Biography
Olive Dame Campbell (1882–1954) was born Olive Dame and was raised in Medford, Massachusetts. From a young age, education played an important role in her life, as her father was the head of a private high school. She graduated from Tufts College in 1900 during a time when most women did not pursue higher education. Three years after graduating, she met her future husband John Charles Campbell, fifteen years her senior, who was a missionary school teacher.
Olive was Campbell’s second wife, and together they traveled to Appalachia, where John had received a grant to study the area’s social and cultural conditions in hopes of improving their school systems. While there, Olive noted that ballads sung by the residents had strong ties to both English and Irish folk songs. The ballads that she collected would eventually be published as “English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians” by Cecil Sharp and Olive D. Campbell in 1917. This collection would later influence several productions. One resulting production was the 2000 drama film Songcatcher, which was loosely based on the book. Another tribute to Olive Dame Campbell’s work with folk songs will take place from 2008 to 2010 by the group Revels Repertory Company, entitled Voices of the Mountain, which will explore the life and work of Olive Campbell.
After being married only twelve years, Olive’s husband John died in 1919. After his death, Olive worked on collecting and organizing his notes from their work together so that a report of his survey could be published. Attempting to follow the writing style of her husband as much as possible, Olive Campbell successfully published “The Southern Highlander and His Homeland” in 1921, under John’s name.
A year later, Olive Dame Campbell was back to work and ready to embark on a trip to Copenhagen via a fellowship provided by the American-Scandinavian Foundation in order to study the Dutch School style of education, in hopes of finding a way to revitalize the local Appalachian school system. Accompanied by her sister Daisy Dame and colleague Marguerite Butler, the women spent eighteen months traveling between Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, visiting local schools along the way.
Upon her return, Olive set to work forming the John C. Campbell Folk School in 1925 in Brasstown, North Carolina. This folkehjskoler, or folk school, was dedicated to her late husband, and was based on the Dutch School style, where no grades were given and no one ever failed. Instead, students and teachers formed a community that worked together to help each other advance in various crafts such as blacksmithing, quilting and many others. This school functioned as an alternative to higher education for people from the surrounding Appalachian area.
Olive Dame Campbell continued to work in collecting ballads and handicrafts up until her death in 1954. While she had no surviving children, the legacy of her work in collecting crafts and ballads, along with the founding of the John C. Campbell Folk School, lives on today.
Read more about this topic: Olive Dame Campbell
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)