A Critical Edition of the James Madison Carpenter Collection

FAIN: RQ-50077-04

American Folklore Society (Bloomington, IN 47406-7512)
Robert Y. Walser (Project Director: August 2004 to January 2007)

Preparation of transcribed text and music plus accompanying critical apparatus for a ten volume print edition of the James Madison Carpenter Collection of folk music and drama.

This project, to be carried out by a US-UK team of scholars, will prepare for publication a critical edition of the James Madison Carpenter Collection, an ethnographic corpus substantially consisting of items of traditional song and drama recorded in the field in Britain and the United States between 1927 and ca. 1943. We envisage that this will form a ten-volume published work, arranged by genre and sub-genre, with an innovative and symbiotic relationship with the online presentation of the raw materials of the Collection planned by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the repository for the collection. The University Press of Mississippi has expressed a strong interest in publishing the critical edition.