Ballad Poetry Research Articles

‘The Chief Preservers of Ballad Poetry’: Revisiting the Ballad Traditions of Scottish Women

The eighteenth century saw an increasing interest in oral narrative ballad poetry, whose perceived decline prompted major efforts among antiquarians and collectors to find and preserve all that remained of the old popular songs. Women, long associated with oral tradition, were seen as the preservers of ballad poetry, transmitting their songs orally across generations. Yet while male collectors acknowledged female singers’ contributions, they obscured the broader realities of women’s engagement with print ballad culture. This article revisits the ballad traditions of Scottish women, exploring how the male-dominated scholarly discourse of the era shaped perceptions of women’s involvement in ballad culture. While collectors emphasised the role of female singers as preservers of purely oral tradition, they downplayed women’s broader engagement with ballads as printed literature, including their participation in the commercial broadside industry as sellers and consumers. This study reveals a more nuanced picture of women's involvement in balladry, challenging traditional narratives that align women singers exclusively with oral ballad tradition. By acknowledging the diverse ways in which women participated in ballad culture, this research sheds light on the complexities of gender dynamics within the ballad tradition, highlighting the need for a re-evaluation of women’s reception and transmission of ballads historically.

Scottish Sounds in Colonial South Africa

Jason R. Rudy, “Scottish Sounds in Colonial South Africa: Thomas Pringle, Dialect, and the Overhearing of Ballad” (pp. 197–214) This essay uses Scottish ballads to think through the ways poems circulated in nineteenth-century emigrant communities. Dialect was a significant feature of colonial poetry, capturing the particular sounds of localities: the borderlands of Scotland, for example. Given the long association between dialect and oral culture, dialect in the context of ballad poetry signaled an especially communal form of identification. Scottish dialect poems in emigrant communities had an especial power to invoke a communal consciousness, a sense of being together that arose from having come from the same place. I take the Scottish poet Thomas Pringle as an example of a larger phenomenon, tracing the revisions he made to ballad poems as he moved from Edinburgh to South Africa and then London.

Spectacular Remedies to Colonial Conflicts: Tableaux Vivants, Proto-Cinema and Global Performance in Dion Boucicault's Jessie Brown

The story of ‘Jessie Brown’ emerged within a faux eyewitness account to the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857. Subsequently elaborated and distributed via a ‘global republic of performance’ (including journalism, ballad poetry, musical compositions, dioramas, exhibitions and stage spectacles), Jessie Brown exposed class- and ethnic-based dissonances within the British imperialist project. The culmination of this process was the elaborate ‘contemporaneous drama’ Jessie Brown; or, The Relief of Lucknow (1858), by Dion Boucicault. Due to ongoing developments in a real-world colonial conflict, Boucicault employed melodramatic elements non-formulaically, including a sonically enhanced, proto-cinematic tableau vivant in lieu of a conventional dramatic resolution. This article augments the study of nineteenth-century literature by developing a ‘global republic of performance’ model used to analyse and account for the Jessie Brown phenomenon in its various media elaborations.

The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts

The premise of Ronald Schuchard's The Last Minstrels is a simple one: to rescue Yeats from the notion that he was a tone-deaf poet whose theories on poetry on music were not to be taken seriously. Schuchard meticulously traces and successfully rehabilitates Yeats's efforts in reviving the art of the spoken word from his early interest in chanting to the psaltery and the establishment of a lyric drama along classical lines. Schuchard takes a broad view of Yeats's revival of the bardic arts as he follows the poet's ‘rhythmic career’ (p. xx) which spanned almost four decades of his public life and involved activities well beyond the romanticized ‘Celtic Twilight’ of the 1890s and 1900s. Schuchard amply and ably demonstrates that Yeats's early ideas about bardic traditions reverberated through his life and work, and were by no means limited to poetry alone. The spoken word involved him in numerous dramatic ventures in Dublin and London well before the establishment of the Abbey Theatre in 1904. Nor were his ventures limited to Irish cultural nationalism. His theories had a marked influence on Pound – and also on Eliot – whose debt to Yeats's prosodic developments seems far greater than anyone has hitherto acknowledged. And in later life his introduction to radio and successive BBC broadcasts of the 1930s gave a new impetus by unexpected means to his desire to bring poetry to the masses. All along, however, the whole point was as he had envisaged it in ‘Popular Ballad Poetry in Ireland’, an early essay from 1887, that poetry was a living, oral tradition, alive in the minds of the people, which was passed on from mouth to mouth. Poetry was something for the ear not for the eye.

The Popular Ballad and Oral Tradition

The Popular Ballad and Oral Tradition Mary Ellen Brown (bio) I begin with a representative quotation from volume 2 of the Papers of Francis James Child because it offers an ideal avenue into the study of the popular ballad and some of the premises of that study: “These two ballads & a fragment of a third were repeated from memory by my grandmother, who is over ninety years old. She learned them orally & has no recollection of their being printed” (II:229). Such a formulation suggests that popular ballads to be authentic and true are held in memory, are unpublished, are learned orally; they are possessions of the past and we get glimpses of that past largely through the memories of the old. It is an easy move from these assertions to suggest that the ballads belong, certainly originated, in the past, in an oral society, homogeneous and small; what we now have is but a pale reflection of their original glory; their time is past. Formulations like the above, once a staple of scholarship and not totally discarded today, have tended to freeze the ballad, even to limit it to exemplars that might fit a definition implicitly allied to origins and transmission. And this has meant in large measure that the popular ballad is a Child ballad, separated off from lesser types circulating orally, as well as from broadside materials (early and late), literary appropriations, imitations, and other cultural uses. For by the “classic” criteria, these latter are not authentic; to tell the truth, applying the criteria strictly would eliminate many of the ballads in the Child collection. Yet the ballad is more genus than genre, more cultural resource and generating concept than a single style of popular verse. It has existed in the past and will exist in the future. And it has always found a home in all the available media, adopting different styles appropriate to a particular cultural moment. At once occasional and historical, it may mark a moment at the time or through reflection. And only sometimes will it be transmitted orally; but even so it can be a ballad. Most twenty-first-century inhabitants of the Western world will know their ballads in electronic or printed form, the one a technological orality, the other the medium of the academy and the visually oriented. This situation suggests that cultural change may well have extraordinary effect on this [End Page 176] genus, this thing designated “ballad”; and societal position may also well effect how one learns/holds in memory/and transmits. The concept of oral tradition has had a profound influence on the study of the popular ballad, allowing some exemplars to be valorized, others dismissed as inauthentic, and an ongoing and even vital vernacular, narrative verse tradition all but ignored because it lacks purity, defined in a limited way as oral, old. The lived perimeters of the ballad are broad and allow the oral memory beside the book analysis, the poets’ reformulation, and the musicians’ borrowing. Mary Ellen Brown Indiana University Mary Ellen Brown Mary Ellen Brown, Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University, has long had a particular interest in ballads, as well as the history and intellectual salience of that study. Her most recent work includes William Motherwell’s Cultural Politics 1797–1835 (2001). References Child 1874. Child 1874 Francis James Child. “Ballad Poetry” (1874). In Johnson’s Universal Cyclopaedia, 1900. Rpt. in Journal of Folklore Research, 32 (1994):214–22. Google Scholar Child 1882–98. Child 1882–98 ———. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Google Scholar Child archive. Child archive ———. The Papers of Frances James Child, shelfmark 25241.47, 33 vols., Houghton Library, Harvard College. Copyright © 2003 its author

Women as the chief preservers of traditional ballad poetry

F. J. Child argued that it is “mainy through women everywhere” that the ballads are preserved and yet to him, as to Percy, Herder, Motherwell or Grundtvig before, women are only the mediators of an older male form of literature (heroic ballads, minstrel song, etc). The essential maternal feminity of orality is part of the German Romantic myth of origin. The 'Volk'/people had to be (kept) anonymous in order to produce 'VOLKSballaden'/popular ballads. What has come down to us in writing are very often ballads sung by women, recorded by men and presented as the 'manly', powerful, genuine ballads of the people. By arguing for women everywhere being the chief preservers of traditional ballad poetry, F. J. Child paved the way for seeking out these women locally.

The Anglo-American Ballad. A Folklore Casebook

Preface. Introduction 1. Popular Songs and the Image of a Nation: The Spectator Papers on Ballads (Numbers 70 and 85) (1711) Joseph Addison 2. Heroic Ballads and the 'Romantic Wildness' of an Anglo-Saxon Past: On Ancient Minstrels (1794) Thomas Percy 3. Countering Mythic Claims: The Origin and Progress of National Song (1783) Joseph Ritson 4. Balladry as a Childhood for National Genius: Popular Poetry (1830) Walter Scott 5. The Concept of Orality and the Collector of 'Tradition': Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern (1827) William Motherwell 6. The Ballad Community as an Egalitarian, Pastoral Ideal: Ballad Poetry (1875) Francis James Child 7. Orality, Primitivism, and an Improvising Folk Community: The Ballad and Communal Poetry (1897) Francis B. Gunmere 8. Real Singers, Individual Authorship, and Diverse Ballads: Ballads and the Illiterate (1921) Louise Pound 9. Archaism and 'Communal Re-creation' in Ballad Tunes: The Music of the Ballads (1929) Phillips Barry 10. Families of Tunes and the Tenacity of Tradition: Ballad Tunes and Texts (1944) Bertrand H. Bronson 11. Ballad Music as an Heirloom of British Culture: Principal Melodic Families of British-American Folk Song (1950) Samuel P. Bayard 12. Variation and Continuity in Ballads Present and Past: The Comparative Approach (1986) D. K. Wilgus 13. Class Politics and the Producers and Production of Songs: Song and Social Context (1986) Michael Pickering 14. Orality and the Formulaic Composition of Ballads: Oral Tradition and Literary Tradition (1977) David Buchan 15. Creativity, Community, and the Individual Songmaker: My Name is Larry Gorman (1964) Edward Ives 16. People and Their Songs as Diverse Phenomena: Ballad Singers, Ballad Makers, and Ballad Etiology (1973) Eleanor R. Long 17. Tradition, Literacy, and the Ballad Marketplace: The Interface of Oral and Written Forms (1984) Dianne Dugaw 18. Performance, Audience, Social Conditions, and Tradition: The Rise of the English Street Ballad (1990) Natascha Wurzbach 19. Blues Ballads and the Syncretism of Anglo and African Traditions: Survivors of the Ballad Tradition (1984) Paul Oliver

The Common Muse. An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry XVth-XXth Century

The Common Muse. An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry XVth-XXth Century

The Common Muse: An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry, XVth-XXth Century

The Common Muse: An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry, XVth-XXth Century

The Common Muse. An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry XVth-XXth Centuries

The Common Muse. An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry XVth-XXth Centuries

REVIEWS

The Common Muse. An Anthology of popular British ballad poetry xvth‐xxth century. Edited by V. DE SOLA PINTO and A. E. RODWAY.English and Scottish Ballads. Edited with an introduction by ROBERT GRAVES.The Organization of Science in England. D. L. S. CARDWELL. HeinemannReligion Without Revelation. JULIAN HUXLEY. Max ParrishEducation and the Philosophic Mind. Edited by A. V. JUDGES. HarrapThe Rise of the Novel. Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. IAN WATT. Chatto & WindusDemocracy in England. DIANA SPEARMAN. Rockliff

The Maid Freed from the Gallows

THE ballad known under the title The Maid Freed from the Gallows is known not only from the collection of Child but also from the classical treatise of F. B. Gummere, in which it is used with great skill to prove the author's well-known theory of ballad origins.' In that ballad, a girl condemned to die on the gallows, we are not told why, calls upon her father and her mother to rescue her, but in vain. Finally she calls on her 'own true love,' who without hesitation pays the ransom (or bribe) and thus frees the victim. We are not told, of course, of any consequences of this peculiar interference with the king's justice. In this form, the ballad reads like a commonplace document relating an event of a type that cannot have been uncommon in Merry Old England in the long period that lies between the Norman Conquest and the end of the eighteenth century. Suffice it to recall a scene in the opening chapter of Sir Walter Scott's admirable Heart of Mid-Lothian, supposed to have occurred in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the early part of the reign of George ii. What puts us on our guard is the significant fact that the same ballad has been found elsewhere, with noteworthy variations.2 Closely related to the ballad is an English folk-tale from Yorkshire, derived, probably, from some ballad version, as may be inferred from the verses interspersed in the prose text.3 In this version, a girl is to be hanged for having lost a golden ball. Standing at the foot of the gallows, she invokes her mother, then her father, and lastly her brother, all in vain. At long last her lover appears, who has succeeded in getting hold of the lost ball, at the risk of his own life. He presents it to the judges and thus saves her life. In a German ballad from Westphalia, a girl, in the power of a mysterious 'skipper' and in danger of death, successively implores her father, her brother, and her love to rescue her. The two former refuse to sell their purple coats to save her life. Her lover sells his own person (apparently because he has no purple coat or anything else of value), and thus redeems her.4 The rationalist method of interpreting the old ballad poetry was ready at hand with the suggestion that the mysterious 'skipper' is simply a pirate who has abducted the heroine. Unfortunately, this explanation failed to explain why the girl's life should be in danger: pirates were certainly not in the habit of slaying their fair victims but preferred to sell them at a handsome profit. This rationalist explanation was suggested in the first place by a Sicilian ballad printed in 1874.5 There a young woman is abducted by Tunisian pirates on the

The Puy at Rouen

The puys were pious literary societies in the north of France from the thirteenth century till modern times. Most of them were in honor of the Virgin. The one at Dieppe was dedicated to her assumption, the one at Amiens to her purification, the one at Rouen to her immaculate conception. At first the puys were more religious than literary. Later they became more literary than religious. Some became wholly secular literary academies. The puys encouraged the art of poetry by crowning the victors in poetic contests held according to their rules. The contests were arranged and conducted by a president chosen for one year and called prince or less often maistre. The membership was drawn from the clergy, the officials, and the bourgeois. The puys interest us on account of their acknowledged influence upon the German meistersänger and the French rhétoriqueurs, especially in the development of ballad poetry.

The Tragic Art of Ballad Poetry

The Tragic Art of Ballad Poetry

Ballad Poetry of the Sea

(1911). Ballad Poetry of the Sea. Royal United Services Institution. Journal: Vol. 55, No. 400, pp. 750-756.

VIII.—The Nibelungenlied and Sage in Modern Poetry

In an article, entitled Nibelungensage und Nibelungendichtungen, which appeared in the Preussische Jahrbücher a little over a year ago (October, 1894), Dr. A. Schmidt, after a summary of the entire Nibelungensage and a comparison of this Sage with the form it assumes in the Nibelungenlied, makes the following statement: “Though it would be madness after Homer to reconstruct anew the Iliad and Odyssey in poetic form, after the mediaeval author it is really a religious duty of German poets who have the interests of their nation at heart to recast into higher forms the imperfectly coined Nibelungen treasure.” In these words the essayist expresses not merely a personal opinion, but echoes the sentiments of many other German critics, and above all of over forty authors who, with over fifty different productions in drama and epic poetry, have tried to recast into ‘higher forms’ the Nibelungensage as a whole or in part. This large number of attempts includes three or four dramatic sketches, but does not include the ‘lower forms’ of lyric and ballad poetry, or of prose narrative. After the clear and thorough discussion of Nibelungen dramas by Professor Carl Weitbrecht, it might seem unnecessary to discuss this part of the general subject any further, but there are certain aspects of this question which he has not touched upon which it is the purpose of this paper to consider; and, while there is complete agreement with the views advanced by Prof. Weitbrecht, yet the attempt will be made to show that his conclusions do not warrant the same approval.

Scottish Ballad Poetry

Scottish Ballad Poetry Get access Notes and Queries, Volume s8-III, Issue 73, 20 May 1893, Page 399, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s8-III.73.399d Published: 20 May 1893