The James Madison Carpenter collection of traditional song and drama

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 Dexter scholarship around England, Scotland, and Ireland. After gaining his doctorate in 1929, and encouraged by Kittredge, Carpenter returned to Britain in order to continue fieldwork. Armed with a portable typewriter and a Dictaphone cylinder machine, he bought a car and struck off northwards up the east coast (Figure 2).1Not