Scope and Content
The James Madison Carpenter Collection spans the years 1928-1987, with the largest portion dated 1928-1935. It is arranged into two groups or series. Series I, the bulk of the collection, consists of the materials purchased from Carpenter by the American Folklife Center, including manuscripts, sound recordings, and graphic materials. The entire collection represents the results of Carpenter's fieldwork, his subsequent work on the collection, and the documentation of other professional activities. Series II consists of material about the collection, primarily generated by the American Folklife Center. It includes manuscript material, sound recordings, and graphic materials.
Carpenter spent most of his life as a university lecturer. However, he began his collecting activities while conducting research on sea chanteys in the northern United States (1927-1928) and in 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 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 time abroad, Carpenter focused, successively, on collecting chanteys (particularly in eastern coast ports of northern England and Scotland, 1929-1930), ballads, and songs (chiefly in Scotland and the English counties of Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire, and Yorkshire, 1929-1933), and folk plays (in England and Scotland, 1934-1935). 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 (1938-1941).
Carpenter collected approximately 1,000 ballad texts and 850 tunes of the Francis James Child canon; 500 sea songs and chanteys; 1,000 other ballads and songs, including bothy ballads (a “bothy” is a lean-to in the horse's stable where farm hands slept) and dreg songs (a “dreg” refers to the men in small rowboats who would pull a dredge to harvest oysters), from Britain and America; 200 children's singing games, riddles, and nursery rhymes; 300 British folk plays; miscellaneous folktales, African American spirituals, Cornish carols, etc.; 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 extensive collection.
The collection represents not only the results of Carpenter's fieldwork, but also documents his fieldwork process. Traveling throughout Britain 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 James 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 ballads 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 song texts 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 play.
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 mumming 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.