User:Memtgs/Phillips Barry

Phillips Barry (1880 – August 29, 1937) was an American academic and collector of traditional ballads in New England.

Barry was born in Boston and attended undergraduate and graduate school at Harvard University for a variety of history studies. After graduating, he began collecting variations of both American and Anglo-American ballads in the northeast United States.

During the summer of 1930, Helen Hartness Flanders began to correspond with Barry on the subject of an archive of traditional songs she had been collecting in Vermont for the Vermont Commission on Country Life. Initially they collaborated for the sake of finding Child Ballads in New England; at the time these songs were considered to be more prevalent in the South and were generally not associated with New England culture. Barry's later work was notably more focused on original American ballads rather than British ballads.