James Madison Carpenter, born in 1888 in Blacklands, Mississippi, near Booneville, in Prentiss County, was a Methodist minister and scholar of American and British folklore.
[1] Carpenter returned to Harvard in 1935 where he gave occasional lectures and worked on transcribing the tunes of the ballads he had collected, intending to put the material into publishable form.
In 1943 he took another post in Virginia and finally moved to the English Department at Greensboro College, North Carolina, where he stayed until his retirement in 1954.
His extensive material eventually found a home at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress where it has been made accessible (and searchable).
In 2018, the fully digitised James Madison Carpenter Collection was made available online on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library’s digital archive.