Origins: BBC: 1920s shanty recordings

Subject: Origins: BBC: 1920s shanty recordings
From: Grab
Date: 23 Oct 08 - 09:02 AM

A collection of shanties recorded in the 1920s on wax cylinders have just been restored by the BBC.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/7683488.stm

Subject: RE: Origins: BBC: 1920s shanty recordings
From: Snuffy
Date: 23 Oct 08 - 10:31 AM

Further discussion of Carpenter's collecting in Sunderland is on this thread

Subject: RE: Origins: BBC: 1920s shanty recordings
From: Snuffy
Date: 23 Oct 08 - 10:38 AM

And the BBC have not restored the cylinders or the collection - the whole of the James Madison Carpenter Collection remains in the Library of Congress in Washington, including all the shanties he collected in many British and American ports.

The papers in the Collection were microfilmed shortly after acquisition and the discs copied onto tape. Copies of the microfilms and tapes are available at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Cecil Sharp House, 2 Regent's Park Road, London NW1 7AY, and a copy of the microfilm is available at the Central Library, Aberdeen.

Subject: RE: Origins: BBC: 1920s shanty recordings
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 23 Oct 08 - 10:46 AM

Note however that the tape copies are poor, partly due to the variable speed at which the cylinders were recorded. The late Bruce Olson went into technical details on that in a discussion here a few years ago. New digital copies have been prepared by the Library of Congress which reproduce content at the correct speed. These will eventually be made available online, but since appropriate permissions must be obtained for every item, that is likely to take a long while to achieve. A print edition of the entire collection, with full scholarly apparatus, is also in preparation: this too is necessarily a long-term project.