Ballad Singer Research Articles

Blind Alfred Reed: Appalachian Visionary

Atlanta-based indie record label Dust-to-Digital has released the complete recorded works of Blind Alfred Reed, one of the largely unsung heroes of the early days of recorded country music, and one of the earliest recorded songwriters in the genre. Reed is not exactly obscure—he recorded at the famed Bristol Sessions, and his songs have been recorded by Bruce Springsteen, Ry Cooder, and others, so enthusiasts of old-time music will recognize his name and perhaps his sound. His complete recordings have not been available in one place until now. Producer and liner note author Ted Olson, who has, in the last decade, produced landmark box set collections on the Bristol, Johnson City, and Knoxville Sessions among others, considers Reed a sage. He writes in the notes that Reed possessed in his songwriting “an intense and fearless social vision” and that Reed's songs “seek to venture beyond the shadowy world of injustices, hypocrisies, and lies.”Reed was a singer and fiddler from southern West Virginia, whose main occupation was music and who managed to eke out a living as a performer, a music teacher, and for a short time in the late 1920s, a recording artist. His sound was sparse and unembellished, using only fiddle, guitar, and one or two voices. Many fiddlers of his time played and sang at the same time, but Reed had a more direct and conservative approach than most—he played the same notes he sang, often in a measured, sauntering cadence—and his voice and fiddle both resonated deeply and clearly. As a singer, Reed was emotive in a manner similar to the old ballad singers—he did not try to shape how listeners interpreted the lyrics; rather, he sang in a neutral way that invited them in to sort things out for themselves. Reed recorded all of his songs with his son Arville, except for one solo number recorded in Bristol and three more with neighbor Arthur Wyrick. I find the recordings of Arville singing with his father among the most enjoyable on the set.The songs deal with religious virtues or economic conditions, or they provide some kind of social commentary, often having to do with the roles and behavior of men and women in relationships, albeit offered from varying, sometimes opposing viewpoints. His perspective was in no small way shaped by the Church, and about one-third of the twenty-two songs on this collection reference religious life in some manner. There are also topical songs about real-life events of the day, a common songwriting practice at that time, and several lighthearted social songs that may be off-putting if taken out of context. In “Woman's Been After Man Ever Since,” he sings: “What a shame it is that women try to be so much like men, they will run for office if they get the chance.” Other songs are social and religious statements on rural Appalachian religious morals of the time, addressing short skirts, bobbed hair, and young men who wear fine shoes but carry a bottle in their pocket. Reed's best-known composition “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” is indicative of yet another strain of Reed's songwriting: economic hardship.This is a hardy collection that shows the breadth of Reed's songwriting, but to some ears, the music itself may sound monotonous. Indeed, with the exception of a single track recorded by Arville, the songs are either in the key of G major or C major—and all of the nineteen songs Reed sings begin with a simple, single-string fiddle intro. The melodies are pleasant and at times nuanced, including a waltz, but I must admit that for many years, Reed's songs tended to run together for me. This set helped me connect the music itself with its historical context and importance, and to realize more keenly that the real impact of Reed's music is as a songwriter who was ahead of his time. In the notes, Olson compares him to Woody Guthrie.As we have come to expect from Dust-to-Digital, the eighty-four-page hardcover book accompanying the CD is original, tidy, and beautiful. It contains unreleased photos and documents, studio sheets, and complete lyrics, in addition to an essay by Olson, who is becoming a household name in historical releases (he has been nominated multiple times for Grammy awards for his work as a music producer and songwriter). The notes here contain new research into Reed's life and music and are a friendly read—at once affectionate and informative. Since the release of this collection in 2016, Olson has continued to research the Reed family and has assembled an even more nuanced account. An updated and revised version of his liner notes was published in June 2022 on the Music of Our Mountains website. See https://musicofourmountains.com for more information.

London Voices, 1820-1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories, edited by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford

Reviewed by: London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories ed. by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford William Weber (bio) London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories, edited by Roger Parker, and Susan Rutherford; pp. 293. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021, $65.00, $64.99 ebook. Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford designed this volume to lay out "the multitudinous voices that were heard in countless contexts and venues" in the city of London during "two tumultuous, disorientating decades in the first half of the nineteenth century." They state that these were years where "the city's population expansion was at a height, and when, as a result, different classes were placed in dangerous but—at least to later eyes—culturally fruitful proximity" (2). The thirteen chapters variously trace how movements developed around ballad singers, opera stars, vocal improvisers, French actors, choruses of sacred music, and invented voice boxes, and how these movements expanded the range of London's musical culture between about 1820 and 1840. In the process, the [End Page 128] differences between so-called high and low areas of cultural activity were considerably polarized. What emerges is a fascinating array of disparate cultural institutions whose dynamism and wide social outreach had no parallel in that period. The contributors dig deep into particular contexts to display, in intriguing detail, how Londoners of various social levels experienced developments different from those spreading early in the nineteenth century. The introduction nonetheless warns us that "there was an anxiety that somehow, despite the expansion of London's venues and audiences, the city was being written out of accounts of musical prowess" (6). Claudio Vellutini lays out a contextual framework for understanding the social structure of institutions and practices within the world of Italian opera in the period. The King's Theatre, the premier opera house in London since 1704, had presented only opera troupes brought from Italy, but by the 1830s British singers were competing on a par with their Italian colleagues, developing their own supposedly English vocal style. With that change came the commodification of sheet music, permitting a vast public to perform pieces from their favorite operas in their homes. Vellutini argues that such commercial activity was "consistent with the consolidation of the logic of capitalism [that] emerged as a trope on both sides of the Atlantic" (64). For some observers, Italian opera thereby became justified only as long as it assisted in the reshaping of opera in English terms. The chapter by Cormac Newark lays out a conceptual basis for understanding the fundamental reshaping of English opera life. He provides a detailed analysis of comments made in The Opera: A Novel, a book by Catherine Gore published in 1832. Mrs. Gore, as she was always addressed, presented bold new perspectives about the English adaptation of Italian opera, treating opera as a useful microcosm for analyzing the "celebrity-spotting" central to amateur fascination with opera stars. Her book provided a broad array of commentary about the cultural life of the upper classes that grew out of the widespread social commentary that arose during that period. Accordingly, Newark argues, Gore dissected the "vicissitudes" she found in private discussions of the taste for opera that reached a climax in the fervent apotheosis of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during the 1840s (253). In effect, Gore brought a bourgeois discernment by defining such taste as separate from the dilettantism that traditionally underlay taste for Italian opera. The concept of "voices" emerges in this volume's analysis of new kinds of cultural discourse within the discordant opinions presented in the press. Singers took on roles as "voices" and thereby articulated radically different roles compared with the ritualized discourse about opera in the eighteenth century. Operas thereby reconceived cultural assumptions long idolized for the unadventurous assumptions of the aristocratic public. Matildie Thom Wium thereby analyzes the "mythology" surrounding the prima donna's assumption of an exotic, in some respects negative, posture (122). That posture made the idolized singer out to be a "divine monster," thereby giving lyric drama a more formidable character compared with the exotically Italianized picture found in the eighteenth century (123). Likewise, Mary Ann Smart shows how adventurous new stagings could become...

Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato

Reviewed by: Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry and Joanne Begiato James Eli Adams (bio) Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato; pp. xiii + 270. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, £85.00, £25.00 paper, $130.00, $36.95 paper. The development of the internet has transformed research across the humanities by providing newly immediate and wide-ranging access to a world of archival material. At times, however, the sheer abundance of that material amplifies a long-standing scholarly challenge: does this archival wealth actually contribute to important new understandings of a field? Can it do more than confirm received wisdom, offer more than the pleasures of anecdotal detail? Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato, brings home this challenge, contributing to burgeoning interest in the social history of military life, which rarely figures centrally in long-standing historical preoccupation with military campaigns and strategy. Attention to the individual soldier’s experience naturally foregrounds norms of masculinity, particularly as they might conflict with those governing domestic life, and as they register the psychic pressures of military service. The most rewarding contributions to the volume address popular understandings of this service, which often obscured its harsher realities. Brown and Begiato’s chapter analyzes late-Victorian recruitment material depicting young and old soldiers together as embodying [End Page 454] an array of values—national, moral, and martial—cast in familial terms as a masculine bond across generations. Barry’s study of the career of Charles Incledon, “a singing sailor on the Georgian Stage,” offers the volume’s most engaging study of “complex masculinity,” as this popular performer, who left the navy around 1783, came to be viewed as “at once a brave British Tar and a ridiculous Regency rake—a patriotic ballad singer, but also an effeminate showman” (83). Attention to soldiers’ more personal experience, however, too often reiterates commonplace views, often by contesting phantom opinions—most notably the notion that military and domestic life were radically disjunctive, both socially and psychically. Thus a chapter on “martial masculinities and family feeling” declares, “The notion that soldiers miraculously forgot family as soon as they left British soil was clearly hyperbole” (38). Indeed, but who ever thought otherwise? “Maintaining a correspondence home,” we learn, was very important to soldiers on the front—as we might have guessed, since letter-writing is a staple of nearly every popular representation of modern warfare (where would war movies be without it?). But the author puts forth this truism to “unsettle the idea that soldiering automatically entailed a denial of family life” (40). We are offered no clear sources for this “idea.” Better to begin with the obvious—“thoughts of family and home routinely intruded into military men’s consciousness”—as a prelude to examining what the archives reveal about the peculiar stresses to which these thoughts responded (45). Another chapter, “Recalling the Comforts of Home,” takes up this issue more directly, noting that “martial and civilian masculine identities were not as disparate as often supposed,” although again it would be helpful to have evidence of that supposition, since the chapter’s conclusions are unsurprising (60). Varieties of nostalgia in soldiers’ journals and correspondence “reinforced the emotional connection with his family back home” (72) and “receipt of material objects” was “an important coping mechanism” (73). This topic is richly treated in Holly Furneaux’s Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (2016), which deserves even more attention than it receives here. Elsewhere, neglected material derives its significance through the treacherous strategy of argument from absence. An essay devoted to the leg of Lord Uxbridge, severed at Waterloo and accorded the peculiar tribute of a separate burial, focuses on the dearth of attention devoted to this distinctive grave. One might presume that commentators simply found the nobleman’s limb a less solemn affair than the graves of the many thousands of soldiers who perished in the Napoleonic wars. But no, the...

Stolen Youth

In 1847 Atwill of New York published “The Lament of the Blind Orphan Girl.” Composed by William Bradbury, the song is written for voice and piano in a lilting 3/8 meter. Mary, the song’s protagonist, sings of “the silvery moon” and “bright chain of stars” over diatonic harmonies. A dramatic shift to the minor mode supports the climax: “Oh, when shall I see them? I’m blind, oh, I’m blind.” Mary explains that she and her brother have also lost their parents. On the sheet music cover a wreath of flowers encircles an image of a young white woman kneeling beneath a tree, alone at a grave. The title page notes: “As sung with distinguished applause by Abby Hutchinson.” Orphan songs pervade nineteenth-century pop repertory. Scholars have analyzed Latvian, Hmong, Danish, and German orphan songs, but US orphan songs have generated little more than passing references. Other examples include: “The Orphan Nosegay Girl” with words by Mrs. Susanna Rowson from 1805; “The Colored Orphan Boy,” composed by C. D. Abbott and sung by S. C. Campbell of the Campbell Minstrels from 1852; and “The Orphan Ballad Singers Ballad” by Henry Russell from 1866. Orphans were not just a topic; in the latter half of the nineteenth century, actual parentless youth featured in bands such as the Hebrew Orphan Asylum Band of New York City. This paper connects the stolen childhoods in orphan songs to those of enslaved youth. If free children were aware of slavery and the movement to abolish it as historian Wilma King has shown, what did it mean for Abby Hutchinson, who started performing abolitionist songs with her brothers at age twelve, to sing as the sentimental stock character of the orphan? Songs like the one above may have been a way that young abolitionists empathized with enslaved youths robbed of their youths.

Forging Communities: Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe ed. by Montserrat Piera

Reviewed by: Forging Communities: Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe ed. by Montserrat Piera Michael O’Brien Keywords history of the language, Historical Romance, Old Spanish, medieval Castilian, materialist hermeneutics, history of the book, translation, material culture, novela sentimental, Cárcel de amor, Catalan Literature, Crown of Aragon, Occitan, Spanish Empire, poetry, Classical Reception, Dante, Mediterranean Studies, Food Studies, Galen, ballads, María de Zayas, Aljamiado, Mudéjar, pilgrimage Piera, Montserrat, editor. Forging Communities: Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe. U of Arkansas P, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-68226-068-5. Forging Communities contains thirteen chapters by multiple authors, including an introduction and postscript by the editor, Montserrat Piera. The work is divided into three distinct sections: “Part I: Connections and Transitions in Muslim, Hebrew, and Christian Communities” (chapters 1–4), “Part II: Food Choices: Ideals and Practices in Monastic and Lay Communities” (chapters 5–9), and “Part III: Food as Fetish: Gendering Sexual Desire through Food” (chapters 10–13). In chapter 1, “From Kitāb al-tabīj to the Llibre de Sent Soví: Continuities and Shifts in the Earliest Iberian Cooking Manuals,” Carolyn A. Nadeau compares the anonymous fourteenth-century Catalan cookbook, Llibre de Sent Soví, with two Arabic-language culinary treatises written during the thirteenth-century’s Almohad Dynasty. Specifically, the author examines the Sent Soví’s connections with the anonymous Kitāb al-ṭabīkh fī al-Maghrib wa al-Andalus fī ʻaṣr al-Mawahḥidīn [The Book of Cooking in Maghreb and Andalus in the Era of Almohads] and Muḥammad Ibn Razīn al-Tujībī’s Fuḍālat al-ḫuwān fī ṭaiyibāt aṭ-ṭaʻām wa’l-alwān [The Delicacies of the Table and the Finest of Foods and Dishes]. Nadeau’s argument is twofold. She first highlights a common thread linking all three texts by identifying what she labels as “narrative bridges” or stylistic commonalities, such as “passion,” “authority,” and “awareness of the reader” (21–28). The author then moves on to a discussion of the continuation and cessation of the use of certain foods, herbs, and spices to elucidate a “culinary contact zone” which existed between Christians and Muslims in medieval Iberia (29). Chapter 2, “Food and Death: Foodways and Communities in the Danza general de la muerte,” considers the inclusion of food as social commentary within the anonymous Danza general de la muerte. Michelle M. Hamilton and María Morrás provide an in-depth analysis of the work’s characters and their association with multiple food items. This includes an examination of the archbishop, the physician, the priest, the laborer, and the alfaquí, and whether they properly obtained or utilized the food which was at their disposal. The authors convincingly demonstrate that food is not only deployed in the Danza general to indicate status, class, and profession, but also to make certain moral [End Page 196] arguments as well. The authors view “the imagery of food and consumption as symbolic equivalences of the moral-philosophical dilemma that is at the crux of the work, namely the conception of life and death and the way people choose to navigate each” (36). In chapter 3, “‘Los que comedes mi pan:’ Food References in the Romancero,” Hilary Pomeroy examines the appearance of food in multiple Iberian ballads, reminding us that certain food acts “communicated an encoded message readily understood by ballad singer and audience alike” (56). Pomeroy asserts that the intentional inclusion of food in certain ballads could immediately evoke information about status, concerns about sieges, and even hint at upcoming plot developments. Furthermore, the examples provided demonstrate that this semiotic value of food can be found in ballads depicting people of multiple faiths. Chapter 4, “Magical Morsels: Food in Morisco Aljamiado Incantations,” examines the role of food in the spells and incantations of two anonymous manuscripts written in Aljamiado between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries on the Iberian Peninsula. Veronica Menaldi shows that spells, primarily used by women, had multiple purposes ranging from improved memory to finding love, but also helped to disguise and preserve certain Islamic traditions under the guise of quotidian food practices. These magical...

Political street songs and singers in seventeenth‐century England

AbstractBallad singers and sellers were unquestionably important contributors to the urban and rural soundscape in seventeenth century England. They brought the popular musical productions of the metropolis to the provinces and acted as cultural mediators between town and country, centre and periphery, orality and print. While ballads dealing with a wide array of topics were performed and sold on early modern streets for centuries, this article specifically explores the nature and significance of street performance to the newly burgeoning commercial trade in political song that emerged in England from the late 1630s. First, the ‘ballad singer’ is historicised as a newly emerging phenomenon, closely related to the burgeoning printed ballad trade from about the 1590s. Second, the article examines the variegated social profile of performers and the significance of the street as a place for performance in the febrile political environment of the mid‐ and late‐seventeenth century. Finally, the article considers the seventeenth‐century printed ballad sheet itself as an important political performer in the English street.

Frail echoes of singing in the streets. Tracing ballad sellers and their reputation in the Low Countries

AbstractThis article discusses opposing representations of the Dutch ballad singer as political rebel versus entertainer and performer. It reveals how these representations were shaped, how they interacted in cultural practices and how they changed in the Low Countries in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The underlying question is the relevancy of these street singers in the process of public opinion formation. The period under scrutiny is highly relevant in the context of Dutch history, because it covers the rise of the reformist movement, the revolt of the Northern provinces against the Spanish King, the establishment of the Dutch Republic and growing importance of the local cultural infrastructure. One of the main conclusions is that from the mid‐fifteenth century onwards and including the seventeenth century, ballads and street singing, entertaining as well as propagandistic, were generally seen as a form propaganda and subversion. Despite the often tolerated and even appreciated entertaining function of ballads, the ballad singer from the Dutch revolt onwards remained a distrusted figure.

Balladmonger Autolycus’s Jobs

The Winter’s Tale is a play in which tragedy and comedy are combined. In this play, Autolycus connects these two genres and elevates the merry atmosphere of comedy. He can be considered as one of many other comic characters in Shakespeare’s plays, but he has much more realistic characteristics with his various jobs which reflect the social atmosphere of England at the time. The most important role of Autolycus is a balladmonger and ballad singer at the sheep-shearing festival. As this play has many allusions on ballad which was very popular in 16 th century England, the ballad which Autolycus sells and sings shows us many characteristics of the ballad at the time. This play also shows us the general reaction and attitude of the English people toward ballad and balladmongers. Autolycus’s jobs such as a balladmonger, ballad singer, and tinker, however, are fundamentally related to another bigger class group of rogues because Autolycus uses these jobs to cover his roguery. Rogues, vagabonds, masterless men like Autolycus caused serious social problem during the Elizabethan era, and the rogue literature which depicted their lives and characteristics was popular among English people. Accordingly, Autolycus’s wrong doing as a poor man on the street and a balladmonger at the festival in the play is found in Robert Green’s Cony-catching pamphlets. Besides Autolycus’s present jobs in the play, his previous jobs mentioned by himself is a very important element in considering the realistic aspect of his character and the play. He was once a courtier serving Prince Florizel but he was whipped out of the court and had several jobs mostly of the people of the lower class. In the play, Autolycus’s previous jobs such as ape-bearer, bailiff are as important as his present status in understanding his character because he reflects the lower class English men at the time. His various jobs show us not only his grim past but the hard lives of low class English men in that era. Shakespeare was excellent in depicting low-status English men and their lives, and Autolycus was one of them. The most realistic thing about Autolycus is that he is a comic character who has fear of living as a rogue. This psychological aspect of him results from his various jobs which can be seen as his personal history, and this makes the depth of his character. Thus, Autolycus can be said one of the most realistic characters created by Shakespeare’s keen observation and deep understanding of his time and people.

“Written and Composed by Nora E. Carpenter”: Song Lyric Scrapbooks, Home Recordings, and Self-Documentation

“Written and Composed by Nora E. Carpenter”Song Lyric Scrapbooks, Home Recordings, and Self-Documentation Emily Hilliard (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Nora E. Carpenter: banjo player, harp blower, songwriter, radio show host, band leader, sheriff, postmaster, general store manager, hotel owner, pig farmer, wife and mother, “Queen of Magoffin County.” All images courtesy of Nora Carpenter Traditional Music Collection, Berea College Special Collections & Archives, Berea, KY. [End Page 66] “The local townsfolk do not like mountain music. They can’t stand to listen to it. They buy Benny Goodman, Guy Lombardo, etc.” The typewritten missive in my hand, dated September 8, 1937, location Harlan, Kentucky, described, with no small dose of disdain, the musical predilections of residents in the region. It was mid-August in Washington, D. C., and I was hunched over a table in the frigid air-conditioned reading room of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, scouring paper after paper, folder after folder, box after box of documents like this, along with recorded discs, photos, and handwritten address books, etched with the names of fiddlers and ballad singers and their approximate locales. I was searching for a specific name in the margins, a note scrawled on some hotel stationery, a sign. These were documents from Alan Lomax’s 1937 recording trip to Eastern Kentucky, when, at the age of twenty-two, under the auspices of the Library of Congress, he and his wife Elizabeth set off for the coal fields, the trunk of their Studebaker packed with a Presto disc-recorder and a stack of blank discs, in search of traditional musicians. Two months later, they returned to the very place where I was sitting with over thirty-two hours of recordings—fiddle tunes and blues, Pentecostal hymns and murder ballads, work songs and lullabies, breakdowns and children’s games; absent, however, were the popular songs Lomax scorns above, ostensibly learned from radio and records that were becoming readily available in the area. Among what he did record were sounds of those now held up as masters of the old-time tradition: fiddler Bill Stepp (whose recorded performance of “Bonaparte’s Retreat” would, through Aaron Copland’s interpretation, later reach millions of Americans in the “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner” commercials), and banjo players Richard Whitely and Walter Williams. But neither Lomax nor Stepp were the subject of my search. I was looking for another name—that of a friend, neighbor, and music partner of those greats, but one who did not achieve their same renown. It’s the name of a banjo player, a harp blower, a songwriter, radio show host, band leader, sheriff, postmaster, general store manager, hotel owner, pig farmer, wife and mother, known in her day as “Queen of Magoffin County”: Nora E. Carpenter. I had spent the month prior in Berea, Kentucky, as a fellow at the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives, studying the collection of Ms. Nora Carpenter (1888–1975). Hailing from Salyersville, the county seat of Magoffin County, Kentucky, Carpenter was a stronghold in her community. She had a daily radio show with her band “Big Mama (sometimes listed as “Hot Mama”) and the Half Mountain Hot Shots” on wsip out of Paintsville, and she owned and ran a twenty-six room downtown hotel with her husband that, along with offering lodging for out-of-town guests, was a community gathering place, the lobby providing the setting for many picking parties and bean-shucking gatherings. She played music not only with those Magoffin County musicians mentioned above, but also a mandolin player by the name of Bill Monroe when he came to town to perform at the Star [End Page 67] Theater. She wrote extensive transcripts of her repertoire that included ballads, early country songs, hymns, and her own compositions that documented local events and personal experiences, all etched on the back of hotel stationery, hunting safety exams (Carpenter was known as a crack shot), letters, grocery receipts, and other scraps. Carpenter also made home recordings of herself and her band, some of which she sent to relatives who had moved away. These transcripts and a handful of recordings made by...

The Travels of John Magee

ABSTRACTThis article is concerned with the circulation of topical print culture in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, focusing on carriers rather than texts. Centred on the biographical and autobiographical accounts of ballad singers and chapmen, especially John Magee's Travels, it maps the geographies of numerous print-selling itinerants. By stressing the role of these individuals as mediators of topical material, it argues that our reading of the reception of news, in an age of propaganda, should privilege the agency of transmitters as much as that of writers. The article's geographies also challenge a London-centric model for the diffusion of topical material.

"To Ask Again": Folklore, Mumbo Jumbo , and the Question of Ethnographic Metafictions

Why does Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, steeped in questions about folklore, anthropological practice, and cultural preservation, receive little attention from scholars who put folklore at the center of their critical analysis? Nineteenth-century folklorist James Russell Lowell once suggested that ballad singers were not truly responsible for the songs that they sang, arguing that part of the charm of ballads was that nobody made them. In Lowell's eyes, the ballads of late nineteenth-century singers seemed have come up violets, and we have only to thank God for them (qtd. in Bendix 81). This rendering of ballads as organic cultural artifacts, as flowers to be picked by scholars, indicates a type of colonialist thinking that naturalizes racial authenticity. Ishmael Reed's work, with its self-conscious attention to form and metafictional tendencies, does not fit the criteria established by such narrative tropes of organic racial authenticity. To understand why Reed's work is largely overlooked by folklorists and anthropologists, I examine the intersections of several critical discourses: theories of writing, scholarship about the relationship between folklore and literature, and the critical reception of Reed's work. First, I look briefly at the emergence of in anthropology in the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to trace its impact on the study of folklore and fiction--particularly as this new methodology began to raise questions about the relationship of fictions to the project of translating the cultures of Others for a white, Western audience. Many of the debates about new ethnography in turn offer us crucial insight the ways in which the study of folklore and literature has been, to a large degree, racialized so that novels by minority writers are often approached as ethnographic fictions: that is, as sites of cultural translation and tourism, where nonwhite writers translate their culture so that white readers can learn what life is really like for an Other. Even more pointedly, the criticisms of new ethnography are directly related to the absence of Mumbo Jumbo from the scholarship of folklore and fiction. The novel's metafictional self-consciousness embraces many of the narrative techniques that critics of new ethnography feared--techniques that complicate the distinction between reality and fiction, thus making an easy cultural translation through fiction impossible. Finally, I argue that Mumbo Jumbo's absence from the discussion of fiction offers an opportunity to begin unpacking the colonialist narratives that often underpin the study of folklore and literature. Debates about the relationship between traditional ethnography, and literary fiction began in earnest when anthropologist James Clifford questioned the transparency of representation and immediacy of experience in traditional writing. In his introduction to the collection Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Clifford called for an acknowledgment of the fictiveness of seemingly objective works of introducing to the discipline of folkloristics the concept of and spurring scholars to theorize the process of ethnography--a task which had not been substantially undertaken before in the field of folklore studies (2). By calling for self-consciousness in Clifford and his coeditor George Marcus placed new emphasis on the craft of writing: this move finally required ethnographers to examine the power dynamics involved in, as Robert Emerson argues, writing a culture into (Introduction 22). Writing Culture therefore had an immediate impact on the study of race in anthropology, as the culture being written is so often the culture of an Other. (1) Writing Culture advanced a commitment to move beyond this static inscription of a culture--beginning with recognition of the inherent fictiveness of ethnography. …

Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New CriticismBallad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism. Steve Newman . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 294.

<i>Steve Newman,</i> Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism<i>Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism</i>. Steve Newman . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 294.

Southern Folk Singers

Southern Folk Singers Charles Joyner (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Guy Carawan (here, in 2007), came to Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School in the 1950s and soon became its music director. He helped spread two freedom songs from the South Carolina Sea Islands—“We Shall Overcome” and “Eyes on the Prize”—to Civil Rights workers across the South. Photography by Heather Carawan, courtesy of a Creative Commons License 2.5. [End Page 73] Folk singers is an ambiguous term. To folklorists it means those whose repertoires have been passed down orally from generation to generation within the family and community. To others it often means professional singers, regardless of background, who learned most of their songs from recordings and offered them to the general public as folk songs. I shall call the former traditional singers and the latter singers of folk songs. Traditional Singers The Wallin Family of Madison County, North Carolina, is tenth. British folklorists Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles recorded members of the family in 1916, and John Cohen (filmmaker and member of the New Lost City Ramblers) recorded and filmed the family extensively in the 1960s. They sang, in the traditional unaccompanied style, the old English and Scottish ballads of love, betrayal, and revenge. Perhaps the most memorable of their songs is Berzilla Wallin’s heart-stopping “Conversation with Death.” Horton Barker, the blind ballad singer from Chilhowie, Virginia, is ninth. The clarity of his unaccompanied tenor, his sly wit, and his extraordinary repertoire of songs, hymns, and such rare ballads as “Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender,” “Bow and Balance,” and “The Turkish Rebilee” were unforgettable to those who heard him from Virginia’s White Top Folk Festival in the thirties to the Chicago Folk Festival in the sixties. Eighth is Vera Hall of Livingston, Alabama. Her rich contralto, recorded for the Library of Congress by John Lomax and Ruby Pickens Tartt, was nationally recognized from the late 1930s to the 1960s for such songs as “Trouble So Hard,” and “Boll Weevil Holler.” Emma Dusenberry of Mena, Arkansas, is seventh. Born in 1862, and blind since her early twenties, she is the earliest singer on this list. According to John Lomax, who recorded her for the Library of Congress in the 1930s, her repertoire of traditional ballads was the largest ever recorded from a single person. Janey Hunter and the Moving Star Hall Singers of Johns Island, South Carolina, are tied with Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers of St. Simons Island, Georgia, for fifth and sixth. Their virtuoso voices, accompanied only by hand-clapping and foot-stomping, evoke an incredibly spiritual response as close to its African roots as any in America. Jean Ritchie of Viper, Kentucky, is number four. From the 1940s to the present she has sung the songs, ballads, and hymns from her family’s repertoire in her authentically Appalachian voice, sometimes a capella, sometimes accompanying herself on the Appalachian dulcimer. Almeda Riddle of Heber Springs, Arkansas, is third. She learned ballads and [End Page 74] other traditional songs from her parents and her mother’s brother growing up in the Ozarks. Known by her friends and fans as “Granny Riddle,” she preferred to sing rare old ballads in the traditional a capella style, always keeping the haunting ambience of her voice behind the song, but embellishing it with unique vocal decorations punctuated by leaps into the falsetto at the end of lines. Click for larger view View full resolution South Carolinian Josh White (here, in 1945) became a protégé of Eleanor Roosevelt and a frequent guest in the White House. His “One Meatball” was the first million-selling record by an African American male singer. Photograph courtesy of The Estate of Josh White (Sr.) and the Josh White Archives. Tying for first place are North Carolina’s Frank Proffitt and Louisiana’s Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Ledbetter is remembered as much for his powerful accompaniment on the twelve-string guitar as for his high sweet voice and unabridged repertoire of work songs, love songs, ballads, and blues, such as “Rock Island Line,” “Midnight Special,” “Take this Hammer,” and “Goodnight Irene.” Frank Proffitt learned most of his...

In the mouths of charlatans. Street performers and the dissemination of pamphlets in Renaissance Italy

This article examines the role of street performers such as ballad singers and charlatans in the publication and sale of cheap printed pamphlets in northern Italian cities during the Renaissance. These mobile and usually socially marginal figures quickly became involved in the printing industry after its initiation in the later fifteenth century, and in this way carried on their established role as crucial cultural mediators, moving texts between different places, different social spheres, and different media. As well as publishing, performing, and selling works such as chivalric ballads, poetic accounts of recent wars, prognostications, and medical remedies, performers also were involved in the dissemination of texts more traditionally considered as ‘high’ literature, belonging to the restricted cultural sphere of the court or salon. In this way, they contributed to the wide dissemination of the works of eminent Renaissance authors, whether those authors approved of it or not. However, growing restrictions on the dissemination of print in the later sixteenth century reduced the freedom of movement of street performers, and diminished the remarkably creative and vibrant literary and performative culture in which they had played a central role.

A Visit with a Russian Poet

Ballads such as this last one were notably sung by sellers at a stand near Chancery Lane. Thackeray, who is credited as the author of an anonymous article on broadside ballads in Frasers Magazine in 1839, writes: Ballad singers come and chant here in deadly guttural tones satirical songs against the Whig administration, against the bishops and dignified clergy, against the German relations of an august royal family. Morgan s social-political verses must have been sung or chanted and sold in quantity here and elsewhere in London and across England. His poetic ardor, verve, scorn, humor, and idealism must have been helpful in the cause of liberal-radical reform. He seems to me to deserve a place in the high rather than low history of his times and in the high rather than low history of the book. I am putting a collection of his ballads together as my last piece of work on authors with empty purses.

Muzyka i medium. Szkic historiograficzny od początków do dzisiaj

The relationship between music and media is closer than it is obvious at first sight. That includes primary media such as the singer or the theatre performance of an opera, print media such as sheet music and music books, electronic media like the record, the tape, radio, film and television, and the recent digital media such as the world wide web, the compact disc or the i-pod.If turned historically, we can realize a chain of media expressing and describing the history of music – from the ancient priestess and singers over the aoide and the rhapsode in old Greek culture presenting epic poetry and narrative literature up to church and choir singers in Christian churches, from mine singers, hymnbooks and troubadours in the Middle Ages up to ballad singers and street musicians selling music sheets and books in the 18th century, from music performance as live music up to recorded and canned music and finally a kind of quarry music allowing everyone a subjective and eclectic selection. The functional history of music follows inevitably the history of media.

The English ballad singer and hidden history

Drawing on Pierre Macherey’s location of ‘real history’ in the silences and gaps of the historical record, this paper studies the changing role of the paid singer in England. Although singers and musicians in England have been rewarded for their performances at all periods, more attention has been given in recent years to traditional singing as a recreational, even domestic activity than as a means of livelihood. Because of their constantly changing social status, the position of the paid singer has been ambiguous and frequently oppositional. A recent book sees their status as one of continuous decline. However, the process was not a continuous and inevitable one: the singer adapted to changes in society and found new sources of support.

Fallen Ladies and Cruel Mothers: Ballad Singers and Ballad Heroines in the Eighteenth Century

Fallen Ladies and Cruel Mothers:Ballad Singers and Ballad Heroines in the Eighteenth Century Tim Fulford (bio) In 1741 William Hogarth completed another of his popular depictions of contemporary London. Like most of Hogarth's pictures, The Enraged Musician (Fig. 1) had a double aim: to show Londoners what was new about their way of life and simultaneously to reveal, in this novel scene, the timeless essence of human character. In this particular picture he focused, above all, on two female figures who were both new and old, individual and universal. One was the milkmaid, an upright girl of youthful vitality who retained the pastoral innocence of the country; the other was the ballad singer, a worn-out street-person in rags with a bawling baby on her arm.1 The picture hinges on an opposition between these women: the one rural, the other urban, the one clean, the other dirty, the one virginal, the other fallen. The healthy girl cries her trade; the raddled mother sings "The Lady's Fall," an old ballad given new and personal force by its appropriateness to her present circumstances as an unmarried parent. The ballad of the "The Lady's Fall" was, like the women in the picture, an instance of what London did to the country incomer. Archaic in its diction, traditional in its form, it was a song without a known author that spoke from a former time and from a rustic context, circulating orally in villages, taverns, and fairs. It was as recently as 1711 that Joseph Addison had caused a stir by treating the readers of The Spectator to a detailed appreciation of two similarly rural ballads, "Chevy Chase" and "The Two Children in the Wood," commending them, and the popular tradition from which they came, for their "majestic simplicity."2 In the city, though, such ballads appeared in a different context: produced on coarse paper by the thousand, they were not just sung from memory in the convivial setting of cottage fireside, but were also sold in the mean streets as the cheap goods of destitute beggars. "The Lady's Fall," for [End Page 309] instance, was a London hit in the 1730s, when Cluer Dicey, the main publisher of cheap broadsides, issued it from his warehouse in Bow Church Yard. As usual, Hogarth was right in tune with the times: the old ballad was, when he painted his picture, a pop song on the city streets. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. William Hogarth, British, 1697–1764, The Enraged Musician, 1741, engraving on ivory laid paper, 332 x 397 mm (image); 363 x 410 mm (plate); 425 x 555 mm (sheet). Restricted gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph R. Shapiro, 1992.1, reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago. But it was not just a song. In The Enraged Musician, the ballad is both a sound—the ragged woman is singing it—and a commodity—a tatty piece of paper she is hawking to passers-by. As a sound, it belongs to one of the traditional English genres that together drown out the art of the foreign violinist. His music is genteel, aimed at the indoor life of drawing room and salon; they are rough, popular, the sounds of the laboring classes whose habitat is outdoors on the street. Thus Hogarth makes a visual critique along patriotic and class-based lines—attacking the preference of the urban nouveau riche for the effete arts of Europe over traditional English forms of expression. Yet he is also doing something more complex and interesting, as an examination of the words of "The Lady's Fall" makes clear. The ballad begins with a drama that has been enacted countless times in patriarchal cultures that fetishize female "honour": [End Page 310] Mark well my heavy doleful Tale, You loyal Lovers all, And heedfully bear in your Breast A gallant Ladys Fall. Long was she woo'd, ere she was won To lead a wedded life, But Folly wrought her Overthrow Ere she became a wife. Too soon, alas! she gave Consent To yield unto his will, Tho' he protested to be true And faithful to her still. She felt her...

A Resisting Performance of an Appalachian Traditional Murder Ballad: Giving Voice to "Pretty Polly"

It ain't about how pretty you sing, it's all about bow good you tell story. Dellie Norton, traditional ballad singer, Madison County NC, as told to author by Sheila Kay Adams, Norton's great-niece, 7 November 2004 SCENARIO 1: MY PARTNER'S MOTHER INTRODUCES me to her friends: a white, upper-middle-class, heterosexual couple. They are in their late sixties or early seventies and are from northeastern Ohio, just one county away from those considered Appalachian. Clearly a part of symphony set, their faces brighten when they learn a musicologist stopping off in Ohio on my way to a music workshop in North Carolina. What are you going to do? I'm going to study old-time specifically, banjo. What that? he says a raised eyebrow. Old-time music, say very simplistically, since can tell they are already losing interest, is kind of music that predates bluegrass and contemporary country It's a kind of early country actually. Oh, he says a look of amused condescension, I didn't think you could call that music. Scenario 2: A friend who loves old-time music and bluegrass and who plays fiddle, guitar, mandolin, and Dobro decides that she can't listen to most old-time and bluegrass bands anymore since so many of songs are misogynist. It violent ones that anger her most, especially murder ballads, in which woman horrifically killed and her murderer suffers few consequences. The Country Gentlemen's recording of River Bottom particularly offensive to her: with a clothesline tied around her knees ... so glad to put an end to that disease. These true stories illustrate a dilemma for feminist lover of old-time, bluegrass, and Appalachian (1) The first scenario demonstrates a widely held position: Appalachian its unabashed banjo twanginess, its hoedown fiddle, and its high, strained, and dispassionate vocal style, a vivid aural representation of itself and as such cannot be considered music worthy of serious study, much less enjoyment. As Ronald D. Eller writes, Appalachia may likely have replaced benighted South as nation's most region.... Always part of mythical South, continues to languish backstage in American drama, still dressed, in popular at least, in garments of backwardness, violence, poverty, and hopelessness once associated South as a whole. No region of United States today plays role of 'other America' quite so persistently as Appalachia. (2) Of course, there an audience that enjoys escaping into precisely this other America, its somewhat exotic rural sounds and modal melodies that can conjure up images of a simpler and more authentic era and place, far from urban noise and confusion. (3) Some of these listeners may choose to ignore misogynist lyrics or perhaps not even notice them, while others may explain them away as artifacts of past cultural norms. (4) Others, however, like woman in second scenario, may feel conflicted, eventually choosing to abandon a favorite genre of music that both maligned by the popular mind and unmistakably misogynist for listener, fan or not, who attends to lyrics of much of its repertoire. would like to examine another option for woman in second scenario. Perhaps it possible to find or create performances of Appalachian music that retain exuberance of fiddle, twang of banjo, or detachment of voice (performances that, in effect, sound Appalachian) while presenting violent lyrics in a way that does not celebrate or ignore their misogyny. The most challenging songs will, of course, be murder ballads, which pervade American folk music and are central to southern Appalachian repertoire. (5) The plot of these murdered sweetheart ballads follows a well-established formula: a young woman lured away from home by her lover to a secluded spot on pretext of marriage or discussing marriage; presumably, she pregnant. …

New Appalachian Books: Write-Ups

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Write-Ups George Brosi and Leanna Lantz Kathy Cantley Ackerman. The Heart ofRevolution: The Radical Life and Novels ofOlive Dargan. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2004. 237 pages with an index, notes and works cited. Hardback in dust jacket. $29.95. Unquestionably, the works of Olive Tilford Dargan (1869-1968), one of Brosi's very favorite regional authors, deserve much more attention than they have received, so it is great to have this book out. However, I wish it had used Olive Tilford Dargan's full name as this avowed feminist used it and that it was much more complete. Instead of a volume like this that is less than half biography of a truly fascinating person and mostly criticism, we need two books: one criticism and another biography. I still wonder: Why did her baby die? Why did she often live apart from her husband? Why did he drown? Where, exactly, did she live in Swain County, North Carolina? How was she viewed there? Who were her friends in Asheville? Did she ever join the Communist Party? Readers are enticed by this book, but never satisfied, yet it is a step in the right direction. The author is writer-in-residence at Isothermal Community College in Spindale, North Carolina. Sheila Kay Adams. My Old True Love. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004. 289 pages. Hardcover. $23.95. Sheila Kay Adams' singing voice has been a joy and inspiration as she has shared the music of her deeply rooted Madison County, North Carolina, mountain family with thousands as a performer. This novel will bring her author's voice into more homes as it tells the fascinating tale of a young ballad singer living in North Carolina in the 1800s. Adams has definitely nailed mountain dialogue. This book is authentic to the core and quite an enjoyable read. Geoffrey L. Buckley. Extracting Appalachia: Images of the Consolidation Coal Company, 1910-1945. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004. 215 pages with an index, bibliography, notes and lots of photos. Trade Paperback. $22.95. 94 Inspired by a collection of over 4,000 photos at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum ofAmerican History, Buckley uses a series ofphotographs takenbythe Consolidation Coal Company mostly in West Virginia and Kentuckyin the early 20th century to effectively convey daily coal camp life. The commentary offers much food for thought aboutboth the intentions of the company and what their pictures inadvertently reveal. The author teaches geography at Ohio University in Athens. Thomas Burton. The Serpent and the Spirit: Glenn Summerford's Story. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 2004. 262 pages with an index and lots of photos. Trade paperback. $19.95. Burton, a retired professor at East Tennessee State, established himself as one of the most sensitive and comprehensive writers about religious serpenthandlerswithhisbook Serpent Handling Believers (1993). The technique of allowing people of varying vantage points to tell the story in their own words is again utilized in this book which revolves around the 1992 murder trial in Scottsboro, Alabama, of Glenn Summerford, a serpent handling believer accused of killing his wife with rattlesnakes. This is truly an absorbing tale told in an enthralling manner. Marian Coe. Once Upon A Different Time. Boone, NC: High Country Publishers, Ltd., 2004. 141 pages, illustrated by Paul Zipperlin. Trade paperback. $12.95. Flirting with creative non-fiction, Marian Coe's short novel works off of a series of articles by Mark Twain's friend, Charles Dudley Warner, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1885 that record a horseback journey from Abingdon, Virginia, to Asheville, North Carolina. Marian Coe came to the North Carolina mountains a few years ago as a retiree. Steven R. Cope. Clover's Log. Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications, 2004. 97 pages. Trade Paperback. $14.00. This poetry collection includes "The Stand by a Tree" which appeared in the Winter 2004 issue of Appalachian Heritage. "The best poems are records of the mind grappling with itself—with love, with mood, with puzzling out the lineaments of the world. Clover's Log is filled with such poems—passionate, unsparingly honest—episodes of the heart. The language is spare and gleaming...