Steve Roud in the chair, Richard Spencer
Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:01:13 PST
Next meeting will be 8 March. Further meetings have not had their dates set.
Please check the TSF website for details of upcoming dates.
In 2025 several TSF members gave online presentations to the American Folklore Society’s annual
conference, which we co-sponsored. The core theme was Francis James Child at 200, but a wide
range of topics were covered. As access to the recordings made of these talks is restricted, we have
decided to ask the presenters concerned to repeat these talks to the TSF in the January, February and
March 2026 meetings.
Michael J. Bell
“To Put the World in Possession of All the English Ballads”: Francis James Child’s Taste and the
Matter of Popular Balladry.
Most folksong scholars would agree that Francis James Child failed in his ambition to “put the
world in possession of all the English Ballads” in his monumental English and Scottish Popular
Ballads (1882-1896). Child’s work has been pronounced idiosyncratic. However, it was formed by
his believe in the universal standard of taste. rooted in the aesthetic theories of the Scottish
Enlightenment as taught by Child’s Harvard mentor, Edward Ellery Channing. Child believed the
popular ballad was finite, and the existing ballads were being erased by the tide of popular culture
and printing. Child made over 200 additions, subtractions and substitutions to his original
publication. In his view, popular ballads were oral, medieval in origin and lacked an author. Art
poems were the opposite of this. Child winnowed out perceived and known art poems and any texts
that did not fit his criteria for the ancient ballads. David Hume’s essay ‘The Standard of Taste’
argued that a true judge who possessed a strong sense of discernment as opposed to the ordinary
taste of the vulgar mind, moved by prejudice instead of wisdom. Child was aiming for this
discerning approach. Child criticised Peter Buchan and his ballads, he felt that poets might work to
make old ballads more perfect, but collectors were restricted to taking them as the were and
preserving them. Child felt that Buchan had tampered with the texts and that the embellished texts
should not be presented. In his view, Buchan was a culture thief, in effect kidnapping the ballads
and making them his own – a form of self-promotion. Child maintained a hierarchy of balladry:
manuscripts were the oldest and most valuable, historical ballads found in the mouths of the people
came second, and broadsides were mostly rubbish. At Harvard, Child worked to instil the tenets of
taste to his students. There were coherent selection practices and standards of taste underlying
Child’s choices, and these standards have their origins in the Scottish Enlightenment. See Bell’s
Forthcoming book: The only True Folksongs in English
Ana Maria Paiva Morão
From Orality to Paper – From Paper to Digital; The Digital Archive of Traditional Oral Literature in
the University of Lisbon-Portugal
Before the 19th century ballads remained alive only in the memory of the people in the Iberian
peninsula. In the 19th century, some of the texts were published. In 1933 Leite de Vasconcellos
(Portuguese linguist, philologist, archaeologist and ethnographer) suggested that collections be
made while there was still time. This work began in 1939. Over the decades, a variety of sound
recording technology was used. Collection materials include manuscripts, typescripts and recording
media. Portuguese Popular Traditions Centre was created in 1993, at the University of Lisbon in
Portugal. It contains ballads, legends, folktales prayers, songs, nursery rhymes, riddles, proverbs,
etc., collected by researchers and students. The collections were filed, but the cataloguing was
incomplete. There was concern about the material being inaccessible and deteriorating. In 1995 –
Tecnotrad – began a digitization project, and made it available on the internet, but it was not
maintained. In 2002, a new project was considered. ADLOT-Digital Archive of Traditional
Literature (2008) but it took until 2010 for the work to begin. By 2013, the database was made
available on the Internet – it included about 13,00 items from the ‘New Collection’ (collected
between 2002-2007). Unfortunately the platform has become obsolete, and there have been
interruptions in online access. From 2022 work began on a new edition of the database. The data
was migrated to a new system, audio files were included, and they are now hosting external
collections of related material. They are making progress toward the gradual integration of the
remaining collection https://adlot.pt/ Future work will include the restoration of a map feature, the
use of voice recognition (for transcription), and also experimentation with AI to create an automatic
pre-classification system.
Julia Bishop
Collect whatever seems to you worth collecting, but remember that the texts of the Child Ballads
are pretty well known’: The Influence of Harvard on the Creation of the James Madison Carpenter
Collection
In 1920, James Madison Carpenter, an erstwhile minister and school principal from Mississippi,
entered Harvard to undertake graduate studies in the English Department. Supervised by George
Lyman Kittredge, the English scholar and successor to Francis James Child, Carpenter completed a
doctoral thesis on shanties and sea songs (1929). With funding awards from Harvard, and
Kittredge’s support, Carpenter made two collecting trips to Britain, in 1928 and 1929-35. During
this time, and to a lesser extent afterwards when back in the US, he amassed a wealth of traditional
song, much of which he transcribed and edited and intended to publish. His plans included British
and American Traditional Ballads with Tunes;, which volume he claimed would be ‘the most
valuable collection of Child ballads with tunes ever published’; and would form an ‘invaluable
supplement’ to Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ball
Carpenter originally returned to Britain to collect sea shanties, but in Dundee he heard his first
ballad, and learned it was easier to find ballad singers than old shanty singers. Kittredge procured
further funding for his fieldwork, encouraging Carpenter to continue collecting broadly, not just
ballads. Carpenter had to grapple with the settled nature of Child’s ballads, as opposed to what he
was encountering in the field. He felt the inclusion of the melodies was a way to extend and
enhance Child’s work. Bell Duncan, of Aberdeenshire was Carpenter’s primary ballad source and
he claimed her ballads were the best versions he encountered. He asked Duncan for her opinions
about the published versions of the songs she knew. He made an effort to collect in places where
Buchan and Christie had collected songs.
Carpenter’s asserted the tunes were of inestimable value to scholars, and this is due in part to
Kittredge’s influence, who provided him with a dictaphone for capturing the songs. In 1935
Carpenter returned to Harvard with an extensive collection, including photographs, and numerous
examples of ballads, shanties, and traditional drama. It was at this point, Carpenter attended
Kittredge’s ballad course, and this gave him confidence to frame his work for publication and
solidify his theories on the importance of the sung ballad. The texts are well known, but his
collection which included the tune and examples of living performances was a valuable supplement
to the previous emphasis on textual material that was thought to already be complete. Carpenter’s
collection is online: https://archives.vwml.org/records/JMC and a catalogue of the collection is
here: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/carpenter/
