James Madison Carpenter (1888-1983)
[The index of the Carpenter Collection is available online but as of yet the music, texts and sound recordings are not available- what a waste!]
James Madison Carpenter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
James Madison Carpenter
Born 1888
Blacklands, Mississippi
Died 1983
Occupation Methodist minister, folklorist
James Madison Carpenter, born in Blacklands, Mississippi (near Booneville) in 1888, was a Methodist minister and scholar of American and British folklore. He received his bachelor and masters of arts degrees from the University of Mississippi, and a PhD from Harvard in 1929. He is most known for his substantial work collecting folk songs in England, Scotland and Wales. He recorded well-known singers and musicians that other folklorists had documented, as well as some never recorded before or since such as Bell Duncan, whose repertoire (according to Carpenter) consisted of some 300 songs, including 65 Child ballads. His collection methods included Dictaphone recordings as well as transcriptions of lyrics.
Carpenter returned to Harvard in 1935 where he gave occasional lectures and worked on transcribing the tunes of the ballads he had collected, intending to put the material into publishable form. From 1938-1943 he taught part-time at Duke University in the English Department. In 1943 he took another post in Virginia and finally moved to the English Department at Greensboro College, North Carolina, where he stayed until his retirement in 1954. He returned to Booneville, Mississippi, in 1964 and remained there until his death in 1983.
In the end, only a handful of items from his collection were ever published. His extensive material eventually found a home at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress where it has been made accessible (and searchable). It is considered "a major collection of traditional song and drama, plus some items of traditional instrumental music, dance, custom, narrative and children's folklore, from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the USA, documented in the period 1927-55."[1] In 2003, the James Madison Carpenter Collection Online Catalogue, the University of Sheffield, and the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, were jointly awarded the Brenda McCallum Prize of the American Folklore Society for their work on the Carpenter Collection.
For a more extensive biography see "'Dr Carpenter from the Harvard College in America': An Introduction to James Madison Carpenter and his Collection" by Julia C. Bishop, Folk Music Journal, 7/4, 1998, pp. 402-420. This is the first article in a special issue of the Journal devoted to Carpenter and his collection.
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James Madison Carpenter biography
James Madison Carpenter was born in Blackland, near Booneville, Mississippi, in 1888. He was educated at the University of Mississippi where he gained a Master's degree before becoming a Methodist minister. He entered Harvard as a doctoral student in English in 1920 and there became a student of George Lyman Kittredge, an eminent literary and folklore scholar. Under Kittredge's supervision, Carpenter worked on a PhD thesis entitled 'Forecastle Songs and Chanties', drawing on fieldwork undertaken in Britain, Ireland and America.
Having gained his doctorate in 1929, Carpenter was awarded a Sheldon Fellowship from Harvard to continue collecting folksongs in Britain. He bought a car and began to travel England, Scotland and Wales in search of singers. Among the people he encountered were some who had sung for the Edwardian folksong collectors, such as Cecil Sharp and Gavin Greig, and some who would be visited by later collectors, such as Hamish Henderson and Kenneth Goldstein. He also located prolific singers never recorded before or since, such as Bell Duncan, an 80-year-old woman from Aberdeenshire, Scotland, whom he described as 'the greatest ballad singer of all time'. Her repertoire, according to Carpenter, consisted of some 300 songs, including 65 of the classic ('Child') ballads.
Carpenter's collecting method for songs was in many cases to record several stanzas of a singer's rendition using the Dictaphone cylinder machine. He then asked the singer to start again and dictate the words of the song, two lines at a time, while he typed them up on a portable typewriter.
By 1933, Carpenter had broadened the scope of his collecting to include mummers' plays as well as traditional songs. A few of these are recorded on cylinder, but many were apparently dictated to Carpenter, mostly by ex-performers.
Carpenter returned to Harvard in 1935 where he gave occasional lectures and set about transcribing the tunes of the ballads he had collected, a task in which he was self-taught. His aim was to publish the ballad material. He continued to work on the ballads in his collection following a move in 1938 to Duke University, where he took up a part-time position in the English Department, then chaired by the eminent North Carolina folklorist Frank C. Brown. The publication never materialised, however, and only a handful of items from his collection were ever published, despite his plans. During his time at Duke, Carpenter also continued to collect and encouraged his students to do so too.
Carpenter left Duke in 1943 and took up further posts in Virginia and finally as Head of the English Department at Greensboro College, North Carolina, where he stayed until his retirement in 1954. He returned to Booneville in 1964 where he began writing popular songs. In 1972, he sold his collection to the Library of Congress. He died in 1983.