Carpenter Folk Online makes the collection of James Madison Carpenter available to view, browse, and search online alongside the VWML’s ever-expanding digital collections.
It is an extensive collection of traditional songs and folk (mummers') plays recorded between 1927 and c.1943. The collection was made by Dr James Madison Carpenter (1888–1983) using a dictaphone machine and portable typewriter, meaning that a large proportion of the collection consists of sound recordings. Most of the items date from 1928–1935, when Carpenter carried out fieldwork in Britain (a large proportion from Aberdeen, Scotland); the remainder were gathered in parts of the US.
Carpenter sold the collection, which comprises papers, wax cylinders, lacquer discs, photographs and drawings, to the Library of Congress (LOC) in 1972. The collection was digitised, although never previously published.
In 1972 Alan Jabbour (the founding director of the American Folklife Centre at LOC) interviewed James Madison Carpenter about his experiences of his collecting work:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Recordings courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Interviewed by Alan Jabbour, 27 May 1972 / AFS 14,762-14,765 / LWO 6918
Four 7’ reels of tape full track at 7.5ips. Interview with Dr James Madison Carpenter about his life and his collecting experiences in England and Scotland.
Recorded by Alan Jabbour, Booneville, Mississippi, May 27, 1972. Recording Project. Accessioned May 1972.
Recorded on a Nagra III tape recorder with dynamic microphone, using electricity from his wall outlet. Recorded in his present home, which is a duplex house in Booneville.
Sweet Thames: the London Folk Club Heritage Project
Sweet Thames was a project led by Star Creative Heritage and supported by the VWML, along with Camden People’s Theatre and nine London folk clubs. It was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and ran from June 2022 until November 2023.
It aimed to research, preserve and shared the heritage of London folk clubs from the second revival onwards by means of archival workshops, oral history interviews and performances. The VWML led the workshops and desk-based research and is currently working on making the results of this, and the recordings, available in our online archives.
The world’s biggest free digital archive of English traditional folk music and dance tunes
The Full English is possibly the most exciting and significant thing to happen to British folk music in at least a generation… To give everyone the keys to the archive of our common heritage will be an invaluable inspiration to generations of musicians and writers – Lee Hall, playwright and screenwriter (Billy Elliot, Pitman Painters, War Horse)
Caution: none of The Full English materials have been censored. The contents do not reflect the opinions and views held by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, or any of The Full English partner organisations.
In 2007 the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded a grant of £154,500 to the English Folk Dance and Song Society for an 18 month pilot project entitled Take 6. The grant enabled the archiving and conservation of six major folk song and dance manuscript collections, making them more widely accessible to the public, particularly to the communities where they were first collected.
As well as the online resources, education and community projects took place in Lancashire, Hampshire and London. Other counties covered by the Take 6 project include Oxfordshire, Sussex, Norfolk, Yorkshire and Dorset.
The six collections are:
The Janet Blunt Collection: 800 items – songs, country dances and morris dance tunes – collected in West Adderbury, Oxfordshire, 1907-1919
The George Butterworth Collection: 460 items – songs, dances and dance tunes – collected all over southern England and Yorkshire between 1906 and 1913
The Francis Collinson Collection: 360 songs collected in the southern counties of England as a result of his involvement in the BBC’s Country Magazine radio programme in the 1940s and early 50s
The Anne G. Gilchrist Collection: 214 folk songs plus children’s singing games Lancashire morris tunes, songs from customs, sea shanties, carols and street cries, all collected from the 1890s to the 1920s, mainly in Lancashire
The Hammond Collection: over 900 folk songs collected mainly in Dorset in the years 1905 to 1907 by two brothers, Henry and Robert Hammond
In February 2011 the Sabine Baring-Gould Folk Song archive, which was created by Wren Music as part of the Devon Tradition project, was added to the Take 6 digital archive. This project was also funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and ran from July 2009 to February 2011.
We champion folk music and dance at the heart of cultural life, all across England.
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