Mellinger Edward Henry: Papers (1910-1944)
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MELLINGER EDWARD HENRY: PAPERS (1910-1944) An Inventory and Index of American Folksong Materials John Hay Library Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island STEPHEN B. GREEN Fall, 1989 PREFACE This guide was prepared in conjunction with an introductory course in archival methodology taught by Professor Megan Sniffin-Marinoff of the Graduate Program in Library and Information Sciences at Simmons College, Boston. The project was carried out between September and December, 1989, and was supervised throughout by Mark N. Brown, Curator of Manuscripts at the John Hay Library, Providence. My intention was to provide research access to Mellinger Henry's papers, specifically, to make available information pertaining to the materials on American folk songs and ballads, of which Mr. Henry was an avid and reputable collector. The project involved systematically going through the archival boxes and folders and entering information about their contents into a database using a personal computer and commercially available software.1 The database has allowed lists to be compiled according to various criteria, each of which gives users a "point of access" for the Henry Papers. Several of those lists are reproduced in this guide. I wish to extend deepest thanks to the entire staff of the John Hay Library for their patience, cooperation and excellent service over the past few months. They certainly made my task an easier one. Stephen B. Green Providence, R.I. December, 1989 1 Computer = Apple MacIntosh© 512KE; Software = Filemaker Plus© from Nashoba Systems. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................... i SCOPE AND CONTENT........................................................................................................ iii SERIES OUTLINE................................................................................................................... v SERIES DESCRIPTION.......................................................................................................... vi USING THE INVENTORY AND INDEX............................................................................ viii SERIES 1: FOLKSONG AND BALLAD FILES: INVENTORY............................................ 1 SERIES 1: FOLKSONG AND BALLAD FILES: TITLE INDEX.......................................... 50 SERIES 2: HIKING AND EDUCATION FILES: INVENTORY........................................... 77 SERIES 3: CORRESPONDENCE FILES: INVENTORY...................................................... 80 SERIES 3: CORRESPONDENCE FILES: SENDER INDEX............................................... 88 BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................................................................96 INTRODUCTION Mellinger Edward Henry (1873-1946) graduated from Brown University in the Class of 1899. He entered the teaching field, becoming a professor of English at Dickinson High School in Jersey City, New Jersey. Mr. Henry was an avid hiker and belonged to numerous mountain clubs up and down the Appalachian chain. He married Florence Stokes (August 3, 1921) whose family had ties to Georgia. Together, the Henrys made numerous sojourns in the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountain region of Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina. In 1923, on one of their trips, they heard Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, deliver a lecture on American ballads and folksongs, and almost immediately began their collecting of songs from the people they encountered in the mountain back country.1 Once they had established the nucleus of a collection, Mellinger Henry began corresponding with other folksong scholars who were doing or endorsing similar work in various parts of the U.S. Among those individuals offering initial encouragement were Harvard professor, George Lyman Kittredge, and Robert Winslow Gordon, founder of the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress. During the next fifteen years, the Henrys devoted much time to securing ballads and songs, traveling south from New Jersey during Mr. Henry's summer vacations. Mrs. Henry was trained musically and was able to take down tunes for many of the pieces, while Mellinger Henry concerned himself with researching variants and sources of the song texts. His correspondence with other scholars grew and he published numerous articles in the Journal of American Folklore, the New Jersey Journal of Education, and other journals. In 1934, his first book, Songs Sung in the Southern Appalachians, was published in London by the Mitre Press. Beech Mountain Folk Songs and Ballads, a collaborative effort with Maurice Matteson, was published in 1936 by G. Schirmer. This was followed in 1937 by Henry's Bibliography for the Study of American Folk-Songs, also published by Mitre Press. In 1939, Folk Songs of the Southern Highlands was published in New York by J. J. Augustin. Mellinger Henry was interested—as were other ballad scholars of the time—in the literary heritage of folksong poetry and the effects of oral transmission, but Mr. Henry's interest went beyond that of mere "arm chair" study, as he admired and felt an affinity with the people whom he perceived as living "the outdoor life" of which he was so fond. He encouraged—through editorials, articles and lectures—the opening up of the Blue Ridge Mountain region for vacationers and especially the creation of trail networks for hikers and climbers. The National Park Service was beginning to take an interest in the region, and several of Mr. Henry's singer-informants found themselves forced to sell their land and relocate as a result of the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in the 1920s. 1 For a brief but informative account of the Henry's collecting activities, written by Mrs. Henry, see "The Ballad- Hunting Henrys" in North Carolina Folklore VII: 1 (July, 1959) pp. 32-34. Over the years, Mellinger Henry made a point of sending reprints of his published journal articles to various colleagues and mentors, including Harry Lyman Koopman and S. Foster Damon, both connected with the Brown University Library. It was presumably due in part to their encouragement—and Mellinger Henry's fond memories of his alma mater—that Mrs. Henry decided, after her husband's death in 1946, to donate his papers to the John Hay Library. Today, there is a quiet but steady flow of reissued vintage folklore field recordings, and considerable attention is being focused on the southern American scene during the first half of this century. Mellinger Henry's papers throw light not only on his own work but on the entire field of folksong studies during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when scholars were publishing seminal collections and debating the so-called "communal" theories of the origins of folksong. The papers also offer some insight into the opening of the southern mountains to tourism, and offer possibilities for investigating the interaction between local and "outside elements." Above all, there is the chance to find out more about the traditions and the region that Mellinger Henry loved and worked so hard to document and share with others. SCOPE AND CONTENT The Mellinger Henry Papers (1910-1944) provide insight into Mr. Henry's two major interests— trail hiking and folksong collecting, with emphasis on the latter. To a great extent, the hiking and folksong materials are intermingled since Mr. Henry's collecting activities were frequently undertaken in the context of outdoor vacation trips in the mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. The papers reflect the later years of Henry's life, with the bulk of the correspondence beginning around the time he was forty years old. Included are twenty-six archival boxes containing 499 folders of research notes and typescript working copies of song texts, as well as incidental correspondence from singer-informants, and drafts of Henry's essays, most of which were published in academic journals. Of particular interest are the letters and penciled copies of ballad texts written out for the Henrys by their mountain friends, including Granville Gadsey, members of the Harmon family, Mary Tucker, and others. Also included is a sizeable group of folksongs which reflect the collecting efforts of university students of Professor Artus Moser in North Carolina and sent to Henry. A noticeable absence from the Henry materials are songs collected from North Carolina singer and dulcimer maker, Nathan Hicks. While the Correspondence Series contains a few letters from Hicks and his wife, it is known that many songs were taken down from the Hickses which are not found among these papers. Two boxes contain drafts of Mellinger Henry's speeches, toasts, editorials, and articles on hiking and issues of education, and reflect something of his involvement in the affairs of Dickinson High School, the Brown Class of 1899, and various trail and hiking clubs. There are three boxes containing folders with correspondence arranged alphabetically by sender, and sub-arranged by date. These letters show Mellinger Henry's remarkable network of contacts and colleagues in the scholarly world of folksong studies . Among the individuals represented are: Phillips Barry, Henry M. Belden, Ruth Benedict, John C. Campbell, Olive Dame Campbell, John Harrington Cox, S. Foster Damon, Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr., William Doerflinger, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, Mary Olive Eddy, Harvey H. Fuson, Gordon H. Gerould, Robert Winslow Gordon, George Herzog, Arthur Palmer Hudson, Sigurd B. Hustvedt,