A Critical Edition of the James Madison Carpenter Collection

FAIN: RQ-50312-08

American Folklore Society (Bloomington, IN 47406-7512)
Robert Y. Walser (Project Director: November 2007 to December 2010)

The third phase of a ten-volume critical edition of the James Madison Carpenter Collection, including final preparation of materials for volumes 2 and 8-10 and continuing music transcription and editing work for other volumes. (36 months)

This project, now being carried out by a US-UK team of scholars, is preparing 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 are working toward the sequential publication of a ten-volume edition, whether realized in hard copy and/or electronic form, arranged by genre and sub-genre, with a complementary 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 edition. NEH has supported our work on Phase 1 (completed) and Phase 2 (current) of this project; we are requesting NEH support here for Phase 3 (of 5 phases total).