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Carpenter's Wax Cylinders of Shanties


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Mike,

 

You can search the catalogue of his recordings---which include 800 shanties but also a lot of morris and sword dances, mummers plays and ballads--photographs and sheet music here at this Sheffield UK site: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/carpenter/aboutcol.html

And a good description is at this US site, where the primary material resides: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/guides/carpenter.html

 

I've searched it...apparently no references to the concertina, which was essentially dead (well, very rare) by the 1920s and 1930s when Carpenter collected. There are button accordions and fiddles on the dance recordings.

 

Of course, the shanties wouldn't have been accompanied by a concertina anyway. Maybe a forebitter would (these have undoubtedly been lumped together with the shanties (work songs) in the collection).

 

Since you live in Sheffield, you can probably plow through the tapes yourself. Cecil Sharp House in London has a full set of the tapes made from the cylinders. The American Folklife Center is supposedly building a digital online site accessible to all, but it is reportedly hung up on finding descendants of the sources to ask permissions. Waste of time, I should think...there is no copyright on any of this that is over 75 years old--as I understand it.

 

Dan

Edited by Dan Worrall
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Thanks Dan I didn't realize the stuff was so near home. Now I think, Julia Bishop who plays organ at our carols in the Blue Ball at your ancestral home of Worrall is doing research on him.I'll contact her.

 

I knew from your books that the concertina wasn't expected on shanties but I just wondered.

 

Happy New Year :)

Edited by michael sam wild
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Mike,

 

and a Happy New Year to you as well. Glad the info was helpful.

 

Actually, the village of Worrall is very close but no cigar. My folks came from Acton, near Nantwich in southern Cheshire--inland from the Wirral peninsula (very Worraliferous place, Cheshire). My earliest traceable ancestor was a yeoman caught up in the English Civil War, and during the chaos converted to the Quakers. When the war was over, the Church of England tried to force him to tithe to them again as if nothing had changed; he refused and was put into prison with several friends. Once he got out, seeing the imprisonments and lashings for Quakers were not likely to stop (and didn't, until 1689 or so) he looked for a way out. William Penn was selling land in the American frontier, but at 62 or so he was too old for hacking down 4 foot tree trunks to clear fields in the virgin forest. He did buy land for two sons who went over with Penn in 1682. I'm descended from one of them. If Penn hadn't come along, I might be Pace-Egging and Morris dancing with you lot. But then, there would be no decent barbecue or tamales! You win some, you lose some.

 

By the way, that collection has some Morris dance photos in it. If you see any good ones, let me know!

Dan

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