Jo Cunningham, EFDSS Press Officer, sent me following Press Release:

New project brings major folk song collection to the UK

A new project to incorporate a pivotal collection into the world's largest online searchable database of folk songs and music has been announced.

The digitised collection of James Madison Carpenter, which has previously only been accessible by visiting the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, will be added to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Digital Archive, thanks to a grant of more than £63,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Follow-on Funding Scheme.

Carpenter's work includes a wealth of traditional songs, ballads and folk plays, collected from performers in Scotland, England and Wales by the Harvard-trained scholar, mostly in the period 1929-35.

As well as more than 2,000 items of traditional song and 300 folk plays, it contains some items of traditional instrumental music, dance, custom, narrative and children's folklore.
The project is being delivered by the Elphinstone Institute, the centre for the study of Ethnology, Folklore, and Ethnomusicology at the University of Aberdeen, in partnership with the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which runs the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library and Archive (VWML) at Cecil Sharp House in London.
A new learning resource for teachers will be created for the online EFDSS Resource Bank using a selection of material from the collection. EFDSS will also deliver a series of creative learning projects with young people, adults, and in schools to introduce the collection to a new audience.

The project will culminate in a celebration concert at Cecil Sharp House in March 2018 featuring material from the Carpenter Collection.

Laura Smyth, Director of the VWML, said: "The Carpenter Collection will be a fantastic addition to our digital archive with collected materials from the early 1930s – a period with little activity from English based collectors.

"It also features a large number of audio recordings, allowing us to get even closer to the original performances."

Dr Julia Bishop, leader of the James Madison Carpenter Collection Project, said: "'The Carpenter Collection has been hidden for so long. This is a wonderful opportunity to return it to the communities and places where so much of it originated."

THIS is fantastic news! I first became aware of James Madison Carpenter through a project and a production I was researching and writing, about Carpenter's recordings of the South Wales shantymen and tall-ship sailors, including Rees Baldwin, 13, George Street, Barry (who became mayor of Barry, the docks town); William Fender of Sydenham Street, Barry, later renamed as Coronation Street; Richard Warner of Cardiff, who first went to sea aboard the Oxford in 1877; Hebron George Mathias and James Garricy. I first contacted Edna Robinson, who lived in Barry and who was Rees Baldwin's daughter, and Edna's son, Jeffery Robinson, a university lecturer who was passionately interested in his grandfather's life. I traced Rees Baldwin's family, including Alistair and Angela Duthie, postmasters in the village of Wick, along the Glamorgan coast.

Carpenter recorded more than 50 shanties from the South Wales seamen, which were long-lost for all these years, but for a chain of incredible coincidences. When I toured in the US, I interviewed Professor Kenny Goldstein, head of the folk life department in the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was following the Grieg trail of Scottish traveller folk song; he was told of this strange American called Dr Carpenter, who passed that way 40 years before. I interviewed Alan Jabbour, director of the folk life department of the National Library of Congress in Washington (who brought me lunch!) He was examining some letters to folk song collector Alan Lomax from Carpenter, telling him of his massive collection of shanties, folk songs and mummers' plays; Alan traced Carpenter to Booneville, Mississippi, where he was astounded to find Carpenter still alive and living in "genteel poverty". Carpenter was ready to sell his collection, which Alan bought for the Library of Congress. (Alan, an expert old-time fiddler, unfortunately died in January this year. Carpenter remained in Booneville until his death on July 4, 1984; he never married and left no children. He was also practically unknown in his chosen field of folksong and folklore studies, and no obituaries appeared in any of the relevant scholarly journals in Britain or in America.)