Reproduced with permission.

Well, this Dr Carpenter came to my house one night, late, aboot twelve o’clock, an ’ I knew, whenever I went to the door, that he was somebody! So he introduced himself an ’ said he was Dr Carpenter from the Harvard College in America.... He came collectin ’ a lot o ’ this stuff. (Henderson 1981-82:417) James Madison Carpenter (1888-1983) was until recently a relatively unknown figure in the history of Anglo-American folksong and British folk play scholarship (Jabbour 1998; Bishop 1998). Born and bred in Mississippi, he was university-educated and worked as a minister and teacher prior to entering Harvard in 1920 to do a Ph.D. in English. Under the supervision of George Lyman Kittredge, he wrote a thesis on “Forecastle Songs and Chanties, ” based on fieldwork with retired seamen in the United States and in ports that he visited in the summer of 1928 on a Dexte