Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths

Abstract

Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths. By Roger deV. Renwick. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Pp. xvi + 183, foreword, introduction, notes, bibliography, indices. $40.00 cloth.) Roger Renwick, a distinguished teacher and scholar of Anglo/American folksong, here offers five case studies of particular songs or song traditions. After a caveat in the first chapter, to be discussed below, he shows in succeeding chapters how attention to the full diachronic record, as preserved in archives and collections, enables the folklorist to say something valid and valuable about Anglo/American folksong. (For ease of discussion, the chapters will be here addressed out of their numerical order.) Two of the essays are concerned with expanding our understanding of Anglo/American folksong. Chapter Three argues for dividing this repertoire into three genres instead of the usual two (lyric and ballad). third genre, catalog song, would encompass many popular pieces, including those preferred for group singing and for work or dance singing. Within this genre Renwick identifies five patterns: enumeration, as in cowboy or sailor songs that go down the list of all the personnel on the ranch or ship; iteration, with verbal repetition especially at the beginning of successive stanzas, as in Ain't Gonna Grieve My Lord No More (Oh, you can't get to heaven on roller skates); incrementation, as in The Foolish Boy (I sold my cow and I got me a calf); cumulation, as in The Twelve Days of Christmas; and dialogue analogous to literary flyting as in Hard of Hearing (Speak a little louder sir; I'm very hard of hearing). formulation of catalog song as a genre adds another nail to the coffin of communal ballad-origin theory, as ballads most popularly offered as evidence of that theory, such as Edward and The Maid Freed from the Gallows, turn out in this reckoning to be catalog songs, not ballads. Chapter Four identifies not a genre but a new ballad. song in question, Oh, Willie, has previously been treated as a mere version of The Butcher's Boy. But Renwick demonstrates that the central issue of this ballad is parental opposition rather than faithless love, and that as such it shows textual coherence across time from early nineteenth-century broadsides to late twentieth-century field-collected versions. Two other chapters are concerned with deepening our understanding of individual folksongs. Chapter Two focuses on a broadside ballad called The Wild and Wicked Youth, and demonstrates how singers in the American South, by transforming this typical broadside ballad into a blues ballad, created the oikotype usually called The Rambling Boy. This oikotype is much more ego-centered than the broadside version, more emotional, and what Renwick calls feminized, by which he seems to mean that extraneous male characters are eliminated and female characters and their reactions to the fate of the hero are highlighted. …