|
Description |
This interview is included in the American Folklore Society Oral History Project held at the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. This collection consists of sound recordings, manuscripts, and graphic materials documenting English, Scottish, and American folk music, dance, children's games, and British folk drama and festivals. Content includes approximately 1,000 ballad texts and 850 tunes of the Francis J. Child canon; 500 sea songs; 1,000 other ballads and songs from Great Britain and the United States, particularly from North Carolina and Mississippi; 200 children's singing games, riddles, and nursery rhymes; 300 English and Scottish folk plays; miscellaneous folktales, Cornish carols, and African-American spirituals; with over 500 related photographic images and 40 drawings collected by James Madison Carpenter from 1928 to 1955. Additions to the collection, including an interview with Carpenter in 1972, lecture notes, and papers of Carpenter's Duke University students, date to 1987. Included is Carpenter's correspondence with John A. Lomax and others. Dance content includes documentation of sword dance plays, fiddle tunes for Morris dance, and photographs of Morris dance (with broom dancing), sword dance, Helston furry dance, and dancing at May Day celebrations and at English Folk Dance Society festivals. Drawings by George Baker illustrate mummers' plays and characters. The collection includes a few items from Ireland and Wales. This collection consists of 28.5 linear ft. (58 boxes) ca. 21,600 items, 19,417 manuscript items, 175 sound cylinders, 221 sound discs (analog, 78 rpm, 12 in.), 563 photographs (composed of negatives, photographic prints, glass negatives, lantern slides, slides, black and white, colored), 40 drawings (pencil, ink, black and white, and colored), and 10 microfilm reels. Note: Sound recordings are in English, Scots, Scottish Gaelic and in Cornish dialect. Biography/History note: James Madison Carpenter (1889-1984) was an American professor of English and a university lecturer. After obtaining his doctorate from Harvard in 1929, he spent the next six years as a Harvard Fellow, traveling throughout England and Scotland collecting folk songs, folk plays, and other folklore material. In 1938, he began teaching at Duke University and continued folk song research there until 1943. He served as Chair of the English Department at Greensboro College, North Carolina, where he taught for 10 years, and retired to his hometown of Booneville, Mississippi in 1964. Carpenter died on July 4, 1984. |
Collecting Memories - Oral Histories of American Folklorists
