The Carpenter Collection
by Roy Palmer
Folk Music Journal, Vol. 5, No. 5 (1989), pp. 620-623
1929, 'Forecastle Songs and Chanties', and indeed, apart from a series of newspaper articles on the same subject, seems to have published in his specialist field only a brief introduction to someone else's collection of songs. Yet he gathered what is undoubtedly one of the finest collections of British folk songs made this century, the bulk of it field recordings made on dictaphone cylinders. Probably under the influence of his mentor at Harvard, the ballad scholar, G. L. Kittredge, Carpenter became interested in the folk songs of the sea, and during 1927 and 1928 spent time in seeking out singing sailors in such places as Marblehead, Salem, Staten Island, Boston, and New Bedford. He sought out more of the same during a four-month stay on this side of the Atlantic in 1928, when he visited Cardiff, Swansea, Barry Docks, Belfast, Dublin, Wicklow, Waterford, Bristol, London, and Greenock. After completing his doctoral thesis, Carpenter immediately returned to Britain on a fellowship for a further year's collecting.
Thanks to Kittredge's support the period eventually extended to six years. Apart from a lengthy spell when he had a series of illnesses, Carpenter spent the whole of this time in travelling round in an Austin Seven car, with a dictaphone powered by a six-volt battery. He had no contacts whatever, and he trusted to luck to find singers. Pursuing his interest in shanties and forebitters, he first travelled to ports all the way up the eastern coasts of northern England and Scotland. Later he visited many English counties: Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Devon, and Cornwall. His interest in Child ballads led him to Aberdeenshire; he was aware of Gavin Greig's work, and traced some of his informants, including Alex Robb, who gave Carpenter 72 songs. He also visited some of Sharp's singers, such as Ellen Plumb and Sam Bennett in Warwickshire.
Carpenter's technique was to record an item on cylinder, then to type it on a portable machine two lines at a time at the singer's dictation. This must have required great patience on the part of singers, and a great deal of time. Carpenter spent the whole of one summer with one of his informants, Bell Duncan, in an effort to note all her songs in this manner.
After returning to America in 1935, despite having little or no musical training, he taught himself to notate tunes, and transcribed about a thousand of those he had recorded. His final year in England was spent primarily in collecting mumming plays (which are to be the subject of a separate note); he prided himself that the texts he obtained were on average a third longer than Tiddy's.
Late in life, Carpenter sold his entire collection to the Library of Congress, and a copy on tape and microfilm is now in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. The collection has three elements: recordings, texts, and transcriptions of tunes. The cylinder recordings were all copied on to tape at the Library of Congress, but because s peeds w ere not adjusted (we know that Carpenter varied the speed of his dictaphone) the words are often difficult to make out, or even unintelligible. The tunes, though, can usually be heard sufficientlyw ell to be notated. There is a kind of index, typewritten by Carpenter, with manuscript annotations. Numbers running from 7 to 73, from I27 to I50, and from 359 to 458, presumably correspond with cylinders. (Some of the missing sections are covered by a manuscript added at the Library of Congress.)
The recordings are mainly British, but some are American, the latest being added in 1940. Under a given number there can be anything from two to twenty entries, with song title on the left and singer's name on the right. There is a good deal of repetition, when a singer has several attempts at a song (or Carpenter at a recording), or runs on to another cylinder. Titles are sometimes idiosyncratic ('Errin go bra', 'Mill and Mocter Free', 'The Quinny Knowes'), and sometimes not given at all ('bothie songs', 'gaelic songs', 'fiddle tunes'). Singers' names are not always given ('Old woman', 'Little Yorkshire Girl', 'Woman with High Screech Voice', 'Loud Mouth Singer near Evesham', 'Man near Exeter'), and their town of residence very seldom appears. Entries are very rarely dated.
More information is given with some of the tune and text transcriptions, now on ten reels of microfilm. In addition to songs and mumming plays, these contain letters (for example, from Carpenter to Kittredge), lecture notes, plans for publications, information on singers and their repertoires, endless lists, cuttings from newspapers and magazines, extracts from books and manuscripts, and even the occasional street ballad. Carpenter's typewritten list of all these papers appears largely haphazard in order, though there are logical sequences at times, such as alphabetical lists of ballads and versions of particular songs arranged together. The title of songs is given, and usually the singer's name. Dates are given only occasionally. Some of the informants listed do not appear in the list of recordings; Carpenter shaved and re-used some cylinders (much to his subsequent regret), and thus some recordings were lost.
The song texts in the collection often give the singer's name and address at the top, though rarely a date. From time to time additional information is provided. For instance, we know from the list of recordings that Robert Yeoman of Dundee contributed a score of shanties and forebitters. Above the text of one of these ('The Dreadnaught') we read: 'Went to sea 1869, in Baltic during Franco-Prussian war, i880 [should be 1870]: learned chanties 1869-70 Born 1856 Last sailing ship, E. W. O' Brian 910o'. Sam Bennett appears in the recording index as a source of songs and fiddle tunes. From the texts we find not only that he came from Ilmington in Warwickshire, but that he learned songs from his brother, James ('Lord Lovel'), from Michael Johnson, at harvest home and bell ringers' suppers, '50 years ago' ('Poor Old Horse'), a song book ('Joe Muggins'), and Jack Kyte ('Old Adam was a Gentleman'), who 'sang forty or fifty years ago, when tight'. Such details are, however, the exception rather than the rule.
The tunes are filed separately from the texts, though under a similar system, or lack of it. Carpenter's list gives title and singer, but in a great many cases the sources of songs are given as 'unnamed'. Diligent study of the recordings might enable many of these to be identified, but it would be a mammoth undertaking. The transcriptions in some cases have a metronome mark (which should, incidentally, be useful in determining the correct speed at which recordings should be played), title, singer's name, tune (at times showing variations) and manuscript text of first verse.
The songs of a particular informant may be grouped together, or scattered: there seems to be no rule. Other transcriptions give a melody line only, and have the singer's surname in brackets. Versions of a given tune from different singers may be grouped together: there are 39 tunes for 'The Dowie Dens of Yarrow', for example. By no means all the recordings are transcribed; conversely, some transcriptions apply to items not listed in the recordings index. Some of these may apply to items in Carpenter's thesis, which includes no tunes. For example, the tune marked 'Bold Ramalee (Captain Snellen)' has its text in the thesis (on p. 379), with this note: 'Captain Charles B. Snellen, born December 25, I837 - thirty years on Grand Banks. Heard song before Civil War.'
Other information on Carpenter's informants and their songs is supplied in an interview which he gave to Alan Jabbour in I972. For example, he mentions an authentic-sounding black shantyman from East London called Scott (but there are two Scotts in the recordings index); he talks of Bell (Belle?, Isobel?) Duncan of Lambhill, Insch, Scotland, who was 'exceptionally intelligent', had a huge repertoire of ballads, and died two years after he met her, at the age of 84. One has to look even farther to find information on Benjamin Bright, from whom Carpenter recorded sea songs at Liverpool in 1929. Some fifty years on Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger recorded the same man, and later still published a booklet on him.
The truth is that the Carpenter Collection is chaotic, and so are the indexes to it. There is an urgent need to remedy the deficiency so that the invaluable material can be properly studied. Ranging across the entire collection, and also taking in Carpenter's thesis, there should be indexes of titles, first lines, tunes, singers, and localities. It is a great pity that no book with selections of texts and tunes is available. Above all, there should be cassettes of recordings, properly copied from the cylinders. Carpenter's work in the field was done between fifty and sixty years ago, and some of his singers were born in the middle of the nineteenth century or even earlier. It is a thrill to hear them, even on the unsatisfactory copies at present available.
Finally, the exploration and evaluation of Carpenter's material by scholars and commentators in books and articles is long overdue: it does not rate a mention, for example, in D. K. Wilgus's monumental book, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898. Perhaps the funds will eventually be found for the necessary work. In the meantime, the incomparable collection awaits the determined researcher. The effort is abundantly worthwhile.
ROY PALMER
I should like to thank Malcolm Taylor of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML) for his invaluable assistance. Much of my information on Carpenter's life is derived from Alan Jabbour's interview (see below).
Bibliography
Carpenter, James M., 'Forecastle Songs and Chanties' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1929).
'Lusty Chanteys from Long-dead Ships', 'Life before the Mast: A Chantey Log', 'Chanteys that "Blow the Man down"', and 'Chanteys in the Age of Sail', New York Notes 623
Times Magazine, respectively I.July I931, pp. I z-13; I9 July 1931, pp. 14-15; 26 July 1931, pp. 10-11; and 30 October 1938, p. 6.
Introduction to Folk Songs of Old New England, edited by Eloise Hubbard Linscott (New York: Macmillan, 1939), reprinted edition (Shoe String Press, i962).
Jabbour, Alan, Interview with J. M. Carpenter, 27 May I97z (tape copy in VWML).
MacColl, Ewan, and Seeger, Peggy (eds), Shellback: Reminiscences of Ben Bright, Mariner (Oxford: History Workshop Pamphlet, no date). For further information on Bright, see Stan Hugill's review of the pamphlet in Folk Review, 8, no. 4 (1979), 29-37.
Palmer, Roy, 'Cruising with Carpenter', English Dance and Song, 47, no. 2 (I985), I4-I6. Includes two songs from Carpenter Collection.
(ed.), Everyman's Book of British B allads (London: J. M. Dent, I980). Includes eight songs from the Carpenter Collection.
(ed.), The Oxford Book of Sea Songs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, I 9 86). Includes three songs from the Carpenter Collection.
Tiddy, R. J. E., The Mummers' Play (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923).
Wilgus, D. K., Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, I959).