Thanks for mentioning Calennig's CD Trade Winds, recorded in 1994. We first became interested in Carpenter for recording 50 shanties, ballads and sea-songs from South Wales seamen. His sources were the two sailors, Rees Baldwin, of 13 George Street, Barry, and William Fender, of 16 Sydenham Street. James Garricy of Cardiff deserves praise for neatly turning The Farmer's Curst Wife into another version of Blow The Man Down:

Come listen to me and a tale I will tell
Way-ay, Blow the man down!
Come listen to me and a tale I will tell
Give us some time to blow the man down!

It's of an old farmer lived down in Grigg's Well
He had an old wife and he didn't love her well…

On listening to Carpenter, we grew interested on Rees Baldwin. We discovered that Rees, who ran away to sea at the age of 16, was a self-taught learned man who wrote articles for The Barry Herald – the basis of our show Trade Winds, which some you saw at Lancaster Festival and our tour to America. Rees was mayor at the time, and when he died in 1945 it was Stan Awbery, Labour candidate for Barry and then Bristol, who wrote his epitaph.

Many years later Professor Kenny Goldstein was in Scotland, following the Greig Trail (As Carpenter had done.) He was alerted by ballad singers who mentioned this strange American collector called Carpenter. Kenny had never heard of Carpenter - Back in the US, he mentioned Carpenter to Alan Jabbour, now director of the National Folklife Center at the Library Of Congress in Washington.

A string of incredible coincidences led Jabbour right to Carpenter's door in Boonville, Mississippi. Carpenter showed a chest which had not been opened for years – it was his Collection. Even more incredible was the South Wales seamen's recordings, of which 22 survived. There was no money to fund Carpenter's activities – to save money, he would record a singer on a disc machine, write it down and 'scratch' the disc, thereby destroying the recording.

I went to Washington to meet Alan Jabbour, who looked forward to Carpenter's shanty singers on CD – this was before my stroke, so I'm afraid I'm three years out of date. Over the years, the Sheffield University website is really developing, with thanks to Dr Julia Bishop, and the Cecil Sharp Library in London has made advances.

Even more encouraging is the family's interest. Edna Robinson, Rees Baldwin's daughter (who has since died) remembered Carpenter making the recordings of the Barry shanty singers, and could rustle up a shanty or two. Her son, Geoffrey Robinson, who was head at Gwent University, is passionately interested in his grandfather's life and kept coming to our shows. Alistair and Angela Duthie, who owned the newspaper shop in the Glamorgan village of Wick, kept important photographs of Rees. Hettie Shewring provided information.

I hate to admit it, but we've fallen foul of Carpenter's recordings. Listening to Nothing But A Humbug again, I could have sworn that the chorus goes:

You're nothing but a humbug
Dirty pig, dirty pig!
You're nothing but a humbug
This I know!

But on reading the manuscript, I was disastrously wrong:

You're nothing but a humbug
So they say, so they say…