Traditional Ballads Research Articles

Traditional Ballads Musically Considered

Seventy years ago, George Lyman Kittredge published his standard, invaluable-but tuneless-abridgment of the massive collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, issued serially in ten parts between the years 1882 and 1898, by his revered master, Francis James Child. Child's work was primarily a library job, though he circulated appeals both in this country and in Britain for whatever scraps of traditional balladry might be recovered from oral sources. Contact at first hand with the bearers of tradition as song was for Child only a lucky accident, but the lack of such contact resulted in deceptive conclusions. Moreover, though interested, he did not see the music of the ballads as an essential part of his editorial responsibility, and perhaps hardly conceived of scholarly ways of incorporating the tunes into a systematic survey of the genre with all its international relations. Toward the end of Child's life, the interest of collectors had begun to turn to the recovery of the folk tunes, which could be gathered only from the lips of living singers. Singers sang what they liked, and it turned out that, among much else, they were fond of the traditional ballads which Child had searched for but had hardly found elsewhere than as texts in written or printed records. Now, surprisingly, was uncovered a vast treasury of fresh oral versions, which virtually transformed the subject from an antiquarian study to a sociomusicological inquiry grounded in contemporary evidence. There seemed reason to believe that such evidence could be enlarged continually by knowledgeable, persistent seekers. The (English) Folk Song Society was founded by a relatively small body of enthusiasts in 1898. Their initially antiquarian bias was soon swallowed up and superseded by the response to the living music now being discovered. Its appeal, in turn, drew in a number of

The Bibliographical Concepts of "Issue" and "State"

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Bibliographical Concepts of "Issue" and "State"G. Thomas TanselleG. Thomas Tanselle Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 69, Number 1First Quarter, 1975 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.69.1.24302244 Views: 16Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Samuel Vincent Lemley A Bibliographical Description of Farkas Bolyai’s Tentamen Juventutem and János Bolyai’s Appendix (1832/3) with a Census of Copies, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 113, no.22 (May 2019): 187–203.https://doi.org/10.1086/703244Chris J. Young The Bibliographical Variants Between The Last of Us and The Last of Us Remastered, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 110, no.44 (Nov 2016): 459–484.https://doi.org/10.1086/689754Giles Bergel, Christopher J. Howe, Heather F. Windram Lines of succession in an English ballad tradition: The publishing history and textual descent of The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 31, no.33 (Mar 2015): 540–562.https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv003Alan B. Farmer, Zachary Lesser Early Modern Digital Scholarship and DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, Literature Compass 5, no.66 (Nov 2008): 1139–1153.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00577.x

A Traditional Ballad from the Kentucky Mountains

A Traditional Ballad from the Kentucky Mountains

The Hunt in the Romancero and Other Traditional Ballads

poetry. While folk ballads generally shun metaphors, the concepts and actions that have an obvious role in the plot may carry connotations and associations far beyond this role. Some motifs, though dealing with action, contribute but little to the development of the plot; yet these are possibly the motifs that have sustained the appeal of the ballad through centuries. To say that hunting plays an important part in traditional ballads is both right and wrong. Hunters abound but seldom bring home any game; in the Romancero, the game is not even likely to appear. The reason for this lies in one of the main characteristics of balladry. Ballads deal with people and their relations with other people, or sometimes other anthropomorphic beings. Hunting is thus not the subject, but the scene, the circumstance, the atmosphere. This does not mean that hunting skill failed to enhance the image of a medieval knight, as he appears in ballads. In the eulogy of the Infantes de Salas, the distinction of two of the slain sons is proficiency in hunting:

A Small Bag Of Ballads From The Hills

A Small Bag Of Ballads From The Hills (With comments about origin and background plus musical notations by student musicologist, Richard Shelby) In our essay-editorial, "The Keepers of The Garden", we said all we felt necessary about ballad-pushers and folklore collectors. If we seem here to hedge on our earlier pronouncements, so be it. But, not so. For our purposes (longrange ) and for our anticipated readers these ballads have relevance. They prove that old "traditional" ballads still have sparse existence in true oral transmission and that the hill folk composed ballads of their own. Although they may provide the superficial interest of novelty, they also have relevance as historical and cultural artifacts. Later we expect to use more of them in more comprehensive, interpretive essays. During the summer we spent a great deal of time building a collection of folk songs transcribing and filing hoping eventually to have records and examples ranging from English and Scottish traditional ballads all the way up to Modern Bluegrass. We transcribed from tapes already made and added new ones. From this collection we elected to present three "murder" ballads, two American (one local) and one "traditional" for the first issue. Ballads, of course, tell a story and are songs, but often the "story" of the circumstances and events that inspired the ballads, the background, or the history of the ballad, especially when traditional, increases the interest of the ballads themselves. So, we include the words and tunes as we found them and some "story" material about them. "Floyd Frazure" (or Frazier) and the "Ballad of Charles J. Guiteau" were received from Mrs. Thelma Osborne and her mother-in-law, Mrs. Vada Smith Osborne of Maytown, Kentucky. Mrs. Vada Smith Osborne said she first heard 'Floyd Frazure'"sung at a square dance when Linvell Perkins sung it". She also said that when she herself was a child her mother, Lina (Linie) Tignor of Troublesome Creek in Knott County, sang the "Ballad of Charles J. Guiteau". Vada Smith Osborne was born in 1897. "Floyd Frazure" tells of a murder committed in Letcher County, Kentucky , at about the turn of the century. Legend has it that Floyd's mother and Ellen Flannery were courting the same man and that Floyd's mother hired him to kill her rival with promise of a new suit of clothes. Further, Floyd supposedly helped build the scaffold on which he would hang and picked the banjo seemingly without knowing the full extent of his crime or coming punishment. Today, we would probably say he was retarded. However, from the scaffold he is reported to have cried out: "Goodbye to everybody, forever and forever. My mother, oh my mother, oh Lord, oh Lord." The "Ballad of Charles J. Guiteau" had particular interest to the people along the Big Sandy River because James A. Garfield's first major assignment as a Union officer was to clear out the Rebels from the Big Sandy. He was remembered for his fairness and for forbidding his soldiers to do any looting. Shortly before his assassination he sent the man who acted as scout for him along the Big Sandy $100 for a visit to the White House, but the President was dead before the visit could materialize. As so often happens with murder and hanging ballads, in this case the convicted man is reported to have composed the ballad and sung it on the scaffold. "Lovin' Henry" is a famous old Scottish ballad, known to folklorists as Child 68, "Young Hunting". Many variants have been collected in the United States, of which this seems one of the better ones. But, as with the others, it has lost almost all of the supernatural effects that made it more interesting and exciting in the "old country". It came to us from Letcher County, Kentucky, under the shadow of Black Mountain; 31 APPALACHIAN HERITAGE but the tape does not make clear which of the old ladies sang it, and the students who did the taping failed to give identification before leaving. We turned the tapes over to Richard Shelby without comment for musical notation. Here is what he told us, and then the ballads. ./soocsocsoecsoacos«'* "Floyd Frasure...

Place-Names in Traditional Ballads

'WHEN is a ballad not a ballad?' Bertrand Bronson asks at the outset of his monumental four-volume edition of The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads,1 and he answers his own question quite categorically 'When it has no tune.' For someone who spent a lifetime of scholarship on the inter-dependence of ballad texts and tunes, this is the only answer to give, and his insistence that we must pay at least as much attention to the tunes as to the texts of the traditional ballads in order to do them justice and understand them fully as a genre, has been one of the most salutory contributions to ballad research in the last few decades.

"Casey Jones": At the Crossroads of Two Ballad Traditions

"Casey Jones": At the Crossroads of Two Ballad Traditions

Scott's "Jock of Hazeldean": The Re-Creation of a Traditional Ballad

Scott's "Jock of Hazeldean": The Re-Creation of a Traditional Ballad

Judeo-Spanish Traditional Ballads from Jerusalem

Judeo-Spanish Traditional Ballads from Jerusalem

Japanese Swordfighters and American Gunfighters

Like so many Japanese critical terms, gendai-geki and jidai-geki are simultaneously precise and loose categorizations for the two major megagenres of Japanese films. Gendai-geki generally refers to motion pictures which have a setting contemporaneous with the time of filming. Jidai-geki is not the Japanese equivalent of such general English language terms as historical drama, costume drama, or period drama. It primarily refers to films set in the latter part of the Tokugawa era, from the early 1600's to 1867. Stories with earlier historical settings are also jidai-geki but these are rare. The proper period of the jidai-geki ends with the beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Jidai-geki plots usually center on swordsmen of fictional, legendary, or actual historical origin. These same heroes often appear in the popular printed fiction of the Tokugawa and Meiji periods. This kind of adventure story still has many readers in Japan. In addition to these literary sources, naniwabushi, kodan, and other kinds of oral narrative transmitted by individual storytellers are other major jidai-geki sources. Unlike the Kabuki theater which moved from its popular origins to become an aesthetic entertainment, these balladmongers today remain common entertainers without any aura of fine culture. Kabuki furnishes almost no film stories but many of its plot elements reoccur in jidai-geki. These same plot elements are equally common to traditional ballads, popular fiction, and Shinkokigeki (New National Drama) which took heroic tales set in the late feudal era and staged them with representational realistic techniques borrowed from Shimpa and Shingeki. Shinkokugeki did not try to rework Kabuki plays into its realistic style. Instead its playwrights fashioned their scripts from the more violent stories of the oral narrative traditions. The emphasis was on maximum melodramatic thrills. The highlights of Shinkokugeki performances are elaborate athletic swordfights that exploit all possible gory variations in a manner that suggests berserk Grand Guignol. In contrast, Kabuki swordfights-not nearly as numerous as those of Shinkokugeki-are a form of dance called tachimawari. In classic tachima-

The Classical Ballads of the Sephardic Jews: A Study in Literary Recomposition

Many a poet has felt the attraction of the Orphic song and mystery of the magic ship in the later abbreviated versions of the ballad. However, these elements are later intrusions, not part of the original, for the folk create by adding, borrowing and reversing as well as by abbreviating. The classical ballads (those whose themes date from antiquity) of the Sephardic Jews provide a fertile but hardly touched field for continuing the study of the creative folk genius at work, forming a new setting for traditional ballad tales. Some of these ballads exist only in apocopated forms where the original narrative is largely lost; others have been recently found in their most complete form among the Sephardim.

The Mexican Corrido: Formula and Theme in a Ballad Tradition

MILMAN PARRY'S CONVERSION to an oral-formulaic perspective in the course of his Homeric studies, coupled with his field observations of the living SerboCroatian epic, enabled him to produce systematic theory of the formulaic character of literature originating in an oral tradition.' The dissemination of this theory, largely accomplished by Parry's student and co-worker, Albert B. Lord,2 ultimately precipitated what has been called a revolution in scholarly opinion.3 The oral-formulaic theory, with attendant controversy, has recently resurfaced in the pages of this journal. Bruce Rosenberg alleges the formulaic character of the spontaneous sermon;4 Bennison Gray counters with critique encompassing both Rosenberg's application and Parry's original formulation.5 Without pausing here to discuss the many valid questions raised by Gray, I will refer to only single far-ranging issue aired in his paper that is of crucial importance to my own: Can method designed to illuminate features of certain texts otherwise obscured in the passage of time be employed from literary and folkloristic perspective in approaching texts of another tradition? The present undertaking assumes an affirmative answer to this question of methodology. The current exchange between Rosenberg and Gray brings to mind the comments of H. L. Rodgers concerning the work of F. P. Magoun and others in the field of Anglo-Saxon literature. Rodgers insisted on tighter construction of the concept formula, if conclusions based on formulaic analysis were to be valid.

The Dead Lover's Return in Modern English Ballad Tradition

The Dead Lover's Return in Modern English Ballad Tradition

Traditional Ballads of Virginia. Collected under the Auspices of the Virginia Folk-Lore Society

Traditional Ballads of Virginia. Collected under the Auspices of the Virginia Folk-Lore Society

MacNeice, Auden, and the Art Ballad

Auden's parodies of popular songs are well-known; less so are MacNeice's subtle interpretations of the ballad tradition.' full possibilities of MacNeice's technique of contrasting a modern viewpoint with an older, naive romanticism are realized in The Streets of Laredo, a poem in which MacNeice imitates the surface form of the original to help establish and enrich the irony in his view of modern London. In imitating a sound pattern or a syntactic construction, MacNeice can recall a particular line of the cowboy ballad and its meaning and at the same time make a direct reference to some other literary work or historical fact. That is, a single line in MacNeice's poem can contain two allusions simultaneously; one of the allusions comes from the cowboy ballad by a simple imitation of surface form, the other from literature or history by direct reference. Not only does this process double the possibilities of poetic allusiveness, but the connection which is established between a portion of the folk ballad and some other literary text allows the two passages to interact and form a meaning related to, but significantly larger than, the explicit meaning of the MacNeice line in which they were joined. result is that with extreme economy MacNeice can establish a complex network of reference and association for his poem and

Traditional Ballads among the Portuguese in California: Part II

Traditional Ballads among the Portuguese in California: Part II

Traditional Ballads among the Portuguese in California: Part I

Traditional Ballads among the Portuguese in California: Part I

Modality in Spanish Renaissance Vihuela Music and Archaic Chilean Folksongs: A Comparative Study

monophonic criterion--involving endings, ranges, octave species, and cadences-borrowed from plainsong and applied to the modal recognition of the upper voice or the tenor; and 2) a new empirical polyphonic criterion, not considered in theoretical writings as belonging to the realms of modality but evident in the written and unwritten accidentals added mostly in connection with the rules of consonance.2 In fact, Renaissance musical idioms employed a new transitional polyphonic mode of which the main identifiable features are: a) Addition of written and unwritten accidentals. Alternative use of a sharp or flat seventh degree.3 Conflicting or partial key signatures.4 b) Change in modal preferences. In theory, expansion of the eight modes to twelve; in practice, reduction of the eight modes and predominance of two. c) Relative ambiguity of tonal centers; emphasis on modal degrees.5 Emergence of tonal transposition. The Spanish vihuela repertory, which flourished most brilliantly during the sixteenth century, provides an ideal source for the study of modality. If compared with the less precise polyphonic scores, the vihuela tablatures based on chromatic frets offer a reliable notation. A recent study by the present writer (Grebe 1966) of a specific part of the vihuela repertory indicates the existence of several innovations in its modal language: the sharp reduction of modal preferences, the growth of transpositions, the large quantity of accidentals, and other features anticipating the transitional idiom of the early Baroque. Vihuela music expresses the native Spanish character better than sacred vocal polyphony. Its repertory was developed by native court minstrels and instrumentalists whose links with the traditional ballad jongleur are shown in the frequent borrowings of folk melodies be

"James Harris" in Britain Since Child

ONE OF THE MANY GAPS IN BALLAD SCHOLARSHIP remaining to be filled is to do for the British Isles what Dr. Tristram Coffin has done for America:1 that is, to study the British Traditional Ballads collected in Great Britain since Professor Francis Child published his revised edition of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads in I882-I898,2 and to study these new variants in relation to those printed in the collection. The purpose of this paper is to examine one of the Child ballads, No. 243, James Harris, to see how variants not included in Child's collection fit into his scholarship. It is hoped that in the process some further light is thrown on the ballad's history, or development, in Britain, as well as on the problem of folk creativity. To do this, it is necessary to briefly trace the evolution of the ballad, in light of my own researches based on those of Child and Coffin. While this depends to some degree on a rough form of the historical-geographical method, it is derived chiefly from careful analysis of internal textual evidence. No consideration will be given to the ballad's music, for this facet is more than adequately handled in volume three of Dr. Bertrand H. Bronson's The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads.3

Traditional Ballads and Songs from Ontario

Traditional Ballads and Songs from Ontario