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, no doubt to be near to his mentor, Kittredge, while he started on the task of preparing his ballads for publication. Carpenter had no teaching position at Harvard, however, and so for about a year he earned money by giving occasional lectures at universities and colleges in the American Northeast. He got engagements at the University of Vermont, Harvard (arranged by Kittredge), Amherst, Boston University, Radcliffe (where he lectured twice), Mount Holyoke and Wellesley; in each case, it seems, he lectured mainly on the ballads. His audiences were enthusiastic about both his material and his method of presentation which involved him singing some or all of the song examples himself:
In his own singing of the ballads-a skill formed on sensitively keen listening-he has trained himself to convey the authentic accent and spirit of the original singers. Approaching the ballad as he does, with a frill consideration of the surpassing meaningfulness of musical tone, he leaves his hearers with a deep feeling, first of the importance to a national culture o f a song-tradition in the lives of its unlettered folk, and second, of the adequacy of these ballads as art in their own right
(Alfred D . Sheffield, Wellesley College).[53]
For Carpenter, the most important engagement was at Harvard itself, in front of Kittredge, and this seems to have been a success: 'I'd written my lecture with Kitty in mind as an audience and he was most gracious. He was keenly interested in it ...
and his wife and his daughter.' The lecture gained Kittredge's personal endorsement in which he made reference to Carpenter's 'very remarkable work' in ballad-collecting.[54]
In between his lecture engagements, Carpenter set about transcribing the tunes of the ballads from his Dictaphone recordings, an arduous task in which he was completely self-taught. Anxious to secure a more reliable income, he also made an application to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship in order to edit his collection for publication.[55] This was unsuccessful; according to Carpenter, 'in refusing to accept as a transcriber of my tunes a misfit-protege of Mr. Moe's musical advisor, I lost the grant.'[56] Once again, however, the Humanities Fund at Harvard, through Professor J. L. Lowes, stepped in, providing him with two years' funding (1936 and 1937) for the tune transcription and editing work.[57] For the second year of the grant, he obtained a glowing reference from the folksong scholar and collector, Phillips Barry, to whom he had shown some of his transcriptions.[58] Barry was particularly interested in the attention which Carpenter was devoting to the tunes as well as the texts of the ballads and strongly supported the publication of Carpenter's collection, so that the British origins of American folk music and the long-term effects of oral transmission on traditional melody could be studied in detail.
The publication being planned by Carpenter was to be called 'English and Scottish Traditional Ballads'[59] or 'British Traditional Ballads'[60] and, in addition to his own ballad collection, was to contain the previously unpublished ballads collected by Reverend James B. Duncan from his elder sister, Mrs Margaret Gillespie. Carpenter had made copies of the ballads from the late Reverend Duncan's manuscripts which, at the time of his stay in Britain, were held by Duncan's daughter, Katharine.[61] Carpenter clearly had great ambitions for his projected book. In the rough notes which he made for its Foreword, he described it as 'an invaluable supplement' to Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads. His notes continue:
It is not only by far the largest collection of the old storied songs that have been preserved in the memory of the folk, but it is the only comprehensive traditional collection from both English and Scottish singers. The publication is valuable not only in its seven hundred-odd traditional tunes and texts but as well in the new light that it throws upon many other vexed questions of folk origins and authenticity of former collections.[62]
In fact, Carpenter claims that his collection consists entirely of authentic, orally transmitted ballads and that these can be used as a measure of the genuineness of some of the ballads included by Child in his collection.[63] The task of editing so much material for publication was a large one and by the end of 1937 it became clear that the Humanities Fund at Harvard could no longer provide him with funds.[64] In 1938, he began to write to fellow folksong collectors and scholars, describing himself and his work, and asking for prospective lecture engagements. Thus, in February 1938, he introduced himself to John Lomax, who was at that time employed at the Archive of Folk Song in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.[65] Lomax was away in Europe and the letter was answered by his son, Alan, who, as well as expressing his interest in Carpenter's collection, suggested contacting an agency for lectures and expressed concem that Carpenter's repeated playing of his Dictaphone recordings for transcription purposes might wear them out.[66] Both of these comments seem to have been taken to heart by Carpenter. Not long after this, he got the management of George W. Britt in Boston to produce a brochure advertising his lectures (Figure 3) which now covered 'English and Scottish Traditional Ballads', 'Roman Britain', 'Lusty Chanteys from Long-Dead Ships', 'Scottish Castles and Cotswold Cottages', and 'Mummers, Guyzards, Sword- Dancers'.[67]
It also appears to have been around this time that Carpenter began to copy his Dictaphone cylinder recordings onto 12-inch 78-rpm discs.[68] Soon after writing to John Lomax, Carpenter also wrote to Frank C. Brown, who was chairman of the English Department at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and an eminent folklorist. In the letter Carpenter inquired as to the possibility of a position at Duke while he continued with his ballad editing. Brown, who was himself in the process of preparing for publication a large folklore collection which he had made in North Carolina, and who knew Kittredge, became interested in Carpenter and managed to secure him a part-time teaching fellowship at a salary of $1000.[69] Under the terms of the fellowship, Carpenter was to teach six hours a week and was free to carry out paid lecturing elsewhere as well. Carpenter therefore moved to Durham in September 1938 in great anticipation, despite the fact that he had little money and had to ask Kittredge for a loan of a hundred dollars so that he could buy a car to transport his precious recordings to North Carolina.[70]
He must have been optimistic at this stage about making up his part-time salary and being able to finish off his editing, for he had had five thousand lecture prospectuses printed, and a number of publishers-including Harvard University Press and Houghton Mifflin-had expressed strong interest in his ballad publication. He had also nearly finished a small illustrated volume entitled 'Christmas Mummers and Cornish Carols' and was writing the introduction for Folk Songs of Old New England, collected and edited by Eloise Hubbard Linscott.[71] These were in addition to two further articles, on the shanties and the ballads respectively, which were to be published in the New York Times Magazine,[72] and an arrangement with a children's author and illustrator, Mrs Lois Covey, who published under the name of Lois Lenski, to publish some of his folk tales, songs and rhymes for children.[73] All seemed to go well initially at Duke. Soon after his arrival, he wrote to Eloise Linscott:
The methods [of teaching] are so different here from those at Harvard that I have had to undergo a considerable adjustment. However, am getting used to it all now. Duke is a marvelously beautiful place, and has bright prospects for the future. I have found some very good friends here.[74]
Carpenter read a paper on 'English and Scottish Ballads in their Native Haunts' at the Modern Language Association's meeting in New York on 29 December 1938,[75] and delivered the same paper, illustrated with slides and singing, at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Folklore Society in Knoxville, Tennessee, on 31 March 1939.[76]
Meanwhile, he continued to edit his ballad collection, and gathered still more material through his students, particularly those attending his summer school.[77] As his collection grew, so did his publication plans. The title of his projected ballad book became 'British and American Traditional Ballads with Tunes' and, according to his outline for the book, it was to be 'the most valuable collection of Child ballads with tunes ever published'.[78] The University funded a typist for three or four years as well, so he was able to carry out a good deal of the work of cataloguing and typing the ballad texts.
Carpenter was not happy with his position at Duke, however, and found himself doing more teaching there than he had bargained on.[79] He tried to reconcile his teaching duties, which were in English literature and creative writing, and his specialist knowledge of folklore by proposing a course for full-time undergraduate students on 'Popular Backgrounds of Literature'. This was a course which he had already run very successfully for summer school students, both at Duke and previously in Massachusetts.[80] It would appear that his attempt to introduce this course into the mainstream timetable and his research interests were viewed as treading on the toes of Brown. The proposal emphasises in several places that the course is 'not an encroachment upon Dr. Brown's field', that 'the field is amply wide enough for two', and that Brown's research and his own are complementary.
What became of Carpenter's proposal, and further details of Carpenter's relationship with Brown and his colleagues, are not known. Brown, however, died on 3 June 1943 at the age of seventy-two[81] and Carpenter left Duke in the same year, after five years. Carpenter then obtained a one-year post as Acting Assistant Professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where a fellow student from his Harvard days was head of the English Department.[82] Finally, in 1944, Carpenter was appointed head of the English Department at Greensboro Woman's College, a Methodist college in North Carolina, where he stayed until his retirement in 1954. He found the students there intelligent and eager to learn, and his courses, especially his Shakespeare class, were very popular.
During his time at Greensboro, Carpenter did not give up hope of publishing at least part of his collection. In fact, he was courted by another eminent folklorist, Arthur Palmer Hudson, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[83] Hudson offered to pay Carpenter $7500 for the collection and to allow him the opportunity to work on and publish what he could of the material for at least five years following the purchase, but Carpenter refused.[84] It seems that, according to a recently discovered letter written by Bertrand Bronson to Margaret Dean-Smith, Carpenter w as planning to renew his efforts to gain funding and continue work on the collection after his retirement. Bronson, too, had previously approached Carpenter for permission to reproduce the texts and tunes of his ballads in The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads,[85] a four-volume supplement to Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads which Bronson was in the process of compiling, but also to no avail:
Years ago, I heard him make a report on his collections at a meeting of the Mod. Lang. Assoc. He said he had tunes for certain Child ballads for which tunes had never been been [sic] published, and later I tried to get copies from him. He said he couldn't possible [sic] afford to give me even one. After that, I lost track of him for a number of years, until about two years ago Professor B . J. Whiting, of Harvard, showed me, and afterward gave me, a begging letter he had just received from the man. It asked for help in securing a subsidy to further and publish his discoveries. It also contained a comprehensive d escription o f the scope of his collections. There is nothing bogus about them and they are fabulous.... In his letter, Carpenter said he had just been retired from his teaching, but was very fit and ready to plunge into the editing job that he'd had to postpone for so many years.[86]
[pics]
As far as we know, Carpenter was unsuccessful in securing any financial assistance at this stage, from Harvard or elsewhere. Indeed, he seems to have become caught between being unable to see the collection through to publication and being unable to let someone else do so for him. There are reports that Carpenter was very possessive about his collection, and Bronson describes him as 'an odd and extremely jealous and secretive man'. [87]
According to Bronson, he has shown parts of his transcriptions of phonographic records to Whiting and others, and has played specimens of the records to enlist interest and support. Whiting told me that always, when he showed him anything, he kept his hand over part of the page, lest his reader should be able to see and remember too much! ... It was Whiting's private opinion, expressed to me, that even if by good fortune he got a grant from somewhere he never would manage to bring matters to fruition. But meanwhile, he will certainly allow no one else to work on the collection, as he regards it as the certain key to fame and fortune. I remember hearing years ago that he was so psychopathic about possible loss that he tied his records all up in a sack when he went to bed at night, ready to lower them out of the window if there should be a fire![88] Thus the collection stayed with Carpenter for some considerable time after he retired without progressing towards publication.
Retirement and the Relinquishing of 'an unparalleled folklore collection' (1954-84)
Following his retirement, Carpenter continued to live in Greensboro for a time. He would therefore have been in Greensboro in 1960 at the time of the 'Greensboro Sit-In', a protest which was to spark an era of student-led civil rights demonstrations.[89]
Carpenter rented an apartment from a Mr Pope, editor of the Greensboro Journal, a man of whom Carpenter later spoke warmly, mentioning with obvious approval that he wrote a book arguing against desegregation. Gradually, Carpenter came to rent smaller apartments and moved out into a suburb before finally returning home to Mississippi in 1964. He seems to have lost interest in working on his collection by this time, devoting himself instead to vegetable gardening and writing his own songs.
It was at his home in Booneville that Alan Jabbour tracked Carpenter down and, in 1972, purchased his collection for the Library of Congress. Carpenter was resigned to letting the material go by this time as long as he received a fair price for it.[9] He was, after all, aged eighty-three. In a letter to the folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein, he explained:
My running from pillar to post, teaching, kept me from doing anything with it in the way of publication; however, I secured a number of grants and did some good hard work on it from time to time. If I could call back ten years, I'd never consider selling it but would work on it myself.[91]
Carpenter lived on in Booneville until his death on 4 July 1984 at the age of ninety-five. He had been very ill with diabetes in the three months prior to his death and had had to have a leg amputated but, according to his niece, he was alert to the end.[92] Carpenter had never married and had no children. He was also practically unknown in his chosen field of folksong and folklore studies, and there were no obituraries in any of the relevant scholarly journals in Britain or America. Yet, he left behind what he once described as 'an unparalleled folklore collection'[93] which, when published, will undoubtedly justify his claims. Meanwhile, it is hoped that the articles in this special issue of Folk MusicJournal go some way towards showing the interest and extent of his work, and raising its profile as a missing chapter in the history of Anglo-American folksong collecting.
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Parsons Fund for Ethnography at the Library of Congress which enabled me to visit the American Folklife Center at the Library in 1996 in order to consult the originals of the Carpenter Collection. I am much indebted t o the Director and staff there, especially Jennifer Cutting, for their many kindnesses, encouragement and assistance, Thomas F. Harkins, Associate University Archivist, has a lso been very helpful in locating materials at Duke University. My research into Carpentehr as greatly benefited from discussions with colleagues, particularly Malcolm Taylor, Sigrid Rieuwerts, Ian Olson, Paul Smith, Herbert Halpert, Steve Roud, Christophe Crawte, David Atkinson, Chris Metherell, and members of the Editorial Board of Folk Music Journal.
Notes
1. Quoted by Hamish Henderson in 'John Strachan', Tocher, 36/37 (1981-82), 410-30 (p. 417); reprinted in Alias MacAlias: Writings on Songs, Folk and Literature, by Hamish Henderson (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), p. 200. Harvard College forms part of Harvard University.
2 See Maud Karpeles,Folk Songs from Newvfoundland (London: Faber, 1971), p. 17.
3 See Carole Henderson Carpenter,' Forty Years Later: Maud Karpeles in Newfoundland', in Folklore Studies in Honour of Herbert Halpert A: Festschrifetd, by Kenneth S. Goldstein and Neil V. Rosenberg, Folklore and Language Bibliographical and Special Series, 7 (St John's: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1980), pp. 111-24 (pp. 115-17).
4. John Ashton and Julia C. Bishop, 'British Ballads in Newfoundland: Some Recent Examples', Lore & Language, 7.2 (1988), 47-90 (p. 48).
5. See the Editorial by Frank Howes in Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1.1 (1932),
vii.
6. 'James Madison Carpenter Collection', in Special C ollections in the Library of Congress: A Selective Guide, compiled by Annette Melville (Washington: Library of Congress, 1980), p. 57.
7 See Roy Palmer, 'The Carpenter Collection', Folk Music Journal, 5.5 (1989), 620-23, and Steve Roud and Paul Smith, 'James Madison Carpenter and the Mummers' Play', in this issue of Folk Music Journal.
8 The James Madison Carpenter Collection, AFC 1972/001, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
9 Copies of the microfilms and tapes are held at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London, VWML Microfilm Reels 46-55 and VWML Reel Tape Collection 303-324. Another copy of the microfilm is held at the Aberdeen Public Library.
10. Conducted 27 May 1972, at Booneville, Mississippi. The tapes now form part of the Carpenter Collection, AFC 1972/001, Reel Tapes, AFS 14,762-14,765. Copies are held at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, VWML Cassettes 121-122.
11. It may be taken that, in the following, any statements conceming Carpenter or quotations by him are taken from the tape-recorded interview, unless otherwise stated.
12. According to some handwritten notes by Alan Jabbour in AFC 1972/001, Folder 4 (not on the Microfilm),C arpenter'sd ate of birth was 17 October 1889 [sic].T he notes are probablyt he information which Jabbour was given by the Harvard Alumni Association when he set about tracing Carpenter, but the year must certainly be a slip since Carpenter states his year of birth categorically as 1888 in the tape recorded interview.
13. The two sisters are mentioned in Carpenter's letter to Alan Jabbour, dated 1 February 1971, AFC 1972/001, Folder 2 (not on the Microfilm).
14. James M. Carpenter,' Two Versions of a Hard-Luck Story', North Carolina Folklore, 2(1954), 16-17 (p. 16). The subject of his degrees is not known.
15. Letter from Jennifer Zukowski, Curatorial Associate, Harvard University Archives, to Christopher Cawte, 27 July 1979. I am indebted to Christopher Cawte for passing on this information. Michael Heaney informs me that the Central Church in Columbus today is a United Methodist foundation.
16. See 'Kittredge, G eorge Lyman' i n Funk and Wagnall's S tandard Encyclopedia of Folklore, ed . by Maria Leach and Jerome Fried (New York: Crowell, 1949-50), p. 583; David E. Bynum, 'Child's Legacy Enlarged: Oral Literary Studies at Harvard since 1856', Harvard Library Bulletin, 22 (1974), 237-67; Clyde Kenneth Hyder, George Lyman Kittredge: Teacher and Scholar (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1962).
17. English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press; London: Harrap, 1904).
18. Bynum, pp. 245-52; Hyder, p. 102; Esther K. Birdsall, 'Some Notes on the Role of George Lyman Kittredge in American Folklore Studies', Journal of the Folklore Institute, 10 (1973), 57-66.
19. See 'Popular Backgrounds of Literature', unpublished course proposal written by Carpenter, Duke University Archives, Duke University, Office of the President, William Preston Few, Records, Subject files, English Department, p. 10; letter to Alan Jabbour, dated 16 March 1971, AFC 1972/001, Folder 2 (not on Microfilm). Cf Robert Young Walser, "'Here We Come Home in a Leaky Ship!" The Shanty Collection of James Madison Carpenter', in this issue of Folk Music Journal.
20. See AFC 1972/001, Folders 13-22 (Box 1, Packet 1); on Microfilm Reel 1, and Folders 36-39 (Box 1, Packet 4); on Microfilm Reel 3.
21. See Interview, and Postscript of an incomplete letter, no date, AFC 1972/001, Folder 137 (Box 6, Packet 6A); on Microfilm Reel 8.
22. Ph.D. thesis, English, Harvard University, 1929; there is a copy of the thesis in Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, VWML Microfilm Reel 42.
23. AFC 1972/001, Folder 12 (not on the Microfilm).
24. See Postscript of incomplete letter cited in note 21.
25. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to identify this singer.
26. 'Collecting Folklore in Britain', unpublished typescript, AFC 1971/001, Folder 148 (Box 6, Packet 6L); on Microfilm Reel 8.
27. The information in this paragraph comes from a letter from Kittredge to Carpenter, of 22 March 1930, AFC 1972/001, Folder 12 (not on the Microfilm).
28. Letter from Kittredge to Carpenter.
29. 'British and American Traditional Ballads with Tunes', unpublished typescript, AFC 1972/001, Folder 67 (Box 3A); on Microfilm Reel 5. The photograph of Bell Duncan was taken by Carpenter, AFC 1972/001, P95.
30. 'Collecting Folklore in Britain'.
31. See 'Folksongs of British Peasants', unpublished typescript, AFC 1972/001, Folder 181 (Mail Sack, Packet 2E); on Microfilm Reel 10.
32. A letter dated 29 December 1930 from Harold Callender of the New York Times was sent to Carpenter at the Bradford House Hotel, London, suggesting he was staying there on or around that date; see AFC 1972/001, Folder 66 (Box 2, Packet 9B); on Microfilm Reel 5.
33. 'Collecting Folklore in Britain'.
34. 'Plans for Work' [1936?], part of an application to the Guggenheim Foundation, AFC 1972/001, Folder 64 (Box 2, Packet 8); on Microfilm Reel 5.
35. See Carpenter'su npublishedp aper 'ChristmasM ummersa nd Comish Carols',i n AFC 1972/001, Folder 158 (Box 7, Packet 2B) and in Folder 161 (Box 7, Packet 2E); on Microfilm Reel 9. See also 'Folksongs of British Peasants'.
36. See the list of ballads collected during the period June 1931 to the 'first of 1932', the list of 'ballads collected since first of year, 1932', in AFC 1972/001, Folder 156 (Box 7, Packet 1D); on Microfilm Reel 9, and the list entitled 'Bothy Songs, 1931-32', in AFC 1972/001, Folder 140 (Box 6, Packet 6D); on Microfilm Reel 8.
37. Letter from Kittredge to Carpenter.
38. Henderson, 'John Strachan', p. 418; reprinted in Henderson, Alias MacAlias, p. 200.
39. See also a letter to Alan Jabbour, dated 18 August 1972, in which Carpenter states that he was in Oxford for roughly a year, 'in and out of the Bodleian', AFC 1972/001, Folder 3 (not on the Microfilm).
40. Hyder, pp. 159-64.
41. Letter to Kenneth Goldstein, 22 March 1971, AFC 1972/001, Folder 2 (not on the Microfilm). An advice note for Dictaphone cylinders sent to Carpenter care of Oxford Post Office and dated 10 May 1933 shows that he was also there a year later, AFC 1972/001, Folder 63 (Box 2, Packet 7); on Microfilm Reel 5.
42. An indication of this is the sheet entitled 'List of Bampton Dances, Whitmonday June 5 1933', AFC 1972/001, Folder 20 (Box 1, Packet 1H); on Microfilm Reel 1.
43. Letter to Kittredge, 21 November 1933, AFC 1972/001, Folder 66 (Box 2, Packet 9B); on Microfilm Reel 5.
44. Letter to Kittredge.
45. The details are as follows: 'Lusty Chanteys from Long-Dead Ships', New York Times Magazine, 12 July 1931, pp. 12-13, 23; 'Life Before the Mast: A Chantey Log', New York Times Magazine, 19 July 1931, pp. 14-15; 'Chanteys that "Blow the Man Down"', New York Times Magazine, 26 July 1931, pp. 10, 15. See also the letter from Harold Callender, European Representative in the Sunday Feature Department of the New York Times, dated 29 December 1930 (cited in note 31), regarding his interest in having these three articles from Carpenter; the letter mentions 'the article already done on the Chanties', but it is not clear if this is one written by Carpenter or not.
46. See undated and incomplete letter from Carpenter to 'you and Mr Markel' (Markel and Callender were at the New York Times) and a postscript to this or another letter in AFC 1972/001, Folder 137 (Box 6, Packet 6A); on Microfilm Reel 8.
47. Letter to Kittredge.
48. See Steve Roud and Paul Smith, 'James Madison Carpenter and the Mummers Play'.
49 In his letter to Kittredge, Carpenter states, 'I hope to make one more collecting trip into Scodand before my work in Britain comes to an end', and a note on the label of Carpenter's Dictaphone Cylinder Number 76 (AFC 1972/001, Dictaphone Cylinders, 4576) refers to 'Insch [Aberdeenshire] Spring 1934'.
50. See the letter from Dalhousie Estates Limited, dated 19 June 1934, granting Carpenter permission to go round Brechin Castle, AFC 1972/001, Folder 186 (not on the Microfilm), the letter from G. H. Tait, dated 27 June 1934, sending Carpenter photographs of various Scottish locations including Brechin Castle in Angus, AFC 1972/001, Folder 185 (not on the Microfilm), and the letter from William N. Meikle, of 16 August 1934, with photographs of Duntarvie and Niddry castles, and 'Scott's View', AFC 1972/001, Folder 186 (not on the Microfilm). The reference n umbers o f the photographs themselves in the Carpenter Collection are AFC 1972/001, P155-157, P198--201 and P517 (Tait), and P215-216 and P516 (Meikle).
51. Carpenter collected 'The Cherry-Tree Carol' from Miss Bessie Wallace in Comwall in December 1934, AFC 1972/001, Folder 103 (Box 5, Packet ID); on Microfilm Reel 7; a note on the label of Carpenter Dictaphone Cylinder Number 14 (AFC 1972/001, Dictaphone Cylinder, 4514) refers to Carpenter recording John Strachan (of Fyvie, Aberdeenshire) in January 1935; a receipt dated 18 March 1935 was sent to Carpenter at the Post Office in Fochabers, Morayshire, AFC 1972/001, Folder 186 (not on the Microfilm), and there is a letter clearly written from Scotland by Carpenter to 'you and Mr. Markel' [at the New York Times] (cited in note 43) which refers to the King's Jubilee-this must be King George V's Silver Jubilee which was celebrated on 6 May 1935 and throughout the summer of that year.
52. An unfinished letter, dated 28 September 1935, is addressed from Corinth, Mississippi, suggesting Carpenter may have made a visit to his family before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work on his collection; see AFC 1972/001, Folder 130 (Box 6, Packet 2C); on Microfilm Reel 8.
53. Quoted on a publicity brochure which Carpenter had printed in 1938. A copy of this brochure is apparently contained in the Carpenter Collection but I was unable to locate it on examination of the Collection in 1996. A photocopy is available at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, A L Carpenter.
54. 1938 publicity brochure.
55. See letter to Mr Henry Allen Moe, dated 2 February 1936, AFC 1971/001, Folder 179 (Mail Sack, Packet 2C); on Microfilm Reel 10.
56. Letter to Alan Jabbour, 16 March 1971, AFC 1972/001, Folder 2 (not on the Microfilm).
57. See letter from Carpenter to the Committee on the Humanities Fund, 13 January 1937, AFC 1972/001 (Folder 74, Box 3H); on Microfilm Reel 5.
58. Letter from Phillips Barry to Professor Charles Burton Gulick, 13 January 1937, AFC 1972/001, Folder 74 (Box 3H); on Microfilm Reel 5. Barry also mentions Carpenter's ballad collection in an article published the same year; see 'American Folk Music', Southern Folklore Quarterly, 1 (1937), 29-47 (pp. 38, 39).
59. 1938 publicity brochure.
60. Handwritten rough notes, AFC 1972/001, Folder 52 (Box 2, Packet 21); on Microfilm Reel 4.
61. See letter from Katharine Duncan, dated 19 June 1937, giving Carpenter permission to publish these items under her father's name, AFC 1972/001, Folder 46 (Box 2, Packet 2C); on Microfilm Reel 4, and Ian Olson's article, 'Scottish Song in the Carpenter Collection' in this issue of Folk MusicJournal.
62. See note 60.
63. See Julia C. Bishop, "'The Most Valuable Collection of Child Ballads with Tunes ever Published": The Unfinished Work of James Madison Carpenter', in Ballads into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child, edited by Tom Cheesman and Sigrid Rieuwerts (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 81-94. "4 Letter to John A. Lomax, 3 February 1938, AFC 1972/001, Folder 12 (not on the Microfilm); cf. letter to Frank Clyde Brown, 14 February 1938, Duke University Archives, Duke University, English Department, Records, Faculty files.
65. Letter to John A. Lomax.
66. Letterf rom 'A[lan] L[omax]', Assistant in Charge, Archive of American Folk-Songs [sic], 19 February 1938, AFC 1972/001, Folder 12 (not on the Microfilm).
67. Carpenter mentions its recent appearance in a letter to Kittredge, dated 28 August 1938, AFC 1972/001, Folder 161 (Box 7, Packet 2E); on Microfilm Reel 9. See also note 53.
68. Carpenter'sle tter to Kittredge, 28 August 1938, refers to his realization that he will have to move his Dictaphone records before he has finished copying them.
69. Letter from Frank C. Brown to Carpenter, 9 May 1938, and telegram from Brown to Carpenter, 12 May 1938, Duke University Archives, Duke University, English Department, Records, Faculty files.
70. Letter to Kittredge, 28 August 1938.
71. Letter to Brown, 5 May 1938, Duke University Archives, Duke University, English Department, Records, Faculty files. See also the letter from Carpenter to Mrs Linscott, 3 November 1938 (in the Eloise Hubbard Linscott Collection, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) and Folk Songs of Old New England, coll. and ed. by Eloise Hubbard Linscott (New York: Macmillan, 1939; 2nd edn, Hamden, CN: Archon Books 1962).
72. See Carpenter'sle tter to Mr LesterM arkel, 26 February1 937, AFC 1972/001, Folder 179 (Mail Sack, Packet 2C); on Microfilm Reel 10. One of these is probably the article by Carpenter entitled 'Chanteys in the Age of Sail' which appeared in the New York Times Magazine, 30 October 1938, p. 6 (copy in AFC 1972/001, Folder 11, not on the Microfilm); the other article has not yet been traced.
73. See Carpenter's letter to Kittredge, 28 August 1938, and Susie Mariar, by Lois Lenski (London: Oxford University Press, 1939; reprinted New York: Henry Z. Walck, 1968).
74. Letter to Linscott.
75. Memo, dated 1 January 1939, in Duke University Archives, Duke University, News Service, Faculty files.
76. Program of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Southeastem Folklore Society, AFC 1972/001, Folder 131 (Box 6, Packet 2D); on Microfilm Reel 8.
77. See the list of names and addresses of summer school students (year unknown), AFC 1972/001, Folder 149 (Box 6, Packet 7A); on Microfilm Reel 9; see also the ballad and song transcriptions from these students in, for example, Folder 70 (Box 3D); on Microfilm Reel 5, and Folders 149-152 (Box 6, Packet 7); on Microfilm Reel 9.
78. 'British and American Traditional Ballads with Tunes'.
79. See Interview, and 'Popular Backgrounds of Literature'.
80. 'Popular Backgrounds of Literature'.
81. 'In Memoriam', in The Frank C. Brown C ollection of North C arolina F olklore, ed. by Newman Ivey White, 7 vols (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1952), I, v.
82 See letter to Carpenter from James W. Miller, 15 September 1943, AFC 1972/001, Folder 122 (Box 5, Packet 2); on Microfim Reel 7, and Interview.
83. See letter from Carpenter to Hudson, no date, AFC 1972/001, Folder 71 (Box 3E); on Microfilm Reel 5, and James M. Carpenter, 'Two Versions of a Hard-Luck Story', 16.
84. Letter from Carpenter to Alan Jabbour, 16 March 1971, AFC 1972/001, Folder 2 (not on the Microfilm).
85. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, by Bertrand H. Bronson, 4 vols (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1959-72).
86. Letter from Bertrand H. Bronson t o Margaret Dean-Smith, dated 24 September 1955, Correspondence File (under 'Guide'), Margaret Dean-Smith Collection, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London. Quoted by permission of the Literary Executor of the Collection.
87. Letter to Margaret Dean-Smith.
88. Letter to Margaret Dean-Smith.
89. William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: G reensboro, North Carolina, and the Black S truggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
90. Letter to Alan Jabbour, 16 March 1971.
91. Letter to Goldstein.
92. Memorandum written by Alan Jabbour, 17 July 1984, AFC 1972/001, Folder 3 (not on the Microfilm).
93. Letter to Goldstein.