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Descripción: In 1908, Olive Dame Campbell, young bride of John C. Campbell, the new Director of the Southern Highlands Division of the Russell Sage Foundation, accompanied her husband on his pioneering social survey of the Southern Appalachian mountains. She began almost immediately to collect ballads and folksongs she heard in the course of her travels. By 1916, her collection, unusual in the attention she paid to collecting tunes as well as song texts, had attracted the attention of her benefactors at the Sage Foundation, Harvard ballad scholar George Lyman Kittredge, and British folksong collector Cecil Sharp. In 1917, Campbell and Sharp together published the pivital English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, which contained some forty-four of sixty-odd songs collected by Mrs. Campbell. The work has been accepted into canon of American folksong scholarship. The author, working as a public folklorist at the John C. Campbell Folk School eighty years after Mrs. Campbell began her collection, found that the only existing copy of Mrs. Campbell's manuscript was a carbon copy in the Ralph Vaughn Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House in London. Examination of the manuscript revealed that the collection consisted of not only the known sixty songs (with over twenty unpublished tunes), but the texts to one hundred and sixty other folksongs collected in the mountains of Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina. Marginalia on the manuscript, when correlated with correspondence in the Campbell Papers in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, showed that Mrs. Campbell's collection was in fact a collaboration with other members of the Council of Southern Mountain Workers, especially Katherine Pettit of the Hindman Settlement School and Isabel Rawn of the Martha Berry School, neither of whom were credited in either the 1917 or the 1932 edition of EFSSA. A full reappraisal of the collection sheds new light on the cultural intervention of the self-styled 'folk movement in the mountains' in the first decades of the Twentieth Century.

Autor(es): Day, Douglas Turner -