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Helen Hartness Flanders lived in the age of the ear. In that pre-video time, local news was often information
passed among neighbors from one farm to another, spread at paring bees and church socials. News became
verses and verses became songs.

Once fashioned, these musical records of triumphs and tragedies took on lives of their own, became in effect
living entities, capable of outlasting their creators and adapting to new circumstances. Some of these were
ballads that were direct descendants of songs that had traveled from Europe to the shores of the New World
and then inland to settle in the inner parts of New England, where they were changed to fit the circumstances
of place and time. Others were composed to mark purely New England events. Helen Flanders treasured
them all.

She came upon her life's work largely by serendipity. In 1930, the Vermont Commission on Country Life
asked her to collect some of the folk songs of New England. The work was funded for a year; for Flanders,
the pursuit would consume much of the rest of her life. By the time she stopped collecting 30 years later, she
and her long-time assistant, Marguerite Olney, had recorded or transcribed the more than 9,000 songs that
are the foundation of the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection at Middlebury College.

If you visit the Flanders Collection today, you can hear this harvest of song. Out of a state-of-the-art
reel-to-reel tape recorder operated by collection curator Jennifer Post and surrounded by Flanders' research
come recordings made originally on wax cylinders and metal discs: the scratchy sounds of a November 11,
1939, recording of Myra Daniels of East Calais singing the old ballad "Fair Lucy," or the spell cast by
Daniels' brother, Elmer George of North Montpelier, as he sings a log-drive ballad - once well-known in
northern New England - about the death- dealing "Jam on Gerry's Rock."

"It's difficult to overestimate what Helen Hartness Flanders did," says Dale Cockrell, a musicologist, formerly
at Middlebury, in the introduction to a program on the Flanders Collection prepared for Vermont Public
Radio.

"This remarkable woman, at a time in 1930 when people were starting to fear the traditional arts in New
England and Vermont were going to die out, this woman took it upon herself to spend the next 30 years of
her life going through this area collecting traditional folk songs, traditional ballads, anything she could find of
the traditional arts, in the process accumulating some 9,000 items That's some significant collection.

But Helen Flanders didn't simply collect the past so that it could lie, gathering dust, in the basement of a
library, Instead she breathed new life into these pieces of living history, saving them from death-by-neglect so
that musicians such as Margaret MacArthur could come along years later and include them in their
repertories.

"If she hadn't done this, the songs would have died with the people who sang them." says MacArthur, who
lives in Marlboro and knew Flanders for the last 12 years of her life. " I'm interested in the songs for their
antiquity, for their local content, for the beauty of the music. This material could have been written down, but
I love to listen to the old people singing them."

In saving New England songs, Helen Hartness Flanders also proved, according to Jennifer Post, that New
England once had as many or more traditional singers and songs than the South, which has received much
more attention from musicologists.

Helen Hartness Flanders was born in the time before information gatherers - we now call them reporters and
historians - had become celebrities. There is no sense in her prolific writing that she considered herself
important to the process. Rather, it was the songs and the singers she considered to be the topics of interest.

Photographs of Flanders offer, at best, small clues about her personality. With her white hair neatly in place
and her rimless glasses, she looks to have been a prettier version of Eleanor Roosevelt. The Barbara
Bush-style choker of pearls at her neck in one studio portrait suggests that she, like the current First Lady,
was a wealthy Republican which, in fact, she was.

Helen Hartness was born in Springfield on May 19, 1890, the daughter of James and Lena Hartness. Her
father, an inventor and engineer, would later become president of the Jones and Lamson Machine Co., one
of the handful of machine-tool companies that formed the backbone of the Connecticut River Valley
economy. He served as governor of Vermont from 1921-23.

One of James Hartness' close friends was an ambitious young mechanical engineer and businessman named
Ralph Flanders, who worked for the rival Fellows Gear Shaper Company. The young man became a
frequent visitor at the Hartness home, in part because of daughter Helen. He was attracted by her brains as
well as her beauty.

Helen Hartness Flanders with son Jim and Ralph Flanders, 1943 (photo - hhfjimrf.jpg)

"We talked about literature and discussed the latest Times book review," Flanders recalled in his
autobiography, Senator from Vermont. "We talked about music. She delighted me with her musicianship at
the piano. She had had and was having the best training available in Boston from Heinrich Gebhard, who was
later to give lessons to Leonard Bernstein."

Helen Hartness married Ralph Flanders on November 1, 1911 in the living room of Smiley Manse, the
Hartness family home.

Flanders went to work for his father in law at Jones and Lamson. Elizabeth Flanders was born in 1912,
followed by Nancy in 1918 and James in 1923. Ralph Flanders was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946 and
became famous as the first senator to challenge Wisconsin's Sen. Joseph McCarthy on his anti-communist
crusade.

Helen Flanders' career as a pianist was ended early by arthritis, but in 1930 her career as a collector was
only beginning. The year before, the State of Vermont had created the Commission on Country Life. At that
time, there widespread interest around the country in collecting folk music and ballads. Much of the collecting
was being done in Appalachia and much of it was under the supervision of Phillips Barry, a Harvard
musicologist. Barry's particular interest was Child ballads named after Francis Child, a 19th century
musicologist who had collected 305 ballads from the British and Scottish traditions.

A subgroup of the commission, the Committee on Traditions and Ideals was headed by Arthur Wallace
Peach, a professor at Norwich University. It was Dr. Peach who proposed to Mrs. Flanders that she spend
a year collecting music on the back roads of Vermont. The committee money soon ran out just as Flanders
began to have an inkling of how much music was out there. She continued anyway, on her own and without
payment except for the personal satisfaction she obviously got from her work. That one year extended into
three decades; that small project became her life's work. And she did not limit herself to Vermont, but
tracked down singers and collected songs all over New England.

In 1935, Helen Flanders met Marguerite Olney, a woman who would become very nearly as important to the
Flanders Collection as Flanders herself. Olney was a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music
and particularly skillful at transcribing the songs she heard.

"A lot of the credit should go to Marguerite Olney," notes Margaret MacArthur. "She was a big part of it and
she did a lot of the collecting."

In later years, the two women would have a serious falling out for reasons never explained publicly, although
some speculate that Marguerite Olney resented how little credit she earned for her efforts. She became a
recluse and died in a house fire.

But in the happier early days, Flanders and Olney would traipse the countryside together and separately,
seeking out old songs in lumber camps and in tiny towns such as Woodbury, Danville and Cuttingsville.

At first, they used a dictaphone of the type invented by Thomas Edison. The dictaphone, on display in the
basement room that houses the Flanders Collection at Middlebury, cut wax cylinders and could be run off
batteries or plugged into a car's cigarette lighter if the house had no electricity, which was often the case. She
later recorded directly onto aluminum, glass and acetate discs, and still later used reel-to-reel tape recorders.

More than the technology, however, it was Helen Flanders' way with people that enabled her to do what she
did, charming her way into the homes of strangers, cajoling reluctant singers into performing for her. It was
rare that she came away without some musical gem.

"From some 13 years of going up and down this northeastern land of ballads," Flanders wrote in one of her
many articles, "Confessions of a Ballad Collector," "there are few byroads that do not have some association,
few non- committal doorways which, opened by perfect strangers, have not given momentous experiences in
texts and tunes."

She delighted in tracking ballads and folk songs through time and geography, recording the mutations and
influences of different generations and places.

In her four-volume work Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England, she includes a version of the
Child ballad entitled "The EIfin Knight," only here it has become "The Cambric Shirt." It is close cousin to the
latter-day version that Simon and Garfunkel put out as "Scarborough Fair," perhaps better known as
"Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme."

Similarly, she found in North Calais the tragic tale of 18 people who drowned when a boat capsized on a
local lake in 1873. Among the papers of an East Berkshire family, she found an almost identical song based
on the tale of five men who drowned when a longboat overturned in Mulberry, England, in 1880. Both songs
had been poured into the mold of a much older ballad. Parentheses indicate the words of the Calais version:

Oh, Mulberrry (Calais) trembled (did tremble) at that awful stroke;
Consider (And considered) the voice of Jehovah that spoke.
To teach us we are (we're) mortal, and exposed to death;
And subject each moment to yield up our breath.

By the time Flanders stopped collecting in 1960 and turned her full attention to cataloging and writing about
the material, she had amassed 5,000 pieces of traditional music; 4,000 letters, broadsides and manuscripts;
234 wax cylinders; 1,312 discs and 62 tapes, according to a count made by Cockrell some years ago. Since
that count was made, says Flanders Collection curator Jennifer Post, new material has been added.

In addition to ballads, the collection includes British and early American songs, folk hymns, call-dances,
nursery games and counting-out rhymes. There are handwritten songs from copybooks, ledgers, cookbooks,
diaries and letters - treasures that came into families, writes Flanders, "by heredity or adoption."

"By heredity or adoption also," she writes, "they possessed an unwritten lore - ballads passed along orally
down generations of memories. Sea battles, border frays, the super-sensitive romances, chronicles, and the
like were learned 'by ear' in their tune. There are remnants of an oral tradition from the time of Skalds to the
present, records of periods, people, and locales, as diverting and entertaining as foreign travel."

The great accomplishment of Helen Hartness Flanders was that she captured, validated, and maintained that
rich oral tradition. She lived a long and satisfying life, and when she died in Springfield in 1972, at the age of
82, she could rest secure in the knowledge that her legacy would be an everlasting one.

Sally Johnson is editor of the Rutland Herald's Vermont Sunday Magazine, and resides in Middlebury.