Narrative Obituary Verse and Native American Balladry

Abstract

FOLKSONG AND BALLAD SCHOLARS have yet to demonstrate satisfactorily relationship of narrative obituary verse to native American balladry, Tristram P. Coffin offered preliminary considerations for such a study in a paper published in I964.' is my suspicion, Coffin wrote, although I find it hard to support in a scholarly fashion, that a high percentage of our British ballad texts owe their origin to narrative obituary verse, and that among our native American ballads this tradition is source of more texts than any other.2 In pursuing hypothesis that the tradition of narrative obituary verse has fed ballads to folk for generations,' Coffin followed a precedent established in brief commentaries by such noted American ballad scholars as W. W. Newell,4 Eckstorm and Smyth,5 and Phillips Barry.6 There is a need to supplement these earlier discussions if we are to move toward an actual documentation of role of narrative obituary poetry in formation of native American ballad texts. It would be a distortion of extant evidence at this point in investigation, however, to exaggerate place of narrative elegiac verse per se in formation of most native American ballads. Rather,