On the "Darling Songs" of Poets, Scholars, and Singers: An Introduction

Abstract

The essays in this collection articulate vital political, aesthetic, and cultural topics of inquiry that remain in shadows so long as literary and historical studies are rooted solely in written and author-identified documents of society, omitting widely shared forms and traditions. As generally practiced, field of Cultural Studies has yet to take up adequately products of premodern oral traditions as they intersect with early print commodities. The need is great for such analyses as these that, suitably capacious on one hand and agile on other, begin to theorize this plethora of materials. We could hardly overstate shaping and grounding influence of eighteenth-century European music and traditions and practices for those of our own day. Versions of songs then--including a number of those discussed in following essays--continue to circulate among us. Of central conceptual importance to anyone attempting to frame an understanding of modern humanities and social sciences, eighteenth-century study of European balladry launched endeavor of ethnography and ethnopoetics and contributed to modern era's imagining of class structure. More specifically for literary scholars, study of balladry and the has been constitutive of concomitant category of polite literature that has dominated project of literary history and criticism. When we know how to seek out and analyze materials in which they survive, traditions and culture supply a vital and socially resonant arena for understanding any historical moment and place. For sociopolitical world of eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland, they supply a central arena for study, because songs and singing imbued culture at all levels. With new technologies of last several decades well suited to handling and (dis)playing both texts and tunes--concordance and indexing capabilities for manifold discreet and interreferenced items, Internet Web sites, multimedia databases with digitalized images and sound representations, and so on--ballad and folk study is coming back into fashion to invigorate our thinking. Songs in eighteenth-century Britain flourished in profuse, complex ways. A consideration of balladry and culture in period brings before us overarching topics, four general areas of concern, that will be elaborated in essays that follow. (1) Because songs are oral, performative, and multimedia--even more intrinsically than drama, say--to consider them adequately we must begin with concept of performance that underlies verbal texts and musical notation. Further, whatever documents or artifacts allow our study of songs as performed utterances must be examined with regard to intersections of orality and literacy across a range of modes and social levels. (1) (2) The social and public character of culture requires that we develop our theoretical understanding of expressive collectivity, moving beyond almost exclusively individualized focus of much literary and social history, while not limiting our regard to manifestations of modern mass culture. As essays here demonstrate, vivid collectivized voices are speaking to us in documents from past that warrant our attention. (2) (3) The study of ballad and folk integrally shaped eighteenth-century emergence of British literary history and criticism as we know it. In turn, that historiography cannot be divorced from today's study of songs. In early modern period, songs shaped and illustrated mapping of English literary imaginary by means of divides between past and present, between a pastoralized and an urbane polite, between subaltern and oral Celtic and ruling and written Gothic. (3) (4) These factors in turn contributed to a paradoxical eighteenth-century gendering of popular song as a category reserved for marginalized communities of women on one hand, or notably masculinized (yet superannuated) bards on other, both of whom were seen as representing a primitive and vanishing cultural past. …