Foremost collector and editor of Vermont folk-music traditions and founder of the Helen
Hartness Flanders Folk Music Collection at Middlebury College. A conscientious,
enterprising, and intelligent woman, Flanders undertook her collecting in May 1930 for
the Vermont Commission on Country Life, which had the 150th anniversary of
Vermont’s statehood (1941) in mind. The avocation of a lifetime began as an exercise to
record Vermont heritage for the benefit of all Vermonters. The wife of Ralph Edward
Flanders, a wealthy businessman who served Vermont in the U.S. Senate, she began
documenting old songs and melodies in the living memory of Vermont descendents of
early settlers, gaining an understanding of folk tradition in the process. Between May and
December 1930, she recorded a small, yet impressive, body of early New England songs
and music, including rare ballad texts with their tunes. Of that first season, Flanders said,
“before undertaking Prof. Peach’s challenge, I had never even heard a traditional song.”
That she found immediate satisfaction in fieldwork is evident from her assessment of that
effort: “Desire in this quest mounts readily to passion. The fascination of this lore
continues; its excitement is cumulative.”
Flanders ventured upon the ballad-hunting scene at a most fortuitous time. American
ballad scholars and collectors had broken new ground over the preceding quarter-century;
had figured out an appropriate categorization, definition, and catalog of American
ballads; and had fostered great interest among a small but dedicated band of ballad
enthusiasts. New England had just attained its due as a repository of migratory ballads,
and, although the active tradition was fast declining, tradition bearers were numerous
enough to impart a respectable, even enviable, repertoire of Old World and New World
pieces. Music annotation and analysis had become an important component of folksong
fieldwork, and Phillips Barry had demonstrated the importance of the informant and the
setting in documenting folk tradition.
In the tight circle of New England balladry, Flanders soon crossed paths with Barry.
She benefited greatly from his mentoring, improving the scope of her fieldwork, applying
appropriate archiving principles to her data, and getting to know everyone of importance
in folk-music studies. She placed articles in newspapers (those of Springfield,
Massachusetts, and Narragansett, Rhode Island, for example), greatly increasing her list
of informants and correspondents. In 1939 she invited Alan Lomax of the Library of
Congress for a week of recording her informants for the library and for her Archive of
Vermont Folk Music, then at Smiley Manse, her home in Springfield, Vermont.
As her material came to the attention of ballad scholars, Flanders received many
inquiries about specific items, enough to know that her collection had value within
academe. This fact was a motivating force behind moving her archive to Middlebury
College. (The college also boasted a ballad specialist on its faculty and a ballad course in
its curriculum.) In February 1941, she established the Helen Hartness Flanders Collection
there, containing New England folksongs, ballads, and folk tunes collected by her or
under her direction. Disk records, dictaphone cylinders, typescripts of each recording,
and items sent by her correspondents numbered about 2,000 items. A dozen years later,
the collection accommodated close to 10,000 items. Flanders had large aspirations for the
archive. She envisioned Middlebury students learning to sing (thereby, she naively assumed, perpetuating the tradition), then returning to their home regions to collect like
materials. The college indicated its intention of integrating the archive not only in
literature courses, but also in history, music, and even the social sciences.
Flanders took delight in introducing informants to the public. In July 1940, she invited
Lena Bourne Fish of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, to Middlebury’s Bread Loaf College to
present her songs to an audience of students, faculty, and townspeople. In February 1948,
she delivered the Louis Charles Elson Memorial Lecture at the Library of Congress,
where she presented Elmer George and Asa Davis of Vermont and Charles Finnemore of
Maine to sing some of the ballads they had recorded for her.
Flanders began publishing out of her collection for local readers very early on,
producing, in 1931, Vermont FolkSongs and Ballads, with music transcriptions by
George Brown, a cellist from Melrose, Massachusetts. With Barry’s professionalism as a
guide, she produced The New Green Mountain Songster (1939), the first scholarly
treatment of items from her collection. George Brown again supplied musical
transcriptions, and her daughter, Elizabeth Flanders Ballard, took an active role. The
volume was a success, reaching both a popular and a scholarly audience. Barry’s
introduction and annotations contributed a high order of scholarship, and the inclusion of
short pieces, play parties, and dance materials found resonance in the lives of her rural
New England readers.
Flanders hired musicologist Marguerite Olney to be her assistant, and they
collaborated on the highly readable miscellaney Ballads Migrant in New England (1953),
which included an Introduction by Robert Frost. Olney became the first archivist of the
Flanders Collection at Middlebury and annotated the long-playing recording Eight
Traditional BritishAmerican Ballads from the Helen Hartness Flanders Collection of
Balladry and Folk Music (1953).
Through her association and collaboration with professional ballad scholars, Flanders
brought a depth to her fieldwork and related activities she could not have achieved on her
own. She was admirably open to the guidance of veteran fieldworkers while never
abandoning the original impulse of her efforts—to preserve Vermont’s heritage for the
benefit of all Vermonters. After Barry’s death in 1937, Tristram Potter Coffin, a young
scholar who had expressed an early admiration for Flanders’ ballad collection, worked
closely with her. Together they produced four scholarly volumes of Child ballads. Coffin
wrote the headnotes, and Bruno Nettl provided musical transcriptions and notations.
Working in an era when a spirit of competition dogged the fleld, Flanders succumbed
to a bit of bean counting. She was tweaked occasionally about including examples of
spurious folk origins to inflate the breadth of her collection, especially in the area of the
treasured Child ballads. While there is some evidence for this, the proportion of suspect
items is minuscule. Flanders was influenced, one assumes, by the entrenched bias of the
academic ballad scholars, even as the field was trying to move beyond the balladaristocracy mindset. This was an abiding problem for the amateur collector, who was
often far more successful in garnering tradition than were the scholars but whose
understanding of the tradition was usually rather shallow. To her credit, Flanders vaulted
this gap by gaining the respect and collaboration of scholars among the most eminent of
the time. Helen Hartness Flanders reached for the highest standards and achieved them.
Linda Morley
References
Flanders, Helen Hartness. 1934. A Garland of Green Mountain Song. Northfield, VT.
——, comp. and ed. 1960–1965. Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England: From the
Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont. 4 vols.
Critical Analysis by Tristram P. Coffin. Music Annotations by Bruno Nettl. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.