James Madison Carpenter, 1888–1983
Born near Booneville, Mississippi, in 1920 Carpenter enrolled at Harvard to begin a PhD in English, and it was here that he developed an interest in folk song. One of the professors in the English department was literary scholar and folklorist George Lyman Kittredge. While Kittredge’s ballad research was entirely library-based, he encouraged his graduate students to go out into the field and undertake collecting work – John Lomax had been another of his protegés. Kittredge acted as supervisor for Carpenter’s thesis, ‘Forecastle Songs and Chanties’, which earned him his doctorate in 1929. This was based in part on fieldwork conducted by Carpenter among retired sailors in North America, and on a four-month trip to the British Isles over the summer of 1928.
This 1928 trip included visits to the Royal Alfred retired seamen’s home in Belvedere – Carpenter referred to this as “The Royal Alfred, Belvedere, London”, but it was actually still part of Kent at this time (until 1965, in fact). Here he collected more than 2 dozen songs, mostly shanties, from Roderick Enderson, William ‘Paddy’ Gaul, Harry Johnson, William Prosser, a Mr. Hill, and one singer identified only as ‘The Bo’sun’.
Whereas most previous collectors had simply noted down song words and tunes on paper, Carpenter used a Dictaphone, run from a 6 volt battery, to record his singers. The Dictaphone had come out of work carried on at the laboratory set up in Washington DC by Alexander Graham Bell; it was patented by the Columbia Gramophone Company in 1907. Of course, magnetic tape had not been invented at this stage, and up until 1947 Dictaphones continued to make recordings onto wax cylinders. Carpenter’s practice was generally to make a sound recording of just a few verses of each song. He would then get the singer to recite the song words, two lines at a time, while he typed them up on a portable typewriter. The wax cylinder would then later be used to make a musical notation of the tune. Sadly – and to his subsequent regret – once he had transcribed the song, he shaved most of the cylinders from this first trip to Britain, so that the cylinders could be reused. As a result, only five audio recordings of the Belvedere singers survive.
With Kittredge’s support, Carpenter returned to Britain in 1929, and over the next six years he amassed an invaluable collection of folk song and other material. As Julia Bishop points out, Carpenter’s return visit to Britain in 1929 coincided with Maud Karpeles travelling to Newfoundland hoping to collect songs of English origin:
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. 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 mummers’ plays. 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. 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.1
The Carpenter collection has now been digitised, and can be accessed via the VWML Archive Catalogue, at https://archives.vwml.org/records/JMC.
- Julia C. Bishop, ‘Dr Carpenter from the Harvard College in America’: An Introduction to James Madison
Carpenter and His Collection, Folk Music Journal, Vol. 7, No. 4, (1998), pp. 403 ↩︎
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