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Maine
Folklife Center |
Women Folklorists
Introduction |
Helen
Creighton |
Fanny Hardy
Eckstorm |
Joanna Colcord |
Helen Hartness
Flanders |
Louise Manny
Helen Hartness
Flanders 1890 - 1972
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Helen Hartness was born in 1890, into a prominent Vermont
family. Her father, James Hartnes, served as the Governor of
Vermont from 1921 to 1923. In 1911 she married Ralph Flanders.
They had three children.
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| Photo courtesy of the Helen Hartness
Flanders Ballad Collection, housed in the Ethnomusicology Archives at
Middlebury College, Vermont. |
Helen Hartness Flanders was one
of eleven Vermont writers who formed the Committee on Traditions
and Ideals within the Vermont Commission on Country Life. These
writers were interested in rejuvenating some of Vermont’s 18th
and 19th century history. In 1929 the Committee asked Flanders
to collect traditional Vermont songs for a 1931 book Vermont
Folksongs and Ballads.
Flanders began intensive
collecting efforts in 1931, using a dictaphone to record
singers. She sent out form letters and articles to nearly every
newspaper in Vermont, asking for information on old ballads. She
published A Garland of Green Mountain Song and Country Songs of
Vermont based on these collections.
Nancy-Jean Seigel describes her
grandmother’s relationship with the singers:
"She cared deeply about
people and took them for who they were. Over time, her
collecting activities led to warm friendships. The day she
recorded Mr. Sparks at the Weston Old Home Day, they ended up
sitting under a maple tree while he told her about his days as
a sailor and showed her how to tie knots. . . . On some
occasions she would return to a home with her recording
machine so that family members could hear the voice of a
relation who had passed away. Notes and small gifts passed
back and forth between collector and singers. The
ratty-looking bearskin rug beside my grandmother’s bed was a
gift from Hanford Hayes from Maine. He had trapped the bear
himself."
Nancy-Jean
Ballard Seigel. "Field Days in the Flanders Collection."
Folklife Center News, Vol. XXIII, no. 2 (Spring, 2001).
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Helen Hartness Flanders records Mrs. Elwin Burditt, of
Springfield, Vermont, probably around 1949. The reel-to-reel
tape recorder on the table was the most advanced, most portable
recording technology available to folksong collectors at that
time.
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A page from the first fruit of
Flanders’ collecting, Vermont Folk-Songs and Ballads, 1931.
Helen Hartness
Flanders knew that you can never tell who will know old songs.
Sometimes people who look the least likely will have learned
many songs from their relatives and friends. Which of these
people do you think is the most likely to know folksongs? |
Jonathan Moss of Orford, New
Hampshire.
Photo courtesy of the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection,
housed in the Ethnomusicology Archives at
Middlebury College, Vermont.
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Myra Daniels of East Montpilier,
Vermont.
Photo courtesy of the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection,
housed in the Ethnomusicology Archives at Middlebury College,
Vermont.
Middlebury College, Vermont.
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Hanford Hayes of Staceyville,
Maine.
Photo courtesy of the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection,
housed in the Ethnomusicology Archives at
Middlebury College, Vermont.
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In fact, all of them were recorded
by Helen Hartness Flanders.
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Flanders shared her songs with the public through a weekly
newspaper articles published in a variety of New England
newspapers in the early 1930s and again in the 1940s. She
published in the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts, the
Narragansett Times in Rhode Island, the Springfield Reporter in
Vermont, the Waterbury Republican in Connecticut, and the Bangor
Daily News, in Maine.
In 1939 Flanders met Marguerite
Olney. Olney was a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, in
Rochester, NY, and therefore could help Flanders with her area
of greatest difficulty: music transcription and analysis. In
1941 Flanders donated her ballad collection to Middlebury
College in Vermont, and Marguerite Olney was hired as the
collection’s curator. Flanders also donated most of the money
for Olney’s salary, as well as to buy gas and tapes for
collecting trips. Flanders continued to provide the primary
financial support for the collection until 1958. Marguerite
Olney was as much a collector as a curator for the collection.
Throughout the 1940s and most of the 1950s, Olney spent her
summers traveling throughout New England. These efforts
resulted in their collaborative book, Ballads Migrant in New
England in 1953.
Helen Flanders
describes the excitement of collecting:
"Each collector who
recovers and preserves this material has his own especial
associations. The Vermont Archive contains some nine hundred
and twenty-one texts and four hundred and five records of
tunes. The intangible, indescribable delights which went with
the collecting of each song are not filed with them. These
cannot exist in words. The glow or the gloom with which one
day ends and another is anticipated remains unstated. The
warmth of heart where in some home a common appreciation of
certain lines in their tunes falls alike upon a collector and
singer cannot be itemized and classified as Early American or
British.
Even that
moment before driving out of the yard, with the dictaphone,
address books, looseleaf notebooks, etc., on the seat of the
car, cannot be distilled into the written word. Just beyond
the windshield is the day-which one regards as untouched and
undoubtedly undeserved (in the flurry of what is to be
neglected at home)-so different each time, but always so
electric with the unknown."
Helen Hartness
Flanders, "The Quest for Vermont Ballads," Proceedings of the
Vermont Historical Society, NS 7, no. 2 (June 1939), p. 53-72.
From the 1930s through the
early 1960s Flanders gave to historical societies, women’s
groups, folklore organizations, poetry meetings, Women’s Clubs,
college campuses, etc. These lectures were short talks that
included a request for further folk songs. She would often bring
one of her informants with her to sing their traditional songs.
"Once at a large New
England college the singer was giving what he had learned in
lumber camps; he had with him, as well, his fiddle for such
tunes as had no words. He was "going strong." Whatever he
chose to sing was most enthusiastically applauded. He became
more and more at home with the people before him. One song
reminded him of another; each song was less proper for public
performance. All present were held in a bond of fascination.
Faces became enigmatical or aghast or animated with humor as
the verses took their own natural medieval course, while the
singer regarded each song as just another ballad. The tension
was fairly paralyzing. Where would he stop? Would he stop of
his own accord, or was he entirely out of hand? When he
started the next song, a real emergency was indicated, for
which there had been no rehearsal. The fiddle might prove the
antidote. The speaker touched him on the sleeve, saying,
'There are but a few minutes left for them to hear you play.'
With a startled look, he picked up his fiddle. The audience
seemed to exhale."
Helen Hartness
Flanders, "The Quest for Vermont Ballads,"
Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society, NS 7, no. 2
(June 1939), p. 53-72.
Between 1960 and 1965 Flanders
published a four-volume work of Child ballads, Ancient Ballads
Traditionally Sung in New England. After her death in 1972, the
Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress recognized the
importance of Flanders collections, and made copies of the
Flanders sound recordings for their permanent collection.
Nancy-Jean Ballard Siegel is
currently working on a biography of her grandmother, Helen
Hartness Flanders. She is particularly interested in contacting
people who sang for Flanders. If you are one of these people, or
know someone who was recorded by Flanders, please contact
Nancy-Jean Siegel at:
Nancy-Jean Siegel
4936 Sentinel Drive, Apt. 404
Bethesda, MD, 20816
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