Traditional Ballads Research Articles

Gendering the Scottish Nation: Rereading the Songs of Lady Nairne

ABSTRACTLady Nairne remains a somewhat peripheral figure in the emerging critical field of Scottish Romanticism. Despite widespread recognition of her extensive contributions to the Scottish ballad and chapbook tradition, critics have yet fully to assess the political and social implications of her poetry, emphasizing rather her use of traditional tunes to obscure herself and the indigenous sources of her art. My reading of Nairne takes a different approach. The beauty of Nairne’s verse accentuates rather than displaces her poetry’s political content and contests, explicitly or implicitly, late-eighteenth-century aesthetic, political, and social values in post-Union “North Britain.” Read from this perspective, Nairne’s poetry reveals a far more ambivalent and oppositional discourse about Scotland’s past, present, and possible futures than previously recognized. It also articulates a complex understanding of the adverse effects of Scotland’s subordinate status in the Union.

Big Bend Killing: The Appalachian Ballad Tradition

Book Review| October 01 2018 Big Bend Killing: The Appalachian Ballad Tradition Big Bend Killing: The Appalachian Ballad Tradition, album, Various artists, ©2017 by Great Smoky Mountains Association, GSMA 200973. Deborah Thompson Deborah Thompson Deborah Thompson is a musician, dancer, and scholar of Appalachia, currently serving as the coordinator of Country Dance Programs at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Appalachian Studies (2018) 24 (2): 259–260. https://doi.org/10.5406/jappastud.24.2.0259 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Deborah Thompson; Big Bend Killing: The Appalachian Ballad Tradition. Journal of Appalachian Studies 1 January 2018; 24 (2): 259–260. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jappastud.24.2.0259 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Appalachian Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Media Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

The Economics of Fortune in Schiller's “Der Ring des Polykrates”

This article discusses the reappearance of fortune as a literary motif at the turn of the nineteenth century in the context of the growing influence of Adam Smith's economic thought in Germany by looking at Schiller's 1797 ballad “Der Ring des Polykrates” as an example. The article's main argument is that fortune, long associated with incalculable fate, could find expression in this work as a herald of the uncontrollable regulatory forces and in‐built crises of economic liberalism. “Der Ring des Polykrates” is a poem – in true ballad tradition – of the border. This border is one between cameralist economic orthodoxy and the new, liberal model of Smith and Malthus. It is this intersection that allows for the centrality of fortune in the poem and also for its reappearance on the literary scene.

El romance de “La batalla de Roncesvalles”: versiones del Archivo Menéndez Pidal-Goyri

A pesar de que el romance tradicional de “La batalla de Roncesvalles” ha sido estudiado ampliamente, por su gran importancia dentro de la épica europea, hasta el momento los investigadores no han tenido fácil acceso al corpus íntegro de sus versiones. Al margen de los conocidos textos del siglo XVI, en el Archivo Menéndez Pidal-Goyri se atesoran dieciséis versiones, en su mayoría inéditas, procedentes de la tradición oral moderna. Este artículo presenta la edición filológica de las versiones de este romance en su totalidad, combinada con un estudio general que ahonda en la transmisión textual, los sentidos narrativos y los fenómenos de contaminación.

Ballads in Oral and Written Tradition: Retrospective Research Survey

The article aims at reviewing the rich and ambivalent Western folk ballad research tradition in terms of confluence of the oral and written traditions. Although being well-reflected in the West, this approach is hardly at all present in Lithuania. The article starts with discussing such cultural phenomenon as broadside ballads. In surveying them, the author maintains that popular publications of the 16th–19th century Europe (bibliothèque bleue, skyllingtricker, Volksbuch, pliegos de cordel, лубочная литература, etc.) were an inherent part of the folk culture. Printed sheets of folksongs and ballads used to be popular in Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and subsequently in America. However, although spread and promoted by the press, the ballads hardly ascended the field of interest of the educated elite, remaining instead in the “lower” spheres of the popular culture.The first collectors of ballads from the 18th century (the “antiquarian period”) paid little attention to the sources of their material, being instead very keen on improving and elaborating of the ballad texts, and presenting them as creative manifestations of the “original bard” or the “national muse”. After the collections by Thomas Percy and Walter Scott appeared, William Motherwell turned back to the still thriving ballad tradition. This Scottish scholar, followed by his Danish colleague Svend Grundtvig and the American Francis James Child founded the modern ballad folklore research, since their collections represented the oral folk tradition rather than engaging in search for the “original” folk ballads. The subsequent researchers, influenced by the Child’s ballad scholarship (Phillips Barry, Cecil J. Sharp, Olive D. Campbell, Louise Pound, Henry M. Belden, etc.), continued investigating the American ballad legacy. However, while collecting and encouraging to further collect the surviving ballads they increasingly realized the huge distance between their endeavors and the Child’s collection. The heterogeneous and fragmented nature of the ballads from the oral tradition was increasingly recognized and acknowledged, along with unavoidable impact of the written and printed sources.Barre J. Toelkien, the scholar belonging to even later generation, attempted methodical indexing of the oral ballads belonging to the Child’s collection. Dianne M. Dugaw in turn suggested that assuming the non-written songs, those from the oral tradition, being inherently different from the printed ones had largely affected the way in which folklore researchers perceived and interpreted folksongs. She concluded that differences devised between the written and non-written, between commercial and non-commercial forms were frequently just illusive, since commercial dissemination constituted an integral part of the folksongs development.In view of the confluence of the oral and written traditions surveyed in this article, it is reasonable to conclude that written culture, or rather the popular press, constituted a significant factor affecting the existence of folk ballads in the West; because of obvious reasons, such culture was absent in old-time Lithuania. Contrary to Lithuania, the ballad tradition of the West was nurtured by the written and printed sources. Therefore, the Lithuanian case could present a kind of thought experiment to the folklore researcher, vividly illustrating the plausible ballad tradition development in the West, if it could be unaffected by such phenomena as printed texts in native languages, readily available to the common people.

The Traditional Tunes of the Gibraltar <em>Romances</em>

Las quince melodías, transcritas directamente de las grabaciones de campo realizadas por la profesora Oro Anahory-Librowicz, representan una mera muestra de la tradición romancística judeoespañola de Gibraltar, escasamente escuchada. Todas las cantó una sola informante, la señora Flora Ohana de Roublev. Así pues, estas melodías servirán como documentación fidedigna para las investigaciones musicológicas comparativas en curso sobre las baladas tradicionales de la Península y de Marruecos.

The Irony of the Ballad Form in Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

Although critics commenting on Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” are divided on whether or not the poem is autobiographical, the genre of the poem as a “ballad” tends to be given short shrift in their critical interpretations, and its role in determining the meaning of the poem is largely left unexplored. Taking into account the fact that a traditional ballad is an impersonal detached mode of poem, and that a lyric is a rather subjective composition displaying the poet’s thoughts and sentiments, one would expect that Keats’s utilization of the formal features of the traditional ballad genre, including a detached, impersonal mode of writing, would rule out lyrical or autobiographical interpretations. However, reading the poem against the grain (of its ballad form), this article argues that Keats’s deployment of the ballad genre conventions does not actually preclude autobiographical interpretations, but, on the contrary, it endorses them. For Keats’s poem is lyrical and personal in nature and his use of the conventions of the traditional ballad form is to deflect the critical attention away from the poem’s autobiographical content. To make this point, this article investigates three illuminating contexts in which to place “La Belle Dame.” To begin with, “La Belle Dame” is a literary ballad that has much in common with Keats’s other poems and letters, whether at the level of poetic themes and personal concerns or at the level of language. However, the most important context to consider the ironic relationship of Keats’s lyrical content to his traditional ballad form is his revision of the poem for its first publication in the Indicator. If Keats’s intention was to reinforce the ballad conventions of the poem, downplay its lyrical implications, and strike a self-conscious pose critical of what he thought was the poem’s excessive sentimentality and easy surrender to wish-fulfilling romance, this very gesture is a confirmation that the poem, at least in its first version, is largely subjective and lyrical. As such, Keats’s seemingly objective ballad mode, later further revised and strengthened, can be regarded as a trick to disguise his true conflicted feelings about his own enthrallment by Fanny Brawn – a trick that ironically reveals as much as it attempts to conceal.

Passion, Poverty, and Travel: Traditional Hakka Songs and Ballads

This volume introduces hitherto untranslated items from the folk literature of the Hakka (or “Kejia” 客家) people associated with mountainous areas of southeast China and various diaspora communities...

Poetics of Domestic Relationships and Conflicts in the Folk Ballad: Ukrainian-British Context

The paper discusses poetics of the traditional ballad, reflecting family relations and conflicts in Ukrainian and British folklore. This comparative research has its base on the classification of the Ukrainian ballad developed by O. Dei, with the involvement of the systematization of the English ballad by F. Child, is guided by the postulates of O. Dey and G. Gerould as for the plot direction of Ukrainian and British domestic-household ballads, and is focused upon the analysis of the opposition “husband – wife” on the material of Ukrainian songs from the cycle II – B: “Fidelity testing of the family and the spouse”, namely the plot type II – B-1: “the wife (the sweetheart) pretends to be dead and tests her husband (her sweetheart) and relatives” (6 versions, 117 lines), and the English work Child № 29: “The Boy and the Mantle” (1 version, 190 lines). The comparison and analysis of the named texts reveal their typology and uniqueness

‘A way of happening, a mouth’: On an Aspect of Lorca’s Revision of the Old Spanish Ballads

Lorca's understanding of the nature of traditional ballads—how they were composed, performed, transmitted—shaped his own reinvention of the ballad. This article argues that Lorca wrote with Menéndez Pidal's early theories of the Romancero in mind. Therefore Lorca's ballads do not issue from a narrator, strictly speaking, but from a voice that is standing in for a juglar and which I term a textual balladeer. This figure transmits textual fragments (as analysis of the ‘Burla de don Pedro a caballo’ suggests) which are revived by a balladeer's imposing voice. It is all illusion but, as we see in the ‘Romance sonámbulo’, Lorca conceives of the ballad as the performance of a powerful voice which can cast such illusions. Therefore, the article examines sound patterning in concert with metre as a way for the textual balladeer to develop voice's agency. Lorca's divided soul, nostalgic for orality but grounded in textuality, is considered.

Pre-Raphaelitism

Pre-Raphaelitism Florence Boos (bio) A section of this article was regrettably omitted. That entry is reprinted in its entirety in Victorian Poetry 54.4. This past year brought many valuable contributions to the study of literary Pre-Raphaelitism, with detailed critical analyses often providing wider philosophic or cultural insights. I will begin this review by examining articles, book chapters, and a monograph that analyze the work of the Rossetti brothers, then turn to several articles and chapters on Christina Rossetti’s poetry. Since Elizabeth Helsinger’s Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2015) includes chapters on several Pre-Raphaelite poets, among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, these will be discussed separately under the relevant author headings. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and Pre-Raphaelite Poetry In “Poetry on Pre-Raphaelite Principles: Science, Nature, and Knowledge in William Michael Rossetti’s ‘Fancies at Leisure’ and ‘Mrs. Holmes Grey” (VP 53, no. 1 [2015]), John Holmes explores the relationship between the Pre-Raphaelites’ early respect for empirical science and the critique of its moral limitations embodied in their verse. Holmes is innovative in pointing out, in William Rossetti’s little-noticed “Fancies at Leisure,” the modernity, close observation, and appeal to the reader’s subjective perceptions that encourage “an enhanced appreciation of our common life within the ecologies that we share” (p. 30). He also finds Rossetti’s “Mrs. Holmes Grey” a sustained exposé of the limits of documentary testimony, as medical witnesses, a judge, jury, [End Page 387] newspaper report, and the recollections of husband and friend all fail to explain a deranged woman’s alleged death from frustrated adulterous passion. Although the proximate focus of this article is on William Rossetti, Holmes’s remarks on the ethos of early Pre-Raphaelitism provide a useful model for understanding other Pre-Raphaelite works as “writing poetry as science—that is, poems on scientific principles—rather than merely poetry of science” (p. 37). Another exploration of the impetus behind early Pre-Raphaelite art appears in D. M. R. Bentley’s “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘For an Annunciation, Early German’: Einfühlung, Inspiration, and Significance” (JPRS 24 [Fall 2015]). Examining the first of Rossetti’s sonnets on a painting, written in 1847 as a contribution to his initial collection “Songs of the Art Catholic,” Bentley notes the similarity of Rossetti’s practice with what would later be theorized by the German philosopher of aesthetics as Einfühlung—glossed by Bentley as “a temporary egress from the narrow confines of self and an opening of space within the self for the alterity that has been felt-into” (p. 37). After examining several plausible originals for the yet-unidentified “Early German” Annunciation painting memorialized in the poem, Bentley demonstrates ways in which the sonnet adduces details only apparent to the figures within the painting, which thus “work to absorb the reader further into it and to achieve an ‘inner standingpoint’” (p. 38). In her chapter on “Listening: Dante Gabriel Rossetti” in Poetry and the Thought of Song, Elizabeth Helsinger traces the significance of listening, sound, and music in evoking altered states of consciousness throughout Rossetti’s paintings and poetry. After identifying ways in which his paintings convey the sense of listening, Helsinger explores the importance placed on older musical and ballad traditions by Rossetti and his friends and the influence of the latter on his watercolors and songs. Observing that his lyrics repeatedly explore “that perplexing transit from page to tones to music heard in the ear of the mind to expand the conception of what lyric poetry and painting might do” (pp. 81–82), she offers subtle readings of the effects of musical allusions within Rossetti’s actual “songs,” his sonnets on paintings, poems replete with musical metaphors such as “Love’s Nocturne,” and finally, the “Willowwood” and “Monochord” sonnets from The House of Life, which, in her words, offer “the feel of life to those who can no longer anticipate” (p. 116). In “Speaking with the Dead: The Séance Diary of William Michael Rossetti, 1865–68,” JPRS 24 (Spring 2015), Andrew Stauffer provides a fascinating glimpse into an unexpected nook of...

Lines of succession in an English ballad tradition: The publishing history and textual descent ofThe Wandering Jew’s Chronicle

This article combines bibliography, book history, literary and traditional textual criticism with phylogenetic analysis to infer the publishing history and textual descent of a short printed ballad history of England— The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle . Probably first published in 1634, The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle most commonly survives as a ‘broadside ballad’—a cheaply-printed song-sheet—illustrated with woodcut portraits of kings and queens of England. It remained in print until ca.1830, its text and illustrations updated to the present. Although in partial synchrony with English history, much of its publishing history and textual descent is uncertain. This article demonstrates how historical evidence, taken in particular from book trade history, may be usefully combined with textual and bibliographical evidence, and that it is at times essential for understanding the descent of the text. The textual descent of the ballad is visualized in a stemma that summarizes key findings from both traditional and phylogenetic analyses.

Destroying Patriarchy: Struggle for Sexual Equality in Mexican‐American Corridos and Anglo‐American Ballads

Rosita, no me desaires,iLa gente lo va notar! Pos, digan lo que quieran,Contigo yo no he de bailar. Alvirez (trad.)Rosita, don't scorn me,The people are going to notice! Well, let them say what they'll say,But with you I will not dance! conversation took place on the dance floor in Saltillo, Mexico, in the year 1900. After Rosita refused to dance, Hipolito drew his pistol and shot her three times. The townspeople painted Rosita's house with her blood, so that everyone would know of her untimely death.The corrido of Rosita Alvirez may be one of Mexico's most famous, but why is the story so violent? What is the song really about? The conversation between Rosita and Hipolito reveals the man's anxiety about his own reputation. The conversation between these two characters can be understood as debate about the relative social statuses of men and in Mexican society and the unequal power each group had at its disposal. The song tells us that at the time of its setting, girl would have had little to make her own choices, not even to choose with whom she would dance. Although Rosita overstepped the boundary of permissible behavior, the severity of punishment is out of proportion to her crime. The song can be interpreted as token of misogyny and male domination prevailing in Mexican society (Nava 137).Feminist scholars of the Anglo-American ballad tradition have identified similar problem of textual analysis. Appalachian ballads present misogynist stories which indicate a cultural fear of women's sexual freedom (Hastie 117). Scholars of both the Mexican-American and Anglo-American traditions have focused on murder ballads in which beautiful young woman is murdered by her lover or her husband (Cohen; Hamessley; Nava). Such ballads and corridos can be understood as didactic tools to instill obedience in young (Herrera-S ob ek).However, in Mexican-American music, the male-centered corrido has lost its dominance since 1973, when Contrabando y Traicion became famous hit song of Los Tigres del Norte (Ragland 142-66). The song narrates the adventures of young woman who shot and killed her unfaithful lover. Recently, scholars have begun to analyze corridos centered on protagonists who are tough women who turn the tables on abusive men (Altamirano; Ramirez-Pimienta; Tatar). Similarly, scholars of the Anglo-American and Scottish ballads have written about warrior women and other heroines who challenge patriarchal norms of behaviors (Dugaw; Hixon; Stewart; Wollstadt). A textual analysis of ballads reveals that the changing portrayals of in balladry, in fact represent changes in gender roles in the wider society.This article examines lyrical narratives from Mexican-American corridos and Anglo-American ballads, to demonstrate how changing portrayals of are indicative of changing social norms of male and female behavior. What appear to be traditional ballads do not in fact reflect unchanging patriarchal ideals of behavior. Instead, ballads represent the efforts of individuals and communities to adjust to patterns of social change attached to the rise of modernity (Cohen; Hastie). Murder ballads, in particular, present modern concerns about the conflicts between patriarchy and the men and who struggle against it. Traditional lyrical images can be manipulated to challenge the established norms of community (NajeraRamirez, Unruly Passions 193). In the Mexican-American tradition as well as the AngloAmerican ballad tradition, the emergence of songs featuring powerful female protagonist reflects the transformation of society away from the dominance of traditionalist, patriarchal norm toward modern society in which gender power is more equally distributed.How is it possible to learn about processes of social change through analysis of song lyrics? First, song lyrics help to reveal ideology, set of deeper understandings about why power is unequally distributed between and men. …

Stories beyond the Text: Contextualizing Narratives and “The Jolly Beggar”

This paper looks at interplay between song and story in ballad tradition, as exemplifijied by a present-day Scottish Traveller family. Through looking at how interweave with songs-fijilling gaps in plot, anchoring a song in time, or developing a didactic message-I explore how Travellers use tradition to mediate their relationship with mainstream society. Finally, I look at function, meaning, and continued relevance of these narratives for this marginalized group.The ballad in Scottish tradition is a song that tells a story, a compact arc communicating human emotion, experience, and history. The songs contain some of most distilled and quietly expressive poetic language to be found anywhere, wrapped around intriguing, moving, and sometimes horrifying plots. They are perfectly formed storytelling packages. Why, then, are they often performed interleaved with segments of prose narrative? It turns out that thinking of ballads as freestanding songs-as generations of scholars and editors have-is something of a misunderstanding of how tradition actually works. In its natural context, performance in home in a small social or family circle, ballad is habitually presented interwoven with segments of spoken that amplify episodes, fijill out backstories, detail relationships, and unpack events, exploring abstract ideas of love, loyalty, and treachery. This tradition of contextualizing narratives goes some way to rendering immaterial scholars' (but not singers') perception of ballads as inadequate narrative (Hyman 239, see also Constantine and Porter).This essay will examine tradition of contextualizing narratives focusing on a short series of stories that relate to reign and conduct of Scotland's King James V (1512-1542), tales that have come down through time with themes found across world. I will consider structure and function of this performance paradigm along with story's contemporary function and meaning for Scottish Travellers.Travellers are a seminomadic people considered native to with a complex pair of intertwined origin legends. The fijirst of these avers that they are Scotland's oldest indigenous people, itinerant metalworkers (tinsmiths) and that current families descend from those who no longer had clan employment after Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746 (Douglas 1, 5, 7-11). There is reference to a tinsmith caste in Perth in twelfth century (Gentleman and Swift 9) and Stanley Robertson mentions their presence in context of James I, 1394-1437 (Robertson Son David, 15: 25). The second legend maintains a possible (cultural and genetic) kinship to Gypsies, or Egyptians as they were called due to their misunderstood origins, Romanies who arrived in in early sixteenth century, during reign of James IV, 1488-1513 (Fraser 111-20; McCormick 386-400). Gypsies were victims of oppression, harassment, and discrimination and of persistent effforts to outlaw and destroy their way of (Nord 3), and there were numerous laws controlling their movements and associations, though these were often not enforced in practice (Mayall 43-62, in English context). Even today, Travellers are victims of virulent prejudice in both legislation and media (BBC Aberdeen Council, Council Monitors; and Evening Express). The settled population's attitudes have been characterized as the last acceptable face of racism in modern Scotland (Amnesty).Until recently, Travellers were seminomadic, living on periphery of society, fijirst in temporary structures such as a bow tent, a canvas-covered framework of willow or hazel, and later in caravans (trailers) and houses. Travellers were also, however, an integral part of Scottish rural life for many years, providers of seasonal labor and dealers in recycled clothing, metals, horses, cars, and caravans. Since 1950s, they have also been invaluable contributors to folklorists working on documentation and preservation of traditional stories, songs, and customs (Henderson 85-87). …

Jácaras and Narcocorridos in Context: What Early Modern Spain Can Tell Us about Today’s Narco-culture

CHARACTERIZING the entirety of narco-culture, let alone any culture, is quite difficult, but by analyzing a discrete musical-literary genre, the narcocorrido --a ballad-form mostly popularized in Mexico, the Borderlands, and the Southwestern United States--one can more easily characterize the culture's principal artistic manifestation. In its simplest definition, the narcocorrido is a song that recounts the exploits of narcos, meaning drug smugglers and their bosses. (1) Since the narcocorrido's existence as a specific genre is dependent on specific historical and social circumstances, the study of the genre also tends to focus on these. It is perhaps for this reason that comparative studies of the narcocorrido are relatively rare; and yet a brief comparison between the narcocorrido of the last several decades, and a very similar genre, the seventeenth-century Spanish (or romance de germania), can be very useful. By making a parallel selective taxonomy of both genres, I hope to provide enough material to create a general backdrop that can be used for further study to examine whether a generic element is the product of a Zeitgeist or is perhaps inherent in songs about criminals in the Hispanic world. Long before the word became a common term in Spain, the form existed as part of the romance tradition. In the late medieval period, alongside musical stories of martial heroes, there were songs about outlaws, the sort that occurs throughout much of Western culture, from Icelandic sagas (Barraclough 368) to Calabrian canto di malavita (Deaglio 359). What eventually made distinct from other Spanish ballads in the seventeenth century was their use of criminal jargon, called germania. In 1609, this distinction was formally announced when Juan Hidalgo published his compilation of anonymous works titled Romances de germania. In the vocabulario (glossary) included at the end of the collection, Hidalgo defines jacarandina as rufianesca o junta de rufianes, o ladrones (Hill 116). The individual who most firmly established the genre's popularity, and whose works were called jacaras after his death, was the master satirist Francisco de Quevedo. While he was not included as a named poet in the Romances de germania collection, his sarcastic criminal ballads were likely circulating in manuscript form around the same time (Pedraza Jimenez 84). Within the next twentyfive years, jacara would become a generic designation quite separate from any old-fashioned romance. This is reflected in Lope's Gatomaquia, published in 1634, as Gilard has pointed out (27): y en medio de lo grave del romance suave, les dijo con despejo, pareciendole versos a lo viejo, que cantasen picaresca. (335) In similar fashion, the narcocorrido is a ballad tradition transformed. Its very name reveals it as an offshoot of the traditional Mexican corrido, a ballad-form that shares many striking similarities with the late-medieval Spanish romance, just like the 300 years before. (2) Also like the jacara, much of the form and content for the narcocorrido existed many decades before that designation came into use. In Mexico, the revolutionary heroes of historic corridos were replaced by Prohibition-era smugglers, and eventually by traffickers in stuff harder than alcohol. Leading up to the consolidation of the narcocorrido as a genre in the 1970's, some mid-century corridos came closer to the in their content than in their later manifestations. These two works below, separated by about 300 years, have been placed side-byside for ease of comparison: Voy a cantar un corrido, escuchen con atencion! de las mujeres galantes, viciosos y malhechores, de Juarez hay de a monton. A unos los han desterrado, otros dejan la carrera, otros que por mala suerte han encontrado la muerte en la mentada Piedrera. Fernandez, con su dinero que de nada le sirvio, la muerte se le acercaba. …

English Folk Ballads Collected By Cecil James Sharp in The Southern Appalachians: Genesis, Transformation and Ukrainian Parallels

The purpose of this research, presented at the Conference sectional meeting, is to tracepeculiarities of transformation of British folk medieval ballads, which were brought to theSouthern Appalachians in the east of the USA by British immigrants at the end of the XVIIIth –beginning of the XIXth century and retained by their descendants, through analyzing certain textson the levels of motifs, dramatis personae, composition, style and artistic means, as well as tooutline relevant Ukrainian parallels. The analysis of such ballads, plot types and epic songs wascarried out: 1) British № 10: “The Twa Sisters” (21 variants); American “The Two Sisters”(5variants) and Ukrainian plot type I – C-5: “the elder sister drowns the younger one because of envyand jealousy” (8 variants); 2) British № 26: The Three Ravens” (2), “The Twa Corbies” (2);American “The Three Ravens” (1), “The Two Crows”(1) and Ukrainian epic songs with the motif oflonely death of a Cossack warrior on the steppe (4). In our study British traditional ballads areclassified according to the grouping worked out by the American scholar Francis Child(305 numbers), Ukrainian folk ballads – the plot-thematic catalogue developed by the Ukrainianfolklorist Оleksiy Dey (here 288 plots are divided into 3 spheres, cycles and plot types). Theinvestigation and comparison of the above indicated texts witness such main tendencies: 1) theAmerican counterparts, collected in the Appalachian Mountains, preserve the historic-nationalmemory and cultural heritage of the British immigrant bearers on the level of leading motifs,dramatis personae, composition peculiarities, traditional medieval images, epithets, similes,commonplaces; 2) some motifs, characters, images, artistic means, archaic and dialectal English ofthe Child ballads are reduced or substituted in the Appalachian texts; 3) realism of Americanballad transformations, which overshadows fantasy and aristocracy of their British prototypes, issimilar to the manner of poetic presentation of the typologically-arisen and described events by theUkrainian folk ballads and dumas .

The corrido as Counterculture in Felipe Cazals’ Canoa.

This article examines the use of the traditional ballad form known as the corrido in Felipe Cazals' Canoa (1975). Although rock music dominated the soundtracks of features made by directors like Cazals in 1970s Mexico, who sought to break away from a formulaic cinematic tradition upheld by a repressive government, Cazals adapts this traditional form to a contemporary setting, reclaiming it for a new generation as a fitting vehicle for a countercultural protest. Cazals' use of the corrido in this film is examined with reference to his celebrated filmic trio produced from 1975 to 1976 and against the backdrop of the tumultuous events leading up to the staging of the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968.

Ng Wing Mui (Mui Yee) and the Revival of the Sineung (Blind Female) Singing Style in Cantonese Naamyam (Southern Tone)

NG WING MUI (MUI YEE) AND THE REVIVAL OF THE SINEUNG (BLIND FEMALE) SINGING STYLE IN CANTONESE NAAMYAM (SOUTHERN TONE) YU SIU WAH The Chinese University of Hong Kong I started my career as an erhu 二胡 player with very narrow musical interests. Not until I enrolled in Professor Rulan Chao Pian’s courses at Harvard did I start to appreciate the richness of the different local genres of Chinese narrative balladry. It was Mrs. Pian1 who shared with me her excitement about Dou Wun 杜煥 (1910–1979), the Cantonese naamyam2 南音 (southern tone) master, and Bell Yung’s project to reconstruct the original context for Dou’s singing in a teahouse in the 1970s.3 In fact, the video of Dou performing as part of that project that Mrs. Pian took is now an outstanding historical document of Dou’s artistry.4 As a student of Mrs. Pian in residence in Cambridge from 1985 to 1993, I got to hear many fine performances of Chinese music and oral performing literature at her house at 14 Brattle Circle. But as it turned out, my thesis focused on the music of the Manchus and Mongols of the eighteenth-century Qing court instead of any of the ballad traditions she introduced me to. However, Mrs. Pian has always been an academic role model for me, particularly her enthusiasm and intense curiosity with regard to all kinds of music. When later developments did bring naamyam to my attention again in 1996, it was Mrs. Pian’s academic zeal and open-mindedness that I tried to emulate. In that year, I was invited to accompany a naamyam singer, an old man who was then eighty-three and, unlike most professional naamyam singers of the early twentieth century, not blind. It was in the recording studio that I was introduced to an elderly woman who played the qinqin (秦琴; three-stringed plucked lute) in the instrumental ensemble. Her name was Ng Wing Mui 吳詠梅 and she was then in her early seventies. She was affectionately and respectfully addressed by the junior musicians as Mui Yee 梅姨 (Auntie Mui), and that is how I will refer to her in this paper. Her contributions to the naamyam that can be heard 1 This is what all of her students were asked to call her. 2 Chinese characters that are especially related to Cantonese musical traditions focused on in this paper will be transliterated into Cantonese (those that are not will be transliterated into pinyin). 3 See his ‘‘Reconstructing a Lost Performance Context: A Field Work Experiment,’’ CHINOPERL Papers 6 (1976): 120–43. 4 On this video and other precious audio-visual materials made by Mrs. Pian, as well as her work on a wide variety of Chinese oral performing literature, see Bell Yung’s essay in this issue. CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 33.2 (December 2014): 121–134 # The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2014 DOI: 10.1179/0193777414Z.00000000023 now, and particularly the style formerly sung by blind female performers, became clearer and clearer to me the more I got to know her. NAAMYAM IN THE PAST Naamyam is a type of balladry that was once enormously popular in Cantonese speaking areas such as Canton, Hong Kong, and Macao. Since Cantonese is a tonal dialect of Chinese with nine tones, and the altering of a word’s tone can yield a vastly different meaning, setting Cantonese lyrics to music therefore requires particular sensitivity. For instance, the melody must not distort the inherent linguistic contour of the lyrics, otherwise the text would be unintelligible or misunderstood. Because of this, naamyam is essentially a rather rigid musical framework, but is one that in fact affords room for spontaneous improvisation on the part of a skilled singer. To average residents of Hong Kong today, naamyam is a sound of the distant past. Yet, it still resonates strongly with those of us who were brought up in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was often broadcast on radio. Although naamyam is no longer sung in teahouses and brothels, it still can be heard in Chinese-style funeral parlors, where it is sung by Taoist priests as part of...

Mountain Fatalism in Wiley Cash’s: A Land More Kind Than Home

Mountain Fatalism in Wiley Cash’sA Land More Kind Than Home Erica Abrams Locklear (bio) In 2003 Wiley Cash had the initial idea for the storyline of his debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, when his “professor, Reggie Scott Young, brought in a news story about a young African American boy with autism who’d been smothered during a healing service on Chicago’s South Side.” Cash elaborates that he “wanted to tell the story, but [he’d] never been to Chicago and knew [he] couldn’t represent the experience of those living on the South Side.1 [End Page 110] Instead, Cash set the novel in Madison County, a region in Western North Carolina that has long been associated with both positive and negative stereotypes about Appalachia. On the positive side, those interested in traditional ballads often connect the county with the hit movie Songcatcher, since both Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp collected ballads in the area in the nineteen-teens. Photographers Rob Amberg and Tim Barnwell have also documented the beauty of the landscape and its people in their image collections, while musicians including Laura Boosinger and Sheila Kay Adams have brought major recognition to the area for its performance arts. Adams, for example, was recently named a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow, one of only nine in the United States. But Madison County also seems to function as a distinctly Appalachian space onto which cultural anxieties about poverty, drug use, unruly evangelicalism, and all manner of negative stereotypes are projected. It was the site of the Shelton Laurel Massacre in 1863, garnering the nickname “Bloody Madison” that still resonates today. In 2009, for example, journalist Rob Neufeld wrote an article for the Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper about a true-crime novel called Unfinished Business by Mark Pinsky. The novel re-creates the unsolved rape and murder of a VISTA worker, Nancy Morgan, in Madison County in 1970. According to Neufeld, a Madison County native named Ellen Banks told Pinsky, “We’ll never really rest in Madison County about Nancy’s death. People really liked her,” and “We’ve had enough problems since the Shelton Laurel massacre.”2 Banks’ mention [End Page 111] of the massacre—almost one-hundred-and-fifty years after the incident—signals that residents remain acutely aware of the associations people inside and outside of the region make between the county and violence. I often tell my students that Madison County serves the same purpose for North Carolina that West Virginia serves for the rest of the nation. Scholars including Anthony Harkins and J.W. Williamson have hypothesized that the rest of the nation—or in this case, the rest of the state—uses such areas to imagine a population of “them, not us,” prompting Manly Wade Wellman to write in 1973 that Madison County was “surely among the most misunderstood and most interesting of all counties in North Carolina,” and certainly that still holds true today.3 This classic blend of binaries perpetuated since the late 1800s of the rustic pioneer inhabiting the same beautiful mountainous space as the degenerate hillbilly coupled with a rich history of Civil War conflict, tourism, and a little-known World War I internment camp serves as rich literary fodder for contemporary authors: Charles Frazier, for example, sets several scenes of Thirteen Moons at the Warm Springs Hotel, while writers including but not limited to Pamela Duncan, Terry Roberts, Rose McLarney, and Ron Rash place much of their fiction and poetry in the county. The fact that Wiley Cash uses Madison County as the setting for his novel about a snake-handling congregation who smothers a boy to death while trying to heal him of his muteness (though readers soon learn that the preacher’s motivations are likely far more sinister) is a loaded one. At first glance, it might seem as though the novel perpetuates problematic notions about the county: after all, where else would one find a stereotypical Western North Carolina snake-handling congregation in the 1980s? But a closer inspection reveals that much more is at play in Cash’s novel than a too-easy reliance on...

“Strong Traivelling”: Re-visions of Women’s Subjectivity and Female Labor in the Ballad-work of Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Siddal's as a painter and poet has been eclipsed by the fame attributed to her face and her misfortune. Apocryphal tales of the beautiful Pre-Raphaelite model recount many of her ill-fated life events: her pneumonia, contracted while posing in a bathtub for Millais's Ophelia; her unhappy relationship with D. G. Rossetti, who painted her obsessively; her years of illness, drug addiction, and depression; her tragic death (or suicide) in 1862 from an overdose of laudanum, possibly as the result of postpartum depression following the birth of a stillborn child; and Rossetti's exhumation of her coffin in 1869 to retrieve manuscripts he had buried with her in a fit of guilt and grief. (1) These anecdotes, however, do not do justice to the creative of a woman whose life included landmarks beyond her shift from dressmaker to fine art model and who possessed many talents beyond her delicate pallor, striking beauty, and long, red hair. (2) In 1854, Elizabeth Siddal began to plan paintings of Clerk Saunders and several other ballads from Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1803), intending them for an illustrated ballad collection to be edited by William Allingham. Although the illustrated collection would not be realized, her with ballads would not be insignificant. To date, over one hundred paintings and drawings by Siddal have been identified, many based on ballads. (3) Within the next few years, Siddal also created paintings and drawings about ballads written by contemporary poets such as Tennyson's The of Shalott and Lady Clare; Rossetti's Sister Helen; and Robert Browning's Pippa's Song from Pippa Passes. During this time, Siddal began to write poetry as well, much of it influenced by ballad forms. (4) As we think about Elizabeth Siddal's with ballads in both visual and verbal media--the creative outpourings of a female artist-poet whose limited fame is due chiefly to the ways in which her model's body contributed to other artists' works of art--I will be exploring the following questions: How does Siddal, as a woman author, appropriate and/or modify the conventions of traditional and Victorian ballad forms in her own poetry? How does Siddal, as a woman artist, use drawing and painting to recast the narratives of traditional Scottish ballads and ballad poems by contemporary Victorian poets? And how does Siddal's reverse ekphrasis contribute to and/or complicate traditional observations about gendered paragone, or rivalry, between the sister arts of painting and poetry? (5) Throughout, I will be focusing on how Siddal's verbal and visual with ballads, taken together, represents female subjectivity and female labor; how Siddal establishes a relationship between female selfhood and female labor through her with ballads, and how the ballad form, itself, contributes to her task. This project engages the word work deliberately, recalling the of gender in the Victorian period and thereafter, including how middle-class gender ideology has influenced and almost erased the creative labor of women like Elizabeth Siddal. I want to think about the work or text, itself, of course, especially in context of the specific cultural of the ballad form and ballad tradition; and I want to begin to think about the kinds of work, or labor, that female bodies do in these ballads and images. Finally, I want to situate these questions about her poetry and paintings within the context of their production--within the important history of Elizabeth Siddal who, like many of the other models and wives of male Pre-Raphaelite artists, was a working-class girl deliberately re-educated to become a member of an elitist bourgeois circle of artists, which, as Cherry and Pollock remind us, required in particular an induction into that social role and psychic condition called femininity--silence, pleasant appearance, deferential manners, self-sacrifice (p. …