I've been trying to get my head around the Carpenter Collection, and to somehow fit that evidence into this huge survey of the chanty materials. Of course, without being on-site with the Carpenter materials, that can't be done completely. But this "phase" of the survey -- the broad strokes -- requires some short cuts! Anyway, I have been greatly assisted by prior posts by many on Mudcat and especially by Snuffy (who has done much work analyzing and organizing info related to the available recordings). Also helpful have been these articles:

1998        Jabbour, Alan and Julia C. Bishop. "The James Madison Carpenter Collection." Folk Music Journal 7(4): 399-401.

1998        Bishop, Julia C. "'Dr Carpenter from the Harvard College in America': An Introduction to James Madison Carpenter and his Collection." Folk Music Journal 7(4): 402-420.

1998        Walser, Robert Young. "'Here We Come Home in a Leaky Ship!': The Shanty Collection of James Madison Carpenter." Folk Music Journal 7(4): 471-495.

Of course, Bob Walser's is the most helpful, since he is working on the shanties in the archive. Yet, the article is quite old at this point. I'm assuming his work with the material has progressed very very much since then. Alas, with the online access in its current state, this is the best we bystanders have for now.

As many will know, and as reflected in the non-pukka, current online database, the Carpenter materials are often sketchy. It is often unclear who sang what. However, based on the info suggested in the database, I have collated the information of singers with songs. (I am concerned *only* with those songs marked as chanties -- inevitably that will lead to some error, but hopefully a minor one.) And, yes, the sketchy information will lead to some error about who sang what. This is a rough attempt based on available info. In light of the work needed for the total survey, I am not at this point trying to do an absolutely thorough study of the Carpenter materials!

Of the collection, Walser wrote in 1998,

the recordings of maritime material, made primarily in the British Isles, comprise about 750 items. Allowing for Carpenter's duplicating, this yields about 375 original recordings. Among these, at least 141 different songs were sung by a number of singers, 34 of whom are identified with a last name and either first name or initials. In addition, the manuscripts and typescripts include shanties gathered by Carpenter in the United States; these include only words, and come from both printed sources (for example, Alden's Harper's Magazine article) and his own collections made in Massachusetts and elsewhere.

As I mentioned, I am only concerned with the shanties. And, I am ignoring the secondary sources that Carpenter archived, as we've dealt with all those before. (One thing I have not done is compare Stanton King's shanty collection with the items he sang for Carpenter.) With this in mind, and taking into consideration that 1998 was at a much earlier stage of Walser's work with the archive, I'm not sure where he got "34" singers from. My own survey has turned up around 61 singers.

Also worth noting is that I think in the Folktrax release of Carpenter recordings, some of the songs are misattributed. However, I have taken them at face value, which means there may be some duplication of items, i.e. the same song being attributed to 2 different singers, due to the CD and archive having different attributions. In the greater scheme of things, at this stage, that error shouldn't really affect our getting an idea of the scope of the chanties represented in the collection, however.

Following will be a consolidated form of my notes mapping the repertoire represented in the Collection.