Ballads and boundaries : narrative singing in an intercultural context ; proceedings of the 23rd International Ballad Conference of the Commission for Folk Poetry 9780882870526, 0882870521

Citation preview

Ballads and Boundaries Nalabitive Singing in an Intercultural Context C

\

Edited by

— Boundar James Porter

4

BALLADS AND BOUNDARIES Narrative Singing in an Intercultural Context

EG GD

Narrative Singing in an Intercultural Context

Proceedings of the 23rd International Ballad Conference of the Commission for Folk Poetry (Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore)

University of California, Los Angeles, June 21-24, 1993

PK J

tw

HEEB

ERE REE

R

HERE RB REE

BALLADS AND BOUNDARIES

/3%b VLSTS

Edited by

JAMES PORTER

/913

Editorial assistant Ellen Sinatra

INDIANA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BLOOMINGTON

Department of Ethnomusicology & Systematic Musicology UCLA

1995

© 1995 by the Regents of the University of California

All rights reserved.

Published 1995

Printed in the United States of America ISBN:

0-88287-052-1

EE EER EEE E EE BBB BERESE

CONTENTS PREFACE

INTRODUCTION James Porter CONFERENCE PROGRAM Part One: The Ballad Genre

David Engle

Boundaries of the Ballad Genre

Satu Grinthal

Borders of the Ballad Genre: The Changing and Presesving Ballad”

Sigrid Rieuwerts

From Percy to Child: The “Popular Ballad as “A distinct and very important species of poetry”

13,

Noemi Marin

Romanian Dirge: A Ballad in Its Own Right

21

Guillermo E. Herndndez

New Perspectives on the Corrido

Juan Carlos Ramirez-Prmenta

Corrido and Literature: Techniques and

Sara S. Garcia

Intertextuality

The Transmutation of a Cultural Constant: The Mexican Political Corrido as Personal

37

Legacy

47

Jobn Minton

“That Amazing Texas Version of Child 84, “Boberick Allen”

61

EnriqueR. Lamadrid

“La indita de San Luis Gonzaga”: History, Faith, and Intercultural Relations in a New Mexican Sacred Ballad

76

Natascha Wiirzbach

Motifs in the Child Corpus

Tom Cheesman

Intersubcultural Dialogue on HusbandKilling: “Elise,” a Popular Ballad in Nineteenth-Century Germany

87

“The Woman Split at the Well": Female Victimization in Philippine Balladry

101

Herminia Meriez

vi Bernice Zamora

Maria Herrera-Sobek Mary Ellen Brown

La Prieta in the Chicano Corrido

109

From Adelitas to Farmworkers: The Representation of Chicanas in Painting and Folksong

119

Thoughts on the Genre: Ballad

130

Part Two:

The Ballad Text

Sandy lues

“The Bonny Earl of Murray”: The Intersections of Folklore and History

135

Erich Wimmer

The Pilgrim in Ballads

142

Boundary Breaking in Romanian Heroic Epic Songs

47

Ruth House Webber

Ballad Language: Repetition and the Formula

156

Tracey R. Sands

Gender-Related Narrative Patterns in the Sacdinavian Legendary Ballads

165

Riccardo Grazioli

Verbal Concision in Piedmontese Ballad Texts: ‘The Use of the Vocative 174

Ana Valenciano

System and Change in the Pan-Hispanic Ballad 188

Georgiana Galateanu-Farnoaga

Manuel da Costa Fontes _ Between Oral and Written Transmission: “O Sacrificio de Isaac” in Portuguese Oral Tradition 197

Judith R. Coben

Romancing the Romance : Perceptions (and Boundaries) of the Judeo-Spanish Ballad

William Bernard McCarthy Sheila Stewart's “Twa Brothers” (Child 49)

209 218

Part Three: Ballad Performance James Porter Jobn D. Niles

Toward a Theory and Method for Ballad

Performance

The Role of a Strong Tradition-Bearer in the

Making of an Oral Culture

225

231

vii Toru Mitsui

How Was “Judas” Sung?

241

Anne Caufriez

The Ballad in Northeastern Portugal

251

Judith Seeger

Just How Bounded Is the Ballad? Two Brazilian examples

265

Gerald Porter

“Wee'l keepe our fingers playing”: ‘Women's Work Songs and the Appropriation of Tradition

276

Ballad Singing and Boundaries

289

‘Sheila Douglas Spiro Sbituni

Boundaries of Musical Style in Albanian Folk Ballads

296

Janet Herman

Ballads With an Edge

302

Sabine Wienker-Piepbo

Karaoke : Singing Beyond National Boundaries 307

Pant Four: Cultural Experience in Ballads Stefaan Top Jestis Martinez

Roger deV. Renwick Joseph M. P. Donatelli

Chants populaires des Flamands de France (1856): A Contribution to Comparative Folksong Research, France/Belgium: Flanders Tigers in a Gold Cage: Binationalism and Politics in the Songs of Mexican Immigrants

315

in Silicon Valley

325

Ballad Finds and the New Sensibility

339

“To Hear With Eyes”: Orality, Print Culture,

and the Textuality of Ballads

347

Nathan Rose

Unacknowledged Legislation: Dialect, Ballads, and the Question of Transmission

358

Otto Holzapfel

Beyond the Boundaries: The Concept of European Folk Ballads Today

367

Sigrid Rieuwerts

Boundaries of Cultural Experience: Singer and Scholar

List of Conference Participants

374 377

PREFACE

It is with considerable pleasure that the organizers of the 23rd Intemational

Ballad Conference, held at UCLA June 21-24, 1993, acknowledge the generous

support of several campus agencies at UCLA. First, we recognize the ready assistance

of Dean Robert Blocker, School of the Arts, who made available the main financial underpinning without which the Conference could not have taken place; he also provided, from his staff, the miraculous help of Etsu Garfias as Coordinator. Likewise, we should salute some other administrators and departments at UCLA and UC Irvine, as well as notable institutions that offered help: Herbert Morris, Divisional Dean of the Humanities, UCLA;

David Lopez,

Director, Chicano Studies Center,

UCLA; Gilbert Gonzales, Director, Chicano-Latino Studies Program, UC Irvine; the Del Amo Foundation; the Italian Cultural Institute; the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UC Irvine; and the Departments of English, Germanic Languages, and Spanish & Portuguese, UCLA were willing partners in making this conference memorable both in quality and transnational collegiality of spirit. Finally, we should extend warm thanks for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, for designing and printing the elegant program brochure. The actual sponsors of the conference, besides the School of the Arts, were the Department of Ethnomusicology & Systematic Musicology, the Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore & Mythology, and the Department of Italian. The School offered a welcome reception on Sunday, June 20, at the Westwood Plaza Hotel, after which the conference participants were regaled with an engrossing program of cowboy ballads sung by Buck Ramsey, once a hired hand on the authentic range. Monday, June 21 saw the opening of the conference proper, with several paper sessions and the first of four roundtables devoted to the four themes of the Conference. On Tuesday, June 22 the conferees enjoyed a day at UCLA's William Andrews Clark Library, a famed repository of 17th and 18th century British literature, and indeed held several conference sessions there in the magnificent salon. We thank the Director, Peter Reill, for permitting the participants to experience the Library, its special broadside ballad exhibit and, what was particularly pleasant, a congenial luncheon in the Library's garden. A full day of sessions Tuesday was followed by the contrast and relief of an informal song night at the Westwood Plaza Hotel. ‘Wednesday's sessions preceded a tour of a specially arranged Ballad Exhibit in honor of the late Professor D.K. Wilgus (1918-89), a longtime member of the Ballad Commission, in UCLA's Research Library. This was followed by an al fresco Italian buffet dinner on the patio of Royce Hall, and the evening concluded witha spendidly diversified ballad concent in Popper Theater, Schoenberg Hall Music Building, with solo performances by Judith Cohen, Sam Hinton, Sheila Douglas, and Lalo Guerrero. An additional small ballad exhibit in the lobby of Schoenberg Hall added to the evening's pleasure. As Editor of these proceedings I wish to pay tribute to my Co-Chair of the Conference, Luisa Del Giudice; to the hardworking members of the Organizing Committee: Anne Cruz and Maria Herrera-Sobek (who were responsible for devising the paper sessions), David Engle, Mike Heisley, and Bernice Zamora; to Norm Cohen for curating the exhibits and serving, with Mike Heisley, as Master of Ceremonies

at the Ballad Concert; and most of all to Etsu Garfias, without whose masterly coordination the Conference arrangements would surely have foundered. I also must thank personally the staff of my own department, Betty Price, Jennifer Del Villar, Tom Lee, David Martinelli and Shana Riddick for their valuable assistance in countless ways, Among our graduate students from Ethnomusicology and Folklore I should single out Bob Bridges, Danielle Eubank, Janet Herman, Ellen Sinatra, and Shannon Thomton for their willingness to lighten organizational chores and help the entire Conference run smoothly. Our last word of thanks must go to Kathleen Moon, Publicity Coordinator in the Department of Music, for her unstinting and skillful help in finalizing these Proceedings for press. James Porter Department of Ethnomusicology & Systematic Musicology

INTRODUCTION At this first meeting of the International Ballad Conference in the United States,

we at UCLA were fulfillinga promise made by the late D.K. Wilgus to the Kommission fiir Volksdichtung (Commission for Folk Poetry), from its inception in the mid-1950s, to hold its Annual Meeting one day in Los Angeles. The Commission came into being

as a Study Group of the Société internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore, and, with its sister Study Group, the International Folk Narrative Conference, has been the

most active of all study groups set up within the intercultural aims of the Société. All annual meetings of the Commission had been held in Europe until 1988, when an

invitation for the 18th Annual Conference came from Université Laval in Quebec, Canada.

It seemed natural to continue the involvement of the New World

by

pursuing Wilgus's intention, especially since some younger members of the Commission were coming not just from the United States but from California in particular: Anne Cruz, Maria Hererra-Sobek UC Irvine), Luisa Del Giudice (UCLA), Bemice Zamora (Santa Clara University), David Engle (California State University, Fresno), and James Porter (UCLA). Of these, the last two had actually been attending

meetings of the Commission since the mid-to-late 1970s. It is well enough known that the Commission’s original remit was to compile a catalogue of European ballad types. This endeavor early ran into problems

determining not only the nature of the ballad genre but also the taxonomic basis for a “ballad type,” and two quite different solutions were subsequently devised: the so called Freiburg System, and the Wilgus-Long system. This is not the the merits of these different approaches (a task that has been done in David Engle's dissertation completed at UCLA in 1985), but it was 1970s that ballad scholars were becoming less interested in involving complex

place to discuss elsewhere e.g., clear by the late type-catalogues

and sometimes controversial notions of how ballads were

composed, and were more concemed with interpretation — often from an ideological or political standpoint — of imagery, language, performance, context, and style: in other words, focussing on the qualities and relationships of text, texture,

and context that had become prominent in folklore studies of the period 1965-1985. The invitation to the Commission to meet at UCLA in 1993 was, then, the

realization of a long-overdue commitment, more especially since D.K. Wilgus had been an active Commission member from the beginning and had attended almost every annual meeting. It was therefore tragic that, having succumbed to illness in 1989, he was unable to see his wish fulfilled. Special exhibits, at the UCLA Research

Library and the Clark Library, were prepared in Professor Wilgus’s honor by Norm Cohen and Luisa Del Giudice, drawing on the rich special collections of these libraries, These exhibits added immeasurably to the satisfying texture of the conference and brought into particular focus the importance of the broadside and chapbook traditions in divers languages. Themes of the Conference

One overarching theme for the 23rd Conference was decided upon by the

Organizing Committee in consultation with the Commission: Ballads and Boundaries, with the sub-theme of Narrative Singing in an Intercultural Context. The notion

of boundaries came into being partly because of the cultural boundary, in Califomia, between the English-language and Hispanic ballad traditions. Yet boundaries also came into focus because of more general concems about the fluid nature of the ballad genre, the ballad text, ballad performance, and the boundaries of cultural experience in ballads. The committee had hoped that the sub-focus of narrative singing would illuminate the performative style of popular balladry, and this was dramatically illustrated not only in the papers on ballad performance but in Wednesday's ballad concert of Anglo-American, Judeo-Hispanic, Scottish, and Mexican-American singing traditions.

‘These four aspects of the ballad, then, genre, text, performance, and cultural experience, gave rise to some 48 papers in 12 sessions, with four roundtables added for good measure. The roundtables followed the paper sessions and were intended to summarize and debate aspects not only of the preceding papers but also the diversity of the topic. Some scholars were invited specifically to participate in these roundtables: Mary Ellen Brown (Indiana University), Archie Green (San Francisco), Flemming Andersen (Odense University, Denmark), Beatriz Mariscal Hay (Colégio

de México), William McCarthy (Penn State University), John H. McDowell (Indiana University). Dianne Dugaw (University of Oregon), Alan Jabbour (American Folklife Center), Neil V. Rosenberg (Memorial University, Newfoundland), and Robert

Bethke (University of Delaware). The first subtopic on Monday, June 21, the ballad genre, drew some contrasting views: Satu Griinthal’s study ofa contemporary Finnish poem as a modem parallel to ballad style already posited the generic transformation of which the ballad is capable; Noemi Marin pointed to the close connection between balladry and the lament tradition in Romania; and Sigrid Rieuwerts made observations on the history of English-language ballad scholarship from Bishop Percy to FJ. Child. This session was followed by one on the Mexican corrido, a genre little studied by the Commission in its relatively short history: Guillermo HemAndez surveyed recent scholarship on the genre, Gloria Orozco analyzed the social tensions that exist in corridos, Juan Carlos Ramirez-Pimienta commented on literary devices in Mexican

corridos, and Sara Garcia discussed how the “Corrido del dia 1° de Mayo” had affected her own family history. The third paper session opened vistas on sundry traditions: John Minton demolished scholars’ attempts to relate the African-American song “Boberick Allen” to the Anglo-American classic, “Barbara Allen”; Patricia Conroy addressed the topic of Danish ballads in the Faroe Islands; Eythun Andreassen animadverted further on boundaries in Faroese ballads; and Enrique Lamadrid analyzed a ballad (indita ) from New Mexico, “La indita de san Luis Gonzaga.” In the following session on gender issues, Tom Cheesman's paper on murder-morality ballads in nineteenth century Germany was succeeded by Herminia's Mefiez's discussion of female victimization in Philippine balladry. Bernice Zamora pointed to the importance of “La Prieta” (or “the dark woman”) in the Chicano corrido, and Maria Herrera-Sobek drew attention in her paper to oral and visual images of Chicanas in the corrido. In many of these papers, the deceptively simple, and shifting, nature of the ballad as a genre was reemphasized. ‘The Tuesday sessions, June 22, revolved around the second subtheme, that of the ballad text. Ballads frequently represent condensed and filtered accounts of historical incidents or situations, and Sandy Ives' paper on the Scottish classic, “The Bonny Earl o' Moray,” articulated the conflict between attempts at factual history and

xiii

a popular or folk view; Erich Wimmer, in contrast, brought out the role of the pilgrim as a figure in ballads who crosses boundaries; Sharon King and Georgiana Famoaga offered different perspectives on historical events recounted in Romanian ballads, the latter paper drawing to some extent on the notable work of Amzulescu in this field. In a second session at the Clark Library, ballad language and narrative pattem

came under scrutiny. Ruth Webber commented on formulaic details in a select group

of Spanish romances; Tracey Sands dealt with narrative pattems in Swedish ballads of female martyrs; Riccardo Grazioli's paper concentrated attention on verbal concision in Piedmontese ballad texts; and Luisa del Giudice discussed the same

Northem Italian ballad tradition in the light of oral theory and recent ethnography.

The last paper session on the ballad text was restricted to the Portuguese and Spanish romancero traditions: Ana Valenciano addressed the issue of system and evaluation

in the romancero; Enrique Rodriguez-Cepeda commented on a project to publish Spanish ballads printed in the eighteenth century; Manuel da Costa Fontes made a close analysis of the ballad, “O Sacrificio de Isaac,” in Portuguese oral tradition; and Judith Cohen detailed contemporary features of the Judeo-Hispanic ballad, noting

especially commercially-recorded variants. This last paper provided an appropriate transition to the next group of sessions.

‘Wednesday, June 23 saw exploration of the third subtopic, ballad performance. Introducing the first session, James Porter outlined the need for a theory and method of ballad performance; John Niles’ paper analyzed the repertoire of a contemporary Scottish traveller singer; Toru Mitsui discussed the performative style of the oldest

surviving English ballad text (“Judas”); Anne Caufriez provided a disquisition on the ballad in Northeast Portugal; and Judith Seeger delineated the boundaries of the ballad in Brazil. In the second session, on urban and rural balladry, Sean Galvin's

paper addressed the place of urban ballads in contemporary scholarship; the paper by Gerald Porter traced the history of worksongs in England and their relation to ballads; Michael Heisley pointed to political features of farmworker's corridos in Califomia’s San Joaquin Valley; and Jamie Moreira discussed broadside ballads as

an adjunct to ballad performance. The second session included papers by Sheila

Douglas on the boundaries of ballad singing in modem Scotland, Spiro Shituni on the boundaries of musical style in Albanian ballads, Janet Herman on a current American rock band's performance of traditional balladry, and Sabine Wienker-

Piepho on the originally Japanese phenomenon of karaoke as it is practised in

Germany. The variety of topics dealing with performance also demonstrated the

inner (generic), and outer (socially adaptive), limits of the balladic concept. The fourth and last subtopic, cultural experience, on Thursday, June 24 reminded conference participants of the diversity of viewpoint involved in ballad production, consumption, and interpretation. The first session saw Stefaan Top, the

Commission's President, address the contribution to Flemish folksong research by the French

scholar,

Charles-Edmond-Henri

de

Coussemaker

(1805-76);

Colin

Quigley analyzed ballad singing as an expression of identity in French Newfoundland; Inéz Cardozo-Freeman asked whether the revolutionary figure portrayed in corridos, José Inés Chavez Garcia, was a hero or villain; and Jesis Martinez drew attention to problems of binationalism and politics in the songs of a Silicon Valley

band, Los Tigres del Norte. The final session, on conceptualizing ballads, brought together many of the thematic strands in the Conference: Roger deV. Renwick

attacked the identification of a Child ballad in the West Indies by a well-known

folklorist; Joseph Donatelli emphasized the textuality of ballads in print culture;

Nathan Rose discussed dialect boundaries with reference to Scottish and North

American examples; and Otto Holzapfel brought the conference suitably to a close

with a paper on the concept of European ballads today.

The overall picture one gets from the range of papers and topics within the general theme at this Conference was one of startling richness and complexity.

Especially eye-opening for many fostered on European notions of the ballad genre

was the vitality of Hispanic and Latin-American traditions, most obviously the corrido, for example, but also the New Mexican indita and the Brazilian romance.

Moving beyond the world of the traditional European ballad, too, were papers on the Philippine korido and the effect of Japanese karaoke practice on our conception of “ballad.” Rock music’s influence entered the picture in at least two contributions.

The Conference itself was, then, a unique opportunity to explore not only current thinking in ballad scholarship, but to recognize the legitimacy of hitherto disre-

garded traditions and to make common cause in a search for the cross- and

intercultural implications of a balladic spirit as well as distinct ballad styles. Itbrought together scholars who only knew of one another by name, and called attention to

the need for collaborative work and study.

Above all, the Conference underlined the dialectical and multiplex reality of the

ballad — its historicity and contemporaneity, its texts and contexts, its communicative essence when sung and on the printed page, its analogues in diverse cultures. Extraordinary performers such as Judith Cohen, Canadian specialist in JudeoHispanic balladry, Sheila Douglas, Scottish singer and scholar, Sam Hinton, the American balladeer, and Lalo Guerrero, the local Los Angeles corrido-singer, compose and sing ballads about the world they live in and have inherited. These composers and singers make, re-make and communicate songs that are heroic, satirical, comic, amorous, or tragic. They cast their songs in verses and meters and

tunes that are familiar and worn, like a comfortable overcoat or shoes; but the themes of their narrative songs, whether ballads, corridos, or romances, cover topics that can be uncomfortable and disturbing. This is the art of the ballad singer and ballad

maker, one that this Conference leaned to listen to, study, and appreciate in all its communicative, transforming power. James Porter

April 1995

EE RE EE

Sunday, June 20, 1993 7:00-10:00 p.m.

Registration

Welcome Reception by the School of the Arts, UCLA

Monday, June 21 8:30-10:15

Session 1: The Ballad Genre Chair: David Engle (California State University, Fresno)

Satu Grinthal (University of Helsinki, Finland), Ballads snd Genre Theories: Some Reflections

Dimitrina S. Gotzeva (UCLA), The Interaction Between the Bulgarian Folk and Literary Ballad Noemi Marin (California State University, Northridge), Romanian Dirge: A Ballad in Its Own Right Sigrid Rieuwerts (University of Kent at Canterbury, England), From Percy to Child: The “Popular Ballad” as “a Distinct and Very Important Species of Poetry” 10:15-10:30

Break

10:30-12:15

Session 2:

BEEBE

RBS

PROGRAM

Westwood Plaza Hotel, Los Angeles

SE BRE

ERG

CONFERENCE

The Mexican Corrido

Chair: Maria Herrera-Sobek (UC Irvine)

Guillermo E. Hemdndez (UCLA), The Mexican Corrido: Transformations of a Genre

BE

Gloria L. Orozco (UCLA), Memory and Corrido: The Discourses of History Juan Carlos Ramirez (UCLA), Literary Devices in Mexican

Corridos

BEBE

Sara S. Garcia (Santa Clara University), The Transmutation

ofa Cultural Constant: The Mexican Political Corrido as Personal Legacy

12:15-1:30 p.m.

Lunch

1:30-3:15,

Session 3: The Ballad Process Chair: Joseph Nagy (UCLA)

John Minton (Indiana University, Purdue University), That

‘Amazing Texas Version of Child 84, ‘Boberick Allen’

Patricia Conroy (University of Washington), Danish Balladsin the Faroe Islands Eythun Andreassen (University of the Faroes), Boundaries

and Limits in the Faroese Ballad Tradition

Enrique R. Lamadrid (university of New Mexico, Albuquerque), ‘La indita de san Luis Gonzaga’: History, Faith, and Intercultural Relations in the Evolution ofa New Mexican Ballad 3:15-3:30

Break

3:30-5:15

Roundtable1: Boundaries of the Ballad Genre Moderator: David Engle (California State University, Fresno)

Mary Ellen Brown (Indiana University), Archie Green (San Francisco), Satu Grinthal (University of Helsinki, Finland), Enrique R. Lamadrid (University of New Mexico, Albuquerque), John Minton (Indiana University, Purdue University), Natascha Wurzbach (University of Cologne, Germany) 5:30-6:30

6:30-8:00 8:00-9:45,

Commission for Folk Poetry Business Meeting Dinner Session 4: Ballad and Gender Chair: Shirley Arora (UCLA) Tom Cheesman (University College, Swansea, Wales), Intersubcultural Dialogue on Husband-Killing: MurderMorality Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Germany Herminia Méftez (UCLA), The Woman Splitat the Well’: Female Victimization in Philippine Balladry Bemice Zamora (University of Santa Clara), ‘La Prieta’ in the Chicano Corrido Maria Herrera-Sobek (UC Irvine), From Folksongs to Murals: Oral and Visual Images of Chicanas in the Corrido

BEEB BEEBE EEE E REE HEB

Tuesday, June 22 9:00-11:00

‘William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Session 5: Ballads and History Chair: Satu Griinthal (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Edward D. Ives (University of Maine, Orono), “The Bonny Earl of Murray”: The Intersections of Folklore and History Stuart MacLennan

Borders of Society

Erich

Wimmer

(San Jose), Scottish Ballads:

(University

‘The Pilgrim in Ballads

of Wurzburg,

On the

Germany),

Sharon D. King (UCLA), Beyond the Pale: Boundaries in the Monastirea Argesului

Georgiana Famoaga (University of Bucharest), Romanian Ballads: The Impact of Ottoman Rule on Family Relations 11:00-11:15

Break

11:15-1:00

Session 6; The Language of Ballads

Chair: Stefan Top (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium) Ruth H. Webber (University of Chicago), Ballad Language and the Role of the Formula

Tracey R. Sands (University of Washington), Narrative Patterns in Swedish Ballads of Female Martyrs Riccardo Grazioli (Region of Lombardy Folklife Center, Milan, Italy), Verbal Concision in Piedmontese Ballad Texts

Luisa Del Giudice (UCLA), Oral Theory, Ethnography, and the Northern Italian Ballad Tradition 1:00-2:15

Lunch and Library Exhibit

2:15-4:00

Session 7: The Portuguese and Spanish Romancero Chair: Anne J. Cruz (UC Irvine) ‘Ana Valenciano (Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain), System and Evolution in the Romancero Enrique Rodriguez-Cepeda (UCLA), Proyecto de publicacién del romancero impreso espariol en el siglo XVI

xviii

Manuel de Costa Fontes (Kent State University), Between

Oral and Written Transmission: “O Sacrificio de Isaac” in Portuguese Oral Tradition

Judith Cohen (York University, Canada), Romancing the Romance: Perceptions of the Judeo-Spanish Ballad 4:15-5:00

Retum to Westwood Plaza Hotel

5:15-7:00

Roundtable 2: Boundaries of the Ballad Text Moderator: Luisa Del Giudice (UCLA)

5:15-7:00

lemming Andersen (Odense University, Denmark), Roger deV. Renwick (University of Texas, Austin), Otto Holzapfel

(German Folksong Archive, Freiburg, Germany), Beatriz

Mariscal Hay (Colegio de México), William McCarthy enn State University), John H. McDowell (Indiana University) 7:00-8:00

Dinner

8:30-10:00

Informal song night

Wednesday, June 23 8:30-9:45

Session 8: Boundaries of Performance Chair;

James Porter (UCLA)

John D. Niles (UC Berkeley), Repertory, Identity, and the ‘Boundaries of Cultural Experience

Tom Mitsui (Kanazawa University, Japan), How Was ‘Judas" Sung? Anne Caufriez (Instrumental Museum of Brussels, Belgium), The Ballad in Nortbeast Portugal Judith Seeger (St. John's College, Annapolis), Boundaries ‘and the Ballad in Brazil 9:45-10:00

Break

10:00-11:45

Session 9: Ballads Urban and Rural Chair: Tom Cheesman (University College, Swansea, Wales)

Sean Galvin (La Guardia Community College), Tbe Place of Urban Ballads in Contemporary Ballad Scholarship

Gerald Porter (University of Vaasa, Finland), “Wee'l keepe

our fingers playing”: Worksongs and the Appropriation of Tradition

Michael Heisley (UCLA), Gritos and Silence in Corrido Singing: Voices from the Farmworkers’ Movement Jamie Moreira (Memorial University, Newfoundland), The Borders and Beyond: A Receptor's View of the Broadside Ballads 11:45-1:00

Lunch

1:00-2:45

Session 10: Ballad Transformations Chair: Alan Jabbour (American Folklife Center, Library of Congress)

Sheila Douglas (Perth, Scotland), Boundaries of Ballad Singing in Scotland Spiro Shituni (Institute of Folk Culture, Tirana, Albania), Boundaries of Musical Style in Albanian Folk Ballads Janet Herman (UCLA), Ballads with an Edge:

A Look at

‘One Contemporary Band's Performance of Traditional Balladry Sabine Wienker-Piepho (University of Gdttingen, Germany), Karaoke: Singing Today Without National Boundaries?

2:45-4:30

Roundtable 3: Boundaries of Performance Moderator: James Porter (UCLA)

Diane Dugaw (University of Oregon), Edward Ives (University of Maine, Orono), Alan Jabbour (American Folklife Center, Library of Congress), Neil V. Rosenberg (Memorial University, Newfoundland), Judith Seeger (St. John’s College, Annapolis) 5:15-6:00 6:15-7:30

8:00-10:00

Ballad Exhibits (University Research Library) Dinner Reception, Department of Italian (Royce Hall Terrace, Third Floor) Ballad Concert (Popper Theater, Schoenberg Hall)

‘Thursday, June 24 8:30-10:00

Session 11: Cultural Boundaries and Politics Chair: Luisa Del Giudice (UCLA)

Stefaan Top (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium), “Chants populaires des Flamands de France” (Edmond de Coussemaker,

1805-1875):

A Contribution to Compara-

tive Folksong Research, France/Belgium: Flanders

Colin Quigley (UCLA), Ballad Singing as Invocation of Identity in Newfoundland Inéz Cardozo-Freeman (Ohio State University, Newark), José Inés Chdvez Garcia: Hero or Villain of the Mexican ‘Revolution? Jess Martinez (Santa Clara University), “The Tigers in the Gold Gage”: Binationalism and Politics in the Songs of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley 10:15-10:30

Break

10:30-12:15

Session 12: Conceptualizing Ballads Chair: Norm Cohen (UCLA)

Roger deV. Renwick (University of Texas, Austin) Ballad Finds and the New Sensibility Joseph M.P. Donatelli (University of Manitoba, Canada), “To Hear with Eyes’ Orality, Print Culture, and the Textuality of Ballads Nathan Rose (Harvard University), Unacknowledged Legislation: Dialect Boundaries, Ballad Boundaries, and the Question of Transmission Ono Holzapfel (German Folksong Archive, Freiburg, Germany), Beyond the Boundaries: The Concept of European Folk Ballads Today 12:15-2:00

Roundtable 4: Boundaries of Cultural Experience in Ballads Moderator: Barre Toelken (Utah State University) Eythun Andreassen (University of the Faroes), Robert Bethke (University of Delaware), Maria Herrera-Sobek (UC Irvine), Sigrid Rieuwerts (University of Kent at Canterbury, England), Stefaan Top (Catholic University of Leuven,

Belgium),

Ana

Valenciano

Complutense, Madrid, Spain)

(Universidad

Buck Ramsey sings at the School of the Arts reception (top), Stefaan Top, President of the Commission, center, with Joseph Donatelli and James Porter (bottom left), Sheila Douglas sings “The Bonny Earl o” Murray” (bottom righl).

Alan Jabbour makes a point to Spiro Shituni (top; photo by Paulette Gershen), Sam Hinton sings at the ballad concert (bottom left), Luisa Del Giudice and Norm Cohen (bottom right).

The conference participants at the Clark Library (top righ), Judith Cohen sings at the ballad concert (4f), Lalo Guerrero sings at the ballad concert (bottom right).

Part One: The Ballad Genre

DAVID

G.

ENGLE

Boundaries of the Ballad Genre ‘Tbisshort contribution summarizes some of the discussions of the Kommission fir Volksdichtung and emphasizes the nature and definition of the folk ballad as telling a single narrative (not several), baving dramatic tension, and concentrating on the narrative (not just facts). In this way the paper

proposes that what matiers most in defining the ballad genre is not text,

context, structure, style, themes, or performance, but the ballad's narrativity.

From the first session of the Kommission fir Volksdichtung in 1966, when participants began work on compiling a European ballad index (Arbeitstagungen liber Fragen eines europaischen Balladenindex), they agreed that the definition of what was to be indexed, arranged, classified, catalogued, or treated should be kept as broad as possible. They hoped that such inclusiveness would not only uncover the richness of each national tradition but also facilitate comparison across cultures and even across continents (Brednich 1969: 32). Certainly the group as a whole moved quickly away from that definition of ballad as a song “which is putatively of medieval origin and which 1s good.” The working definition became that of the narrative song: a song which tells a story (Brednich 1966: 16-17). Some refinements have been offered, but the simplest definition has remained, if not as a battle cry, at least as a sort of lowest common denominator. Inclusiveness was, of course, the guiding principle of D.K

who was more than once (mistakenly) rebuffed

for seeming to propose that all ballads were like his “blues ballads,” thats, just made up of various “building blocks” on the spur of the moment (cf. Klaus Roth, in Engle 1978: 29 and passim; Engle 1985:184-186). Significantly, Wilgus was working on the borders of the genre by advancing the proposition that if one could solve the most difficult problems of ballad classification, then the classical ballads should cause us litle trouble. It tums out that improvisational narrative song, of which the “blues ballad” is a prominent example, even belongs to parts of the classical German ballad tradition, and not just to the Southeast of the United States. It is fascinating to note that the Gottschee versions of the song material "Heimkehr des Ehemannes” (“Retum of the Husband”; Brednich and Suppan 1969, No. 103; DVldr 11; Engle 1985, V80) exist in six reports, all of which share a single story background: the returning husband meets a beggar, exchanges clothes with him, goes to the wedding and is given wine by the bride. She recognizes her former husband by his ring or his words, and they are reunited. Effectively, the only text the versions have in common is the scene in which the wife gives the retuming husband the wine. Some variants begin at different points in the story. Various treatments bring the pair together again; one, however, separates them. In some the new groom must be bought off, in some he leaps over the table, overjoyed at being free again.

4

Ballads and Boundaries

‘A major reason for this variation was noted by Erich Seemann, namely that although this style of Gottschee singing may be executed in German dialect, it stands squarely within the surrounding Slovene tradition of improvised narrative singing (Seeman 1951). In fact, all the Gottschee dialect versions of ballad types in the Deutsche Volkslieder mit ibren Melodien are “out-liers” because they obey textual and performance rules different from that governing the rest of the tradition, which is essentially one of memorized text. The other salient aspect that Wilgus emphasized in discussing the blues ballad was its treatment of story, the blues ballad being a song which often references a narrative

more

than

recounts

it (cf. Wilgus

1959 and

his statements

in the

Arbeitstagungen proceedings). In the Anglo-American tradition, the “Titanic” ballad isa good example: rather then tell the story of the ship's Atlantic crossing, its striking the iceberg and the crew's getting as many lifeboats as possible clear, the song picks ‘out specific details from the background of a familiar story: That ship it left England, runnin’ from shore to shore. Rich had declared, they would not ride with the poor. Put the poor below, well, they was the first to go ‘Wasn't it sad when that great ship went down It was sad when that great ship went down. It was sad when that great ship went down. Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives, It was sad when that great ship went down. Well, Jacob Nash, he was a millionaire.

Had plenty of money, money to spare. Titanic was a goin’ down, but he could not pay his fare, Wasn't it sad when that great ship went down. It was sad when that great ship ....'

German tragition has its “Cimbria” and the “Flood on the Eger." In similar fashion our “fohn Hardy” (Laws 1964:12) is mirrored by the farewell of “Schinderhannes” (cf. Pinck 1963, III: 95-97, no. 29), in which the song dwells more on the evildoer's last minutes than on his deeds, capture, and execution. “Bad men ballads” have been a central theme of German narrative song from Lindenschmid (Erk and Béhme 1893-94: 246-247) and Schwartenhals (Erk and Bohme 1893-94: 1288) in the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century's “Andreas Hofer,” a sort of political “bad man” or the poacher and outlaw “Bairischer Hiasl” (Erk and Bohme 1893-94: 1465-66). ‘The vehicle for many narrative songs has been the printed broadside, which has often had a marked influence not only on ballad vocabulary but also on narrative structure, first pressing the narrative into an expressly moral framework and then often expanding the story with both details and episodes (cf. inter alia, Cheesman 1994). I might refer to the long-winded “St. Jakobs StraSe” which takes us along the entire pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela before telling us about the evil innkeeper there (Erk and Bohme 1893-94: 2091), or that “old timey” piece about the carnival fire of 1570 in which the revelers’ costumes caught fire and bumed many nobles to death.? But there are also problems with more traditional texts, as evidenced by dialogue songs that reveal a story before our ears rather than narrate it strictly.

ECE BE ERE EERE EB EEE BEB

Boundaries of the Ballad Genre

5

“GroSmutter Schlangenkéchin” (Meier et al., 1935 ff., no. 79; Engle1985, V144; cf. Child 12) is perhaps the most famous, but there are many others. For instance, “Das wacker Madchen” (also known as “Graserin und Reiter,” Meier et al., no.149; Engle 1985, V79) presents us with two dialogues. In the first, the knight tries to persuade the maid to go with him. In the second the maid's mother reveals to her how her father has drunk and gambled away the family fortune. My years at the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv impressed me with a central fact: although I was expecting to find traditional examples that looked like “Child” and “Grundtvig” ballads, | found as varied a corpus as anything my own American tradition has to offer. Indeed, I perceive the two traditions to be strikingly similar in their basic features, from the big and ancient ballads to the backwoods moralizing sung from yellowed prints. ‘What does this have to say about genre? would advance the opinion that ballads as narrative songs reference and present one story, not several little stories or vignettes, such as befell the occupants of the “Griiner August” (paddy wagon"; a newer parody of Erk and Bohme

1893-94, B 136, “Die Donaustrudel”), or as

frequently occur in such dance tunes as “Hans in Schnogeloch’ or “Hopp Marianche” (Erk and Bohme 1893-94, B 1723 (“Hans in Schnugeloch"], also 1833 {“Hopp Marianche")). It does not matter greatly whether the song recounts the story asa third Person narrative or presents us with significant dialogue dramatizing the story directly before our mind's eye. As discussed in the first Arbeitstagungen, the story should have dramatic tension (‘dramatisch pointiert”; Brednich 1966:14). Thatis, it should not be an Ehestandsklage, Bauernklage, or one of those general complaints or laments about marriage, occupation, or life on the “Government Claim.” It should reference a specific narrative. Thus, the Streitgespréch or expansive argument between water and wine (Erk and Bohme 1893-94, B 1074-1079) would not be a narrative song, whereas the argument between the miller and his wife about whether he can put her “mill” “out of commission” for having slept with the miller’s helper (Erk and Bohme 1893-94, B 156) would be within the parameters of narrative song. The ballad, by extension, should concentrate on story, rather than merely on facts. Thus, both songs about Leonie Laubacher's death in 1898 ‘ do not simply state that she was murdered, but rather tell how she was murdered, and how her attackers were brought to justice. Finally, the main theme of the song should lie within the story, not outside it. In “Rautenstrduchelein” (the “Rue Bush”, Erk and Bohme 1893-94, B 912), the narrator dreams of a young woman but is confronted with an old hag. He then complains about his wife and how he would gladly exchange her for a sausage and a glass of wine. Here the narrative element acts as part of a larger theme, rather than being the theme directly. Such a song certainly lies in the marches of balladry, perhaps outside its narrative homeland, but definitely within the genre's contextual and referential sphere of influence. In conclusion, then, I shall stay with the starting definition used by this Kommission fiir Volksdichtung. What matters most in the ballad as a genre is not its text or context, its style or structure, its themes or performance (all fascinating and extremely important aspects that we shall not ignore). What matters, fundamentally,

is the ballad’s narrativity.

6

Ballads and Boundaries

Notes

'E.g., Eric von Schmidt's rendition on the disc, The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt, Prestige/Folklore 14005 (1963). *Deutsches Volksliedarchiv folder, “KIV: Zwei Brider wollten wandern wohl nach Amerika,” and folder “Gr. I: Oitza wir i amal ains singa.” ‘Deutsches Volksliedarchiv folder, “Gr. I: HOrt zu ihr Christenleut, was sich in kurz zugetragen hat.” “Deutsches Volksliedarchiv folders, “Gr. I: Zu Belfort in dem schnen Frankenland” and “Gr. : Zwei liebten sich in einem Sinn. References Cited

Brednich, R.W. ed. Volksballaden . ed. Volksballaden

1966. Erste Arbettstagung ber Fragen des Typenindex der europdischen . , pp. 16-17. Berlin: Staatliches Institut fur Musikforschung, 1966. 1969. Zwette Arbettstagung tber Fragen des Typenindex der europaischen . , p. 32. Berlin: Staatliches Institut filr Musikforschung, 1969.

and W. Suppan eds. 1969. Gottscbeer Volkslieder, No. 103. Mainz: Schotts

‘Sohne; DVidr 1A; Engle 1985, V80.

Cheesman, Tom.

1994. The Shocking Ballad Picture Show: German Popular Literature and

Cultural History, Oxford: Berg.

Deutsches Volksliedarchiv (Silberbachstr. 13, D-79100 Germany) song folder with its call number. Engle, David G. 1985. Preliminary Catalogue and Edition of German Folk Ballads. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. ‘ed. 1978. Achte Arbettstagung tber Fragen des Typenindex der europatschen

Volksballaden . Freiburg: Deutsches Volksliedarchiv. Erk, Ludwig and Franz Magnus Bohme. 1893-94. Deutscher Liederbort. Leip: Laws, George Malcolm, Jr. 1964. Native American Balladry. Philadelphia: American Folklore Socety. Meter, John et al., ed. 1935 f . Deutsche Volksiieder mit ibren Melodten. Berlin & Freiburgi Br.

Pinck, Louis. 1963. Verklingende Wetsen: Lotbringer Volkslieder. 3 vols. Kassel: Barenseiter. Seemann, Erich. 1951. “Zum Liedkreis vom ‘Heimkehrende Ehemann’,” in Beitrige zur Sprachwissenschaft und Volkskunde: Festschrift far Ernst Ochs, ed. Karl Friedr. Miller, pp 168-179. Lahr: Schauenburg.

Wilk i. D.K. 1959. Anglo-American Folk Song Scholarship Since 1898. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

SATU

GRUNTHAL

Borders of the Ballad Genre: The Changing and the Preserving Ballad Because of their long, diverse history and their splitting into primary and secondary genres, ballads provide ample material for genre theory. As a literary theory, ballads are self-reflexive, constantly mirroring their own tradition, conventions and values. In this mirroring they simultaneously change, distort, and preserve their own image and generic bistory. This means adopting critical distance from the tradition but also inscribing continuity with it: ballads preserve continuity in discontinuity. Genette’s work on transtextuality and Hutcheon's theory of parody are useful in

discussing the ballad’s dialogue with the past. The paper discusses these theories and their relevance o the ballad in relation to a poem by the contemporary Finnish poet, Aulikki Oksanen.

‘There are no totally stationary stages in the history of literature. No ready genres, ready in the sense that they are fully developed, have existed in the past nor do they

exist now (Tynjanow 1982: 44). Therefore, we must give up the thought that

somewhere in obscure history we could find an original, real representative of the particular genre of the ballad. It must also be remembered that although genres are in the constant process of change, this process is not one of degeneration but of cooperative maintenance and renewal. The continuous controversy and influence from cross-currents that are part of the process fertilize fruitful soil for innovations concerning the genre. Every genre looks at itself in the mirror of its tradition and history. This is also true for the ballad. Thus, when a contemporary ballad is written, it relates to its ancestors in an obvious or a subtle manner. It sees itself in the mirror of genre's tradition, and in this mirror it sees old folk ballads, the first medieval literary ballads, the ballad movement of the romantic era and the often capricious ballads of our own century. The ballad in the historical mirror, then, has many faces, We as readers ~ and listeners — also consider these faces when we generalize about the genre and make our definitions or working hypotheses about it. Of course, such generalizations tend to obscure the diversity of the genre. As hypotheses they are, nevertheless, valuable, Conventions are also based on generalizations. Conventions look uniform or coherent because they are based on groups, not individuals. Gombrich calls the formation of conventions the etc. principle (see Harpham 1982: 7). The title a poem is given is no coincidence and should therefore be considered carefully. Whena poems titled as a ballad, it isa clear statement that the poem wants

8

Ballads and Boundaries

to be - and that it should be - read in this particular context. It is our duty as readers or scholars to clarify, how the poem reflects or rebels against its convention, not to

argue that the poet has made a mistake.

‘Although conventions are bom through groups, genres develop and change in response to individual poems. The ballad genre is renewed through poems that are intended as ballads but fit or contribute to the genre in a fresh new way. Innovations must always be seen in relation to the genre and as a comment upon tradition.

‘Without the context of tradition, these innovations would be left without relevance

ora point of comparison. The tradition can also be present through parody, criticism or negation. Therefore, neglect of tradition also means ~ paradoxically enough — acknowledging its existence and value. ‘These facts were clear already to the Russian formalists. Tynjanow states that the more sharply a literary work deviates from a literary system, the stronger is the position of and emphasis on that same system in that work's literary context. In this way, every system by nature includes a possibility for deviation and denial of itself. ‘A poem written in free verse enhances with its free, non-metrical elements its opposite, the rhythmic element (Tynjanow 1982: 42). Sixty years after Tynjanow, Linda Hutcheon discusses generic changes in the framework of parody (see, for example, Tynjanow 1982) which she calls repetition with difference (Hutcheon 1991, where she refers to parody’s ironic “transcontextualization and inversion). The aim of parody is to renew and augment a genre. The paradox of parody is that while ridiculing its object parody simultaneously strengthens it. The same tendency towards negation is at work again: by mocking certain conventions, the parody incorporates them in itself and in this way also guarantees their ongoing existence (according to Hutcheon 1991: 43, parody is “intramural” because it always repeats another discursive text, whereas satire is “extramural” in its ameliorative aim to ridicule the follies of mankind).

Hutcheon’s point of departure, namely parody as repetition with difference, can be used as an analogy to the evolutionary process of ballads. Throughout their history they have repeated - and still repeat — their past tradition with difference. This repetition can be serious, parodic or critical. Denial of tradition means giving form to that which is missing in it, to that which exists through non-existence. In this way, it could be called repetition of the non-existent, negative repetition. Poems that question their tradition but proclaim themselves ballads may have only one thing in common: their relation to this specific genre, the ballad. We are all familiar with poems -- mostly from our own century — that we most likely would not regard as ballads without a title that reveals their genre. Through such capricious ballads the genre is in constant process of dynamic change, transformation and metamorphosis. While the ballad moves in unexpected directions, its boundaries yield to and interact with those of other genres. Often it is not even relevant to ask

to which genrea certain work belongs. The far more rewarding challenge is to reflect upon the boundaries of other genres it touches and the genres with which it plays. ‘These capricious ballads have a common denominator as long as they announce

that belong to a certain genre and mirror it specifically. As soon as some other unambiguous common denominator can be found, the poems can be classified

together as a genre of their own: they would have ceased to exist primarily through the ballad.

‘As I already pointed out, Hutcheon uses the concept of parody when researching literary processes of change. By contrast, Genette’s point of departure

Borders of the Ballad Genre

9

is imitation. According to his classification, parody and transformation are based in

one or several texts, never in a genre. As to imitation, it focuses primarily on style and on genre as a secondary consideration (Genette 1982: 89-92; according to

Genette 1972: 31, imitation can be ludicrous, serious, or satirical). Regardless which classification system we choose to pinpoint generic change, itis important to note that the existence of a genre and the constant process of change that it includes are based on repetition. Repetition is a medium with which a poem either imitates, parodies or denies its genre. Throughout the ages poets have imitated, parodied, praised and transformed ballads ~— they have done everything except stopped writing them (Laws 1972: 3). Let us illuminate the concept of repetition with difference with the help of one contemporary Finnish literary ballad. The poem in question is Aulikki Oksanen’s Padttoman tyton balladi, which was published in 1992." PAATTOMAN TYTON BALLADI

Paatén tytt6 ajotielld seisoo ilman paati, taivaalla on taysikuu ja ajotiella ju2ita. Eipa huoli hullu mies kun hameenhelman nakee: paatn taikka ei, se kuuluu silti akkavakeen.

Hameenhelman alla kylla aina hoituu varvi, eihan jatkd sithen hommaan naisen pata tarvi. Paatén tytté pieni on ja raiskatessa vaiti, jatka pall rapikdi kuin tonnikalan maiti. Padtén tyté kuutamolla kamalasti nauraa, autonromu savuaa ja ajomies on vainaa. ‘Tyw6jd kun ikinsd han padttémasti raastoi,

paatén tyté paattémien seuraan hdnet haastoi.

Paatén tytté ajotielld seisoo ilman paati, taivaalla on taysikuu ja ajotiella jaded.

The poem plays with the word pad, which has a double meaning in Finnish: it means both ‘head’ and ‘end’. The title of the ballad can, then, be translated either The Ballad of the Headless Girl or The Ballad of the Senseless Girl. The other character in the poem is a crazy man, a madman. Their story is padtén, senseless,

and also padttymaton, endless. Derivations of the word pad are used in almost every line and the ambiguous meanings of these words create at least two parallel stories into the poem. Let us first have a look at the traditional features in the poem. It is a narrative; it tells a story. It leaves elliptic gaps in the story, but these gaps obey the ballad convention and are therefore easy to fill in. Itis, for example, easy to conclude that the girl kills the crazy man, although the events are presented to us only

10

Ballads and Boundaries

metaphorically. With the help of our background knowledge of the genre, we can complete the elliptical story. Our understanding of Oksanen’s poem is enriched by Finnish folklore. There isa relatively well-known Finnish folktale where a loving couple sets out on a sleigh ride in the middle of the night. As they are riding in the moonlight the man suddenly realizes that his fiancé at his side is dead and has come to take him to the world beyond. Oksanen's ballad follows this structure.

‘Aulikki Oksanen’s poem is full of well known ballad properties not only from

the folktale mentioned above but also from ballad tradition in general. Central motifs

in the poem are night, moonlight, a man on the move, a mysterious woman and her revenge.

The poem follows also ballad tradition with its metre, stanzaic form and rhyme. The ballad is written in light and dancing paeon, which forms a stark contrast to the

gloomy and fateful atmosphere of the poem. (The meter is based on the flow of one strong and three weak metrical positions.)

Paatdn tyttd ajotiella seisoo ilman paatd, taivaalla on taysikuu ja ajotiella jaata.

+ 000 + 000 + 000 + 0 +000 + 000 + 000 + 0

Eip’ huoli hullu mies kun hameenhelman nike: + 000 + 000 + 000 + 0 paatén taikka ei, se kuuluu silti akkavakeen. + 000 + 000 + 000 + 0 The controversy between meter and content has, however, an important interpretative function. On one hand it underlines the absurdity of life: despite of all pain and tragicalness the life must - and can - go on. On the other hand it demonstrates the speed and breathlessness with which the events flow. Some rhymes in the poem mirror the old Finnish broadside tradition where halfrhymes like ndkee-vdkeen and nauraa-vainaa were common. The first and last stanza of the poem can also be regarded as refrains: they create the very same situation at the beginning and at the end of the poem. This strategy, which makes the beginning the end and vice versa, underlines the absurd nature of the poem and the senselessness of the world. When the poem ends, it is immediately ready to start again: the head- and senseless girl starts to wait for the next crazy man — or, metaphorically, death waits for its next victim in a car crash. ‘Above we have discussed such features in Oksanen's poem that clearly follow the ballad convention. But how does her ballad rebel against the tradition and change iv? Through its distorted love story, the poem mirrors the medieval danse macabre -tradition where the dead ask the living to dance with them. In the end, representatives from all levels of the medieval class society and of all ages join the long dancing chain. Above the danse macabre frescoes in churches were often written the words /t is you.

The couple in Oksanen’s ballad exploit and develop the affinity between sexual love and the grotesque. Geoffrey Harpham points out that the most famous loving couples in literature and mythology, like Adam and Eve, Tristan and Isolde, and Romeo and Juliet, are not only connected by love but also by death and transgression (see Harpham 1982: 10-13). Because we are used to regarding them as incamations of true love, we easily forget how essential elements transitoriness and destruction

Borders of the Ballad Genre

1

are in their relationships. In these love stories high and low, sublimity and grotesque are mixed in order to clarify the structure of amalgamation that characterizes human love, and humanity, in general (Harpham 1982; 11).

Lovers in ballads echo this tradition. In ballads, there is no love without death

or no death without love. Oksanen's ballad joins the chain by showing only the macabre sides of a love story and heaping them to excess. In her poem, love is replaced by rape, but death follows this love's stand-in just as inevitably. The girl who is out of her mind alludes to the Death in the danse macabre frescoes; she asks the

crazy guy to dance with her. She is simultaneously the victim and the judge. In these ways Oksanen’s poem repeats the ballad tradition but gives it a new

tune. It emphasizes absurdity and black humor in the narration. The headless and

senseless girl, this mysterious liminal figure, is simultaneously comic and tragic. Even

so, her revenge is as irreversible as always in ballads. In traditional ballads love is deadly serious, but death is not to be laughed at either. Oksanen’s poem also mixes temporal levels: it has transferred the events to the car and tunafish age. Thave already mentioned that the poem uses rhymes that allude to broadside ballads.

Another feature

common

to some

broadside

ballads as well as this

contemporary poem is racy language. When Oksanen's ballad uses idioms from spoken language and mixes styles, it acts in terms of both contemporary time and older tradition.

In conclusion, we must ask what this particular poem does with its tradition and

to it. Oksanen’s poem is true to the narrative nature of a ballad and incorporates

several standard motifs. It alludes not only to the broadside tradition but also to

folklore. In addition to this it strengthens its ties to the ballad genre - in a way redundantly - by being structured in traditional form. Further, although Oksanen’s poem would be recognized as a ballad even without its title, the poem is titled as a ballad so as to be quite certain.

Given these elements consistent with traditional ballad genre, Oksanen’s poem

disturbs the seeming black-and-whiteness of the ballad genre both with its form and

its content. Just as the Finnish adjective padton is ambiguous, the story splits into several interpretations. Humor, tragedy and absurdity overlap and interact. As we have seen, this poem maintains the supporting pillars of its genre but

builds something new on them. It differs from the convention mainly in its attitude and tone. It loads the story with hints showing that the ballad — and thus the whole world -- has at the same time a shocking, a senseless and a ridiculous face. It must

be pointed out, however, that although the ballad in this way acts against the mainstream in its genre, it again is based on the danse macabre tradition, in which

the Death sports a grimace as well as a laughing face.

It can be stated with good reason that this ballad repeats its tradition with

difference. In its mirror we can simultaneously see the repetition and the repeated.

The poem clearly shows that the poet knows the ballad tradition well and wants to contribute to it. It condenses the absurdity of the world but also shows the

inevitability and irrevocability of the events. It distorts the love story intoa rape story, but at the same time activates two ballad opposites: the great narratives of life and death. It shows the full moon and its reflection on the ice of the road at one glance, ina mirror.

12

Ballads and Boundaries

Notes 1A free translation of the poem is as follows: Out of her mind, on the highway /Out of her mind stands a girl, the moon is full, the winter cruel/And there is ice about // ‘That does not bother the crazy guy/Who catches sight of her. Out of her mind she may be, but/She’s still a lot of skirt// For just beneath that skirt lies what/Will always serve his turn; Of course, no woman needs her mind/For what he has in his// the girl is small, out of her mind//Lies quietly as she is raped; The fella comes all over her/With sperm like fish's milk // the girl laughs terribly, out of/Her mind therte in the moonlight; ‘Smoke is rising from a car-wreck,/And the driver lies there dead.// All his life, he never minded/Who or what he was grinding; Now that girl, out of her mind,/Has put an end to him.// Out of her mind, on the highway;/Out of her mind stands a girl ‘The moon is full, the wind is cruel/And there is ice about. References Cited

Genette, Gérard. 1972. Métonymie chez Proust. - Figures Il]. Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1962. Palimpsestes. La lttérature au second degré. Paris: Editions du Seuil Harpham, Geoffrey. 1982. On the grotesque. Strategies of contradiction in art and Mterature. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1991 (1985). A Theory of Parody. The Teachings of Twentleth-Century Art Forms. New York and London. Routledge. Laws, G. Malcolm Jr. 1972. The British Literary Ballad. A Study in Poetic Imttation. Carbondale and Edwardsville. Southem Illinois University Press. ‘Tynjanow, Juri. 1982. Poettl. AusgewAblte Essays. Leipzig and Weimar: Gustav Kiepenhever Verlag

13

SIGRID

RIEUWERTS

From Percy to Child: the “Popular Ballad” as “a distinct and very important species of

poetry.”

The boundaries of the ballad genre are continually being redrawn and what we label a folk ballad today is not necessarily what it would bave been called yesterday. Dance, epic poetry, romance, song— all these and many more bave occupied neighboring territories at various points in the bistory of the genre. This paper's particular concern is with balladry bordering on poetry, that is, ballads from the period between the publication of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98). Percy's “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry”

Interest in the folk ballad as a gente is first recorded in the wake of Percy's publication of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in the mid-eighteenth century. At that time, ballads, as Fricdman rightly observes, were “decidedly a mixed lot”: the term ballad is “connoting almost anything sung in the streets or gathered into the lower-class miscellanies; and even in the minds of the literary antiquaries, ballads were intimately connected, or confused, with all manner of song and old poetry” (Friedman 1961:

63).

‘While Percy was eager to avoid the confusing term, his learned friend and advisor, the poet William Shenstone, felt an attempt at distinguishing ballads from songs and other forms of povtry must be made if a homogenous collection was to be achieved. In considering this question of genre, it is important to bear in mind that Percy and Shenstone were mainly concemed with English material and not

traditional Scottish ballads. In his letter to Percy of April 24, 1761 Shenstone wams about consulting the etymology of the word “ballad”: “it will be necessary herein to follow the ordinary opinion of the world, at Last” he insists. And “with the common people, I believe, a Song becomes a ballad as it grows in years, as they think an old serpent becomes a Dragon, [....] For my own part, I who love by means of different words to bundle up distinct Ideas, am apt to consider a Ballad as containing some little story, either real or invented. Perhaps my notion may be too contracted” (Hecht 1909: 52). Clearly, Shenstone is neither satisfied with the common definition of a ballad being an old song nor with his own of a ballad being a song with some little story. And yet, his notion of a ballad as a narrative song is not far from the present day understanding of the genre.

14

Ballads and Boundaries

Percy, on the other hand, after having considered for himself Shenstone's “queries about the Old Ballads” and after having held “a council of war with Mr Johnson” (Hecht 1909: 53), has come to the conclusion that ballads are to be placed

firmly in the realm of poetry. Furthermore, since these poems are “showing the first efforts of ancient genius, and exhibiting the customs and opinions of remote ages: of ages that had been almost lost to memory” (Percy 1891, 1:1-2), ballad poetry is preceding all poetic art and is therefore no longer a living genre. Ballads, according to Percy, are simply reliques of ancient poetry: they are the “effusions of nature” and not the “labours of art” (Percy 1891, 1:1).

And in offering these “barbarous

productions of unpolished ages” to the public as an illustration of the earliest state of literature, it is possible “to survey the progress of life and manners, and to inquire by what gradations barbarity was civilized, grossness refined, and ignorance instructed” (Percy 1891, 1:2).

First and foremost, Percy intended his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry to be a Collection of Old Poewy, taking Dodsley's Collection of Old Plays as his model (Hecht 1909: 54). And yet, given poetic theory in the mid-eighteenth century, these ancient reliques with their affecting simplicity and artless beauties may be seen as

a corrective to the polished poetry of the day.

‘With his publication of ballads, Percy called attention “to Poetry in new forms; to Poetry endued with new Manners & new Images” as Warton describes it in his Jetter to the ballad editor (quoted in Dennis 1931: 1176). But at the same time, Percy

was eager to conform to an eighteenth-century poetic ideal. Addison, Dryden,

Johnson, Shenstone and also Pope were for him the authorities on poetic matter and,

like Alexander Pope, he distinguished clearly between the various types of poetry such as sonnet, epic, pastoral, elegy, and ode. As each one is endowed with a particular style and diction, Percy “corrects” the pieces according to his idea of a ballad, a species of poetry hardly recognized by the literary world. Being so much aware of the demands for poetic correctness of contemporary

neo-classical poetry, Percy was not even sure himself whether “the barbarous productions of unpolished ages” were worthy of attention or approbation in “the present state of improved literature.” In his preface to the Reliques he expressed his hopes that allowances would be made for this type of poetry even if it were only through natural curiosity about the ancient past: “In a polished age, like the present, Tam sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances tobe made for them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity, and many artless graces, which in the opinion of no mean critics (above all, Addison and

Dryden) have been thought to compensate for the higher beauties, and, if they do not dazzle the imagination are frequently found to interest the heart” (Percy 1891, 1:8). The ballads of ancient minstrels were, despite their pleasing simplicity, artless graces and interest to the heart, in want of higher beauties, and needed to be complemented — not

least to atone for their rudeness — with “a few modem

attempts in the same kind of writing [. . . ] and with litle elegant pieces of the lyric kind” (Percy 1891, 1: 8-9).

Percy's collection includes many different types of poetry, but emphatically

excludes broadside ballads. Indeed, one of his major concems was to lift the reliques

of antiquity high above their cousins in the gutter. He knew that publishing “ballads”

might harm his reputation and he would be known to the world— as Shenstone warned him in his letter of November 14, 1762 — as a “Ballad monger” (Hecht 1909:

From Percy to Child

15

87). Small wonder, therefore, that Percy was anxious to avoid the term ballad, since in his time it was not regarded as a distinct and above all, respectable literary genre. In later life, Percy even distanced himself from the publication of his own ballad book, and did not want to have his professional title of “Bishop” used in connection with ballad poetry (Anderson 1988: 45). The collection of ancient English poetry that Percy eventually printed was not intended for the common people or the singer, but for the judicious antiquary and the reader of taste and genius (Percy 1891, 1:6). Although only one-fourth of the texts printed came from the famous Folio Manuscript, the manuscript exerted on Percy's choice of material from sources other than the manuscript itself a “tremendous influence” (Friedman 1954: 525). The Folio Manuscript itself revealed quite a poetic diversity: Robin Hood ballads, historical ballads derived from garlands, metrical romances, poetry of the time of the Tudors and Stuarts, some traditional pieces and some modem ballad imitations. From Percy to Motherwell

With the diversity of material reflected in the printed collection, Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry proved an enormous success in England and indeed, the rest of Europe — especially on Burger and Herder in Germany. “I do not think there isan able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligation to the Reliques,” said Wordswortha generation later, and even he goes so far as to say that English poetry had been absolutely redeemed by the publication of Percy's Reliques (quoted in Percy 1891, 1: xci). Despite this far-from-homogeneous collection of material, Percy's collection served as a role-model for many ballad collections and editions in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, including Scot, and pethaps surprisingly, Child. But as Sir ‘Walter Scott quite rightly observed, Percy and later ballad collectors shared the same interests but faced different problems. According to Scott, for Percy “the great difficulty was not how to secure the very words of old ballads, but how to arrest attention upon that subject at all” (Scott 1968, 1: 38).

Scott's “attempt to imitate the plan and style of Bishop Percy” (Scott 1968, 4: 52),

bore fruit in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, published in 1802. Since Scott's choice of material

is limited to the Border region and to narrative verse

(i.e.,

romances and ballads), his collection appears to be far more homogeneous. It is interesting to note that the last of the four volumes (published in 1830) of Scott's Minsirelsy is entirely devoted to ballad imitations. These imitations are part and parcel of literary men’s interest in the ballad genre, the so-called Ballad Revival (See Friedman 1961 and, for the revival on the popular level, Dugaw 1987). It was regarded as a legitimate and valuable poetic exercise, and only those “who have written their imitations with the preconceived purpose of passing them for ancient” were despised by Scott and others (Scott 1968, 4:10). Ballad imitations crop up everywhere, even in the most unlikely places such as David Herd’s manuscripts. These manuscripts, which were known to people like Percy, Ritson, Bums, Jamieson, and Scott contain, among some traditional ballads, quite a number of “seemingly insignificant fragments,” several ballad imitations as well as some pieces Herd gathered from “the various Miscellanies, wherein they formerly lay dispersed” (Hecht 1904: viii-ix). David Herd’s collections of songs and

16

Ballads and Boundaries

ballads have been praised for “their comprehensiveness and apparent accuracy of reproduction” (Hecht 1904: viii), but in them we find old songs and ballads side by

side with modem songs by celebrated authors. To contemporaries like Allan Cunningham, David Herd is too honest and too indiscriminating: “To David Herd, we are indebted for our knowledge of many genuine native verses. The rough, the polished, the rude, the courtly, the pure, the gross, the imperfect, and the complete, were all welcome to honest and indiscriminating David.

He loved them all, and he published them all” (1825: 4: 361).

It is

our good fortune that Herd shows no real interestin polishing his verse. He collected

and transcribed carefully and his book is indeed — as Scott said — “the first classical collection of Scottish songs and ballads” (Scott 1968, 1:169).

‘Among the early Scottish ballad collections Herd's, Kinloch’s, Buchan’s and

Motherwell's are held in the highest esteem, since all these collections contain material gathered from the field, so to speak, in contrast to material gathered from

old books and manuscripts. Herd and Motherwell may not only have lacked poetic talent and literary ambitions, but they had also less sensibility. Their value judgment is not based on the poetic correctness of their times, nor did they trouble themselves

too much with moral qualms. performed the ballads.

In a way, they were closer to the people who

This is a very significant development in the history of the ballad genre since,

for the first time, we learn about its natural habitat. Thus, we are no longer twice

removed from the living ballad — once, because we are looking at the past (ie., the eighteenth and nineteenth century) and twice, because they in tum concemed

themselves with the past (an earlier age) and not with contemporary ballad tradition.

Living Ballad Tradition Itis illuminating to see how early ballad collectors responded to “the real thing,”

tothe ballad in its natural setting (“Sitz im Leben” as opposed to “Sitz im Buch"). The

shift in value judgement could not be more apparent than in the response to a manuscript of Mrs. Brown of Falkland’s ballads, which was freely passed around to the early ballad editors. Percy did not really know what to make of these “curious” pieces, and he even had to be reminded to acknowledge receipt of the manuscript. Ritson admits the genuineness of Mrs. Brown's ballads, but does not think they are ancient or, indeed, of any great merit. When he retumed the manuscript to Alexander Fraser Tyler (July 17, 1794), Ritson says in his accompanying letter: “I do not consider the publication of these pieces tending to enhance the reputation of your lyric poetry — I certainly conceive them to be genuine & in certain respects

curious but by no means ancient not [sic ] equal in point of merit to those few productions of a similar nature which have already appeared in print” (quoted in Montgomerie 1970: 246) If Mrs. Brown's ballads — today so highly acclaimed — did nothing to enhance the reputation of poetry according to prevailing contemporary opinion, itis in a way understandable that she took offence when her name was mentioned by Scott in connection with ballads. It was also Scott who suspected Mrs. Brown of ballad

forgery, since she was very fond of Percy's and Herd's ballad collections and wrote ballad poetry herself. But Scott, Anderson and Jamieson came eventually to the conclusion that “her character places her above the suspicion of literary imposture” (Anderson's letter to Percy, in Anderson 1988: 43).

From Percy to Child

17

Let me also note in passing — especially for those of us who see Mrs. Brown's ballads as a good illustration of oral-formulaic theory — that she did not believe in a ballad idea, but a genuine and correct ballad: “I do not pretend to say that these Ballads are Correct in any way” (quoted in Anderson 1988: 54) is her judgment on the ballads she wrote down entirely from recollection. She regarded her texts from memory as inferior to printed versions.

While the collectors Jamieson and Kinloch moved away from ballad poetry of antiquity to ballad poetry handed down by tradition, they still admitted that their collections “may” be inferior. It was Motherwell who first insisted that ballads, preserved by oral transmission, are of equal authenticity and value. The present collections, he says, convey “very inaccurate impressions of the state in which these compositions are actually extant among us” (1827: vi). In Motherwell’s Minstrelsy we find many ballads — with music incidentally — “printed precisely in the form in which they were remembered by the several individuals who sung or recited them” (1827: ci), and yet, we would be very mistaken in believing that it contains only genuine traditional ballads. Even Motherwell does not refrain from collating copies (see his note to “May Colvin", 1827: 67) or passing on his own ballad imitations (see “The Crusader's Farewell”, 1827: 66).

Francis James Child ‘The distinctiveness of the genre i.e., the questions of what constitutes a ballad and what differentiates it from other forms of poetry and song, have been vexing questions ever since Percy first published ballads. By focusing on eighteenth and nineteenth century ballad collections and poetic theory, we have become aware of a demarcation slowly arising between ballads being ancient pieces of poetry and ballads being traditional, narrative songs. Thus, the boundaries of the ballad genre were gradually determined, but it was not until Child published his authoritative collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, that the ballad fully emerged from the earlier indistinction of the genre. ‘When we look at Child's first collection, English and Scottish Ballads of 185759, we recognize that Child's understanding of the ballad genre very much reflected the material and collective knowledge of his time. This early collection comprised many pieces termed ballads that were not found in his later definitive collection of 1882-96, for example, romances, pieces of non-popular origin or transmission, broadsides, ballad imitations, lyrical pieces (see James 1933: 60-63). By the time Child was working on The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, his understanding of the ballad genre had significantly changed (see Rieuwerts, forthcoming) and consequently, he admitted many modem, incomplete, edited and fragmentary pieces into his collection. Child offered his first compilation of English and Scottish Ballads in 1857 (1: ix) to the student of “popular fiction” as being “more comprehensive in its plan than any of its kind which has hitherto appeared.” In the rewritten preface of the second edition of English and Scottish Ballads of 1860,

Child merely states that “these

volumes have been compiled from the numerous collections of Ballads printed since the beginning of the last century” (1860, 1: vii). He also adds an important distinction that was later to form the basis of The English and Scottish Ballads, and that is the distinction between the true popular ballad and artificial literature:

18

Ballads and Boundaries

“Widely different from the true popular ballads, the spontaneous products of nature, are the works of the professional ballad-maker, which make up the bulk of

Garlands and Broadsides. These, though sometimes not without grace, more frequently not lacking in humour, belong to artificial literature, — of course to an

humble department.” And in a footnote, Child adds: “This distinction is not absolute, for several of the ancient ballads have a sort of literary character, and many broadsides were printed from oral tradition” (1860, 1: vii). When Child speaks of

the true popular ballads as spontaneous products of nature in contrast to artificial literature, he reiterates a distinction made by Percy and Herder: Percy, as we have seen, distinguished between “labours of art” and “effusions of nature” and Herder

between Volkspoesie, the “poetry of nature/poetry of the people” and Kunstpoesie, the “poetry of art.” But unlike Percy and many early ballad collectors, Child

entertained no doubts as to the worth of Volkspoesie. To him the popular ballad as

poetry of nature was not only a distinct but also a very important species of poetry that had the power to recall the poetry of art “from false and artificial courses to nature and truth.”

In his little known article on “Ballad Poetry” in Johnson's Universal Cyclopaedia,

Child elaborates on this point of nature and art. “The popular ballad,” he writes, “is

a distinct and very important species of poetry. Its historical and natural place is anterior to the appearance of the poetry of art” (1902: 464). This condition

of society,

when the whole people were still one in respect to knowledge, desires, and taste no longer exists, and thus the popular ballad, with its Fundamental characteristics

being “the absence of subjectivity” and “self-consciousness,” no longer exists either.

To Child, therefore, balladry was a closed account, and all that was left to be done

was to gather the last remains and preserve it since popular ballads may serve the literature of art as a corrective: “Being founded on what is permanent and universal in the heart of man, and now by printing put beyond the danger of perishing, it will

survive the fluctuations of taste, and may from time to time serve [.. . ] to recall a literature from false and artificial courses to nature and truth” (Child, 1902: 464-65).

Many points Percy made, especially about ballads being the effusions of nature and preceding the poetry of art, we see repeated by Child. Like Percy, he viewed the popular ballads as the last remains of a distinctive literary species, the last

specimen of a popular genre. This notion is also to be found in another of Child's little-known articles, published anonymously in The Nation in 1868: “what words could express our regret for the loss of countless other ballads, which have perished like the generations of the leaves, and largely in consequence of the introduction

of the art which boasts the conservation of all arts? Since ballad times cannot return

except with the return of a state of society which no rational being wishes to see

repeated, all we can do is to put beyond danger what we happen to retain, and to

seek out and save what is just ready to perish” (Child 1868: 192-193).

‘What Child found in the ballad collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, were not only the effusions of nature, but a wide spread of the

poetry of art. Broadsides, for example, were regarded by Child as “products of a low kind of art” (1902: 466) and not as authentic popular ballads. In response to the Ballad Society's intention to publish all the known collection of English ballads, starting with the broadsides, Child urged them not to reproduce the “dull and useless” broadside. collections, but the genuine traditional ballads instead.

Since

with Hales's and Fumivall’s publication of the Percy folio manuscript, a comparison

KERR EES EKER HEHEHE BPHREE EEE

From Percy to Child

19

of the genuine texts and the highly edited ones were made possible for the first time in 1868, he asked, “why should not Englishmen set to work, though very late, to make a complete collection? Why should we not have an English work which should at least aspire to equal Svend Grundtvig's ‘Old Ballads of Denmark?” In order to make a complete collection of the popular ballads, the editor would have to go behind the texts printed in the many ballad collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and gather the ballads preserved in manuscripts or floating in the memories of the people. The reason is that in these collections, the poetry

of nature, the popular ballads, are mixed with the poetry of art, but ballad poetry — according to Child — is a distinct and very important species of poetry anterior to the poetry of art; or, as we would say today, they belong to folklore and not to. literature. This recognition of an independent genre lies at the heart of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, however much we might disagree with its scope and arrangement. Itis illuminating to read Child's advice, published in The Nation (1868), to the future editor of the “complete collection of the English and Scottish popular ballads” which in the end, of course, turned out to be Child himself: Give us then, first, all that is left, or all that can be found, of the genuine ballads of the people. Ransack the public libraries. [. . . | Hunt up private manuscripts. [...] And next, where are the Mrs. Farquhars, the Mrs. Browns, the Mrs. Amots, the Miss Rutherfords themselves, and the nurses who taught them ballads? {. . |. From these sources, public libraries, parish scrap-books, and the memory of living persons, it is probable that much might be gathered.

[

] We insist on having the actual tradition placed before our eyes. We utterly refuse “collated” editions, made up from a variety of copies, such as we find in nearly all the ballad-books from Percy down to our day” (Child 1868: 193)

Editorial manipulation and oral tradition can corrupt and mutilate an authentic

ballad “on its way.” And yet, ballads preserved in manuscripts or floating in the

memories of the people ought to be the major sources for the complete collection of popular ballads in English modeled on Grundtvig’s Danmarks gamle Folkeviser. Child, like Motherwell before him, insisted on having the actual tradition placed before him and utterly rejected improved, corrected or collated ballads,

Although he did not lay down specific criteria, Child clearly distinguished the popular ballads from other forms of poetry, and set an example in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads by including all that he could find of the genuine ballads of the people. When we look at the ballad genre before Child, genuine traditional

ballads appear alongside ballad imitations, romances, epic poems etc,; after Child, they form a separate category. And by clearly distinguishing the genuine folk ballad

—as we would say today — from other poetic forms, Child laid the foundations for

the independence of folk literature.

20

Ballads and Boundaries

References Cited

Anderson, W. E. K., ed, 1988. The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Robert Anderson. New Haven: Yale University Press. Child, Francis James. 1868. Ballad Books.

The Nation

7: 192-193.

1902 [1874] Ballad Poetry. Universal Cyclopaedia and Atlas, ed. Rossiter ‘Johnson, revised and enlarged by Charles K. Adams, vol. 1, pp. 464-468, 12 vols. New ‘York: Appleton.

‘Company

. ed, 1857-59. English and Scottish Ballads, 8 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and ed. 1860. English and Scottish Ballads. 2nd series. 8 vols. Boston: Little

‘Brown and Company.

ed. 1882-98. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co. Cunningham, Allan, ed. 1825. The Songs of Scotland. Ancient and Modem: With an Introduction and Notes, Historical and Critical, and Characters of the Lyric Poets. 4 vols. London: Taylor.

Dennis, Leah, 1931.

The Text of the Percy-Warton Letters. Publications of the Modern

Language Association 46; 1166-1201.

Dugaw, Dianne. 1987-88. The Popular Marketing of “Old Ballads": The Ballad Revival and

Eighteenth-Century Antiquarianism Reconsidered. Eigbteentb-Century Studies 21: 71-

90. Friedman, Albert B. 1954. Germanic Philology

53:

‘ Percy's Folio Manuscript Revalued. Journal of English and

524-531.

. 1961. The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sopbisticated Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hecht, Hans. 1904.

Songs from David Herd's Manuscripts, Edinburgh: Hay.

1909.

Thomas Percy und William Shenstone: Ein Briefwecbsel aus der

Entstebungszeit der Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Strassburg: Tribner.

James, Thelma. 1933. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads of Francis J. Child. Journal of American Folklore 46: 51-68. Montgomerie, William. 1970. A Bibliography of the Scottish Ballad Manuscripts 1730-1825: Part VII - Mrs. Brown's Manuscripts. Studies in Scottish Literature 7: 238-254. Motherwell, William. 1827. Minstrelsy, Anctentand Modern: With an Historical Introduction and Notes. Glasgow: J. Wylie. Percy, Thomas. 1891. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets Together with Some Few of Later Date, ed. Henry B. Wheatley. 3 vols. London: Swan Sonnenschein.

Rieuwerts, Sigrid. [1995]. “Give us the genuine ballads of the people”: On F. J. Child's Ballad Concept. Journal of the Folklore Institute (forthcoming). Scott, Sir Walter. 1968. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. T.F. Henderson. 4 vols. Detroit: Singing Tree Press.

21 NOEMI

Romanian Dirge:

MARIN

A Ballad in Its Own Right

This paper discusses the Romanian dirge as a specific ballad genre in the

spectrum of traditional folklore, linking boundaries from different areas of Hterature, music, and performance, and empbasizing the dirge as a unique ancestral ritual of sorrow and liberation. The paper analyzes dirge from the perspective of communicative performance located at the boundary between archaic ritual and contemporary oral tradition. Highlighting characteristics of the dirge in relation to the traditional Romanian ballad, it empbasizes the communicative function of delivery, performed by a group of experienced women, bocitoare, and the use of ballad, personal narrative, recitative, and chant to blend different folkloric features into the still active form of the Romanian sacred ritual. Romanian dirge, lament or funeral song has accompanied the ritual of burial and funeral procession in Romania for over 2000 years. It constitutes one of the most ancient forms of folkloric tradition that the people of Romania continue to enact in modern times. The Romanian dirge offers a distinctive example of folkloric

complexity, crossing the boundaries of different genres such as those of the ballad,

Byzantine chant and ancient Greek choral song, pre-Christian ritual, improvisation, and oral performance. Its uniqueness lies both in the complex overlapping of custom and tradition and in the contemporary significance of these folkloric associations. Dirge and its complex structure are manifested consistently throughout the entire territory of Romania.

it thus constitutes ancient and characteristic form of

sociocultural performance that is incorporated within the Romanian funeral rite.

Dirge is both an ancestral and contemporary folkloric enactment of powerful

rituals that can be traced back to ancient Greece and the Thracian history of

Romanian territory.

Analyzing Romanian dirge, one can find ethnographic

influences and boundary crossings of collective life, rituals and traditions common

to the entire Balkan area, but in this articleI shall be referring mainly to the Romanian dirge as a genre viable in the contemporary life of Romanian folklore, emphasizing its uniqueness in terms of linking boundaries of folkloric literature, music, and

performance. I shall be analyzing Romanian dirge, moreover, from the perspective of a creative performance located at the boundary of archaic ritual and contemporary oral tradition, and will examine how the delivery of the dirge, as it is performed by a group of experienced women called bocitoare, makes use of certain characteristics of ballad, personal narrative, recitative, and chant that blends distinct folkloric

features into this active part of the sacred ritual of passage into death. My contention

22

Ballads and Boundaries

is that dirge represents a major performative part of the rite of passage since it overlaps boundaries

of Romanian

folklore genres and reflects the moral

and

sociocultural values of Romanian people. I shall also advocate that the performance

of dirge, in every funeral procession and ritual in rural Romania, demonstrates the continuity of oral tradition and of folkloric improvisation in the social life of the Romanian people. ‘What is a dirge? How is it manifested in the Romanian funeral ritual? What are the boundaries of folkloric tradition with which the dirge or lament forges links?

Although there are a multitude of definitions of dirge or laments (Kligman 1988, Watts 1988) or funeral songs (Birlea 1977), the dirge in Romania is unanimously considered a constitutive part of the ritual of passage (Eliade 1957, Kligman 1988). Through dirge the lamenters, women who are kin to the deceased or newlybereaved widows from the village recite, lament, sing, and cry over the deceased

body throughout the three day period of the funeral ritual. The funeral songs are

mandatory in that they are performed only by women considered to be “custodians of traditions” (Watts 1988: 44). Folk belief holds thata funeral without a dirge is a

sin, a factor that might explain the continuity of lament in the funeral ritual of contemporary rural communities in Romania. According to Kligman (1988), Romanian dirge has a double dimension:

(a) a referential one — that refers to

elements of cosmogonic order present in chant and recitative form; and (b) an indexical one — that refers to the pragmatic order of the community and the interactive dialogue of lamenters with the deceased.

Structurally, Romanian dirge is performed in the format of rhymed couplets of

7- or 8-syllable lines that relate both to (1) folkloric themes rooted in ballads, doine

(songs of lamentation and longing), fairy tales, and to (2) improvisations that bring into the rhymed form personal stories about the deceased. The laments are in repetitive form; they are invocations of nature, incantations and negotiations with the deceased to come back to life. The double dimension of the Romanian dirge

encompasses the specific cultural pattern of grief in the Romanian funeral rite of Passage. Birth, marriage, and death are viewed by Romanians as major moments in the life of an individual and in the social life of the village. Consequently the rituals of

baptism, marriage and death are referred as “rites of passage” (Gennep 1908) in which dramatic transformations take place when passing from one individual stage to another. Victor Tumer, in his anthropological study on ritual, Gennep’s stages of a rite of passage, namely separation, transition, tion CTumer 1982: 24). Viewed from this perspective, the funeral a fundamental moment of passage into death, a rite of separation, be performed according to its significance and elaboration.

reinforces van and incorporaritual becomes which needs to

In Romania, the funeral ritual consists of the actual procession accompanied by

laments over the deceased, and the giving of alms and lighting of candles. ‘Complementary to the procession, chanting and performing the sorrow of the living for the dead are gradually emphasized. Romanians believe there is a powerful spiritual exchange between the living and the dead. Consequently, the lament develops performative acts of negotiation in the form of dialogues, improvised or recited, during the procession. The lamenters either address the deceased directly, or death as a feminine

character, attempting to bargain the return of the dead. Thus the Romanian dirge,

in the format of a sung ballad or of a chanted invocation, reflects a communicative

Romanian Dirge

23

pattern of negotiation between the living and the dead. Lamenters talk to the dead; they recount particular circumstances of death; they show the possibilty of fictive ‘communication through natural signs between the living and the dead; and portray the world of death and the process of putrefaction. Romanians do not believe in cremation. There is a popular belief that fire is destructive for it bums not only the body but also the soul of the person, preventing the dead from becoming immortal. Consequently, a distinct category of Romanian dirge refers to the case in which the deceased is an unmarried girl. As mentioned before, this type of lament portrays a strong connection between the ritual of marriage and that of death. In such an instance, Romanian folkloric and religious traditions demand the performance of a symbolic wedding before the deceased is buried. The body is dressed in nuptial attire, and the gates of the courtyard are adomed with fir-trees to announce a marriage in the community, a wedding between the deceased and nature. From Gennep’s perspective (1908), the three phases of the ritual (separation, transition,

and incorporation) become intertwined as the symbolic behavior of the protagonists (the deceased and nature) is narrated by the lamenters. The laments make reference to the social status of the dead, the symbolic marriage, and attempt to negotiate a reversible ritual of a real marriage. The funeral rite of separation becomes “a symbolic model of social order that also attempts to be an effective means of regulating that order, as it is grounded upon the same fundamental structural and dynamic principles as society itself” (Kligman 1988: 44). Since the above observations provide a cultural background for the Romanian dirge, I can now present the main characteristics that ballads and laments share in Romanian folklore. Amzulescu (1964) has emphasized the typical folkloric structure of the Romanian ballad as being an integrated poetic and musical one, affiliated to the Balkan mode! rather than to the medieval epos, Thus, one can identify the common background shared by both ballads and laments in Romania The first similarity between ballad and dirge in Romanian folkloric tradition refers to the manner in which both are performed in rural villages. Ballads as well as dirges are performed with a musical background, allowing improvisations “that fill in and amplify the room left between the fixed forms of popular verse” (Amzulescu 1964: 27). Secondly, since they arise from the same folkloric roots, ballad and lament share a poetic pattern, having similar forms of epic rhyme, namely monorhyming periods of 7- or 8-syllable lines. Thirdly, repetition represents a structural component that is found in the versification of both ballads and laments; repetition is present either through reiteration of the same word or through synonymic usage in two or three immediate lines. Fourthly, repetitive devices share a common purpose in Romanian ballad and dirge, for they create an amplification of the story from the simple forms of repeated words, rhymes and synonyms into a suggestive, dramatic crescendo of the story or ritual. A fifth shared characteristic between Romanian ballad and lament refers to their common poetic devices: epithets, dialogues, metaphors, invocations, questions and negotiations, apostrophes, hyperboles, conscious exaggeration of the situation, symbolic analogies, descriptive and narrative elements of the folk tales are similarly combined in artistic form in ballads or the poetic verses of the dirge. A sixth feature is the mixed character of lyric and epic in Romanian ballads, one that is shared in laments as the lamenters narrate, recite, and perform stories about the deceased or Romanian folk tales during the funeral ritual

24

Ballads and Boundaries A further feature that is shared between dirge and ballad is that both are rooted

in ancient poetry of the fantastic and ritual. The Romanian dirge reflects mainly two

of the ballad categories of Romanian folklore, that is the solar and the domestic ballads. In the funeral ritual, lamenters refer to nature and death as they incorporate

themes from common tradition in their expression of the passage of humans from

‘one stage to another. Consequently, Romanian ballads on domestic themes reflect an indexical quality similar to the dirge, inasmuch as both allow the performer(s) to improvise and adapt the text to the specific collectivity addressed. Kligman, analyzing funeral rites in Transylvania, comments on the similarity of ballad themes to those of the laments as she offers a thorough comparative study

between the most famous Romanian ballad, “Miorita,” and the dirge (1988: 243-245). Kligman states that

Symbolic marriages, whether grounded in popular or in institution-

alized religious beliefs about relations between the living and the

dead, find profound resonance in Romanian culture, especially exemplified by the Miorita, the inspirational traditional Romanian

ballad... Symbolic marriage is the most significant feature common to the death-wedding and variants of mioritic tradition .... Both of these cultural texts — the death-wedding and the Miorita - - offer a dramatic resolution to threatening circumstances, almost beyond the control of humans (Kligman 1988: 243-245)

‘A number of Romanian folklorists and ethnographers (Papahagi 1967, Rusu 1967; Scarlat 1982; Stoicescu 1983, Ursache 1976) have highlighted the cosmogonic perspective on life and death prevailing in most Romanian folk songs, ballads, and

laments. Dima (1982) stresses that Romanians consider death the most significant cosmic relation of human beings. In most Romanian folk ballads the ceremonial of

death is incorporated in a descriptive manner almost identical to its actual enactment of a funeral ritual. Teodorescu and Paun (1967) identify the presence of the same

three main parts of the death ceremonial in ballads and laments. The authors reveal

a similar perspective on death that ballad performers and lamenters present as they

narrate: (a) about the separation of the living and the deceased; (b) about the passage of the dead in “another” world; and (c) how the ritual balances a social order

that has been interrupted by the departure of the dead. From a rhetorical perspective, Vrabie (1978) reinforces the similarities between Romanian ballads and laments in the discourse of incantations, and in the symbology of narrated and performed ritual. Lastly, the folk songs or melodies that accompany both laments and ballads

constitute another fundamental feature of Romanian folklore shared both by ballads

and dirges.

Whenever a ballad performer narrates a hero's death or sings of

cosmogonic elements of passage, a lament is incorporated.

The Romanian dirge

contains features of Byzantine chant and recitative — parlato — as major features of its musical format. Traditionally, male performers sing and narrate ballads, while

female performers are the only singers in the funeral ritual.

Although the

performances are clearly defined by gender, the actual singing is similar in style for

both ballads and laments. The performer alternates the melodic formulas — parlato — of recites them on the same note — rectotono — in a continuous musical

Romanian Dirge

25

monodic variation, ending with a chanted sound that delineates each dramatic episode. The melody is directly related to the text, and allows for improvisation. Psalmodic chant, a unison that underlies the text through single notes, and variations in voice modulation allow ballads and dirges to be sung in a Byzantine musical style. Thus, the performer chants, utters, or voices long sounds, modulates, and uses invocations in his or her stichomythic dialogue with the audience or with the deceased. In conclusion, the musical forms of heterophony, unisonic and monodic modulation, and improvisation of melodic alternatives prevail in both ballads and dirges. As regards the performative aspect of Romanian dirge, the performer shares an identical position in the interpretation of both ballad and laments. Whether presentinga ballad or lamenting the dead, the performer(s)is (are) only anonymous interpreter(s), facilitating the communication between the dramatic narrative and the actual perception of folk custom in daily life. The laments, then, are always performed by women who, singularly or in groups, evoke sorrowful moments and personal narratives about the deceased. Romanian lamenters, similarly to those in Greece, perform dirges by narrating stories or ballads as well as expressing their own feelings — anxiety, sorrow, fear, and anticipation — in their laments. Romanian funeral ritual imposes specific laments to be sung at the laying out of the dead and at the tomb. The performers link cosmogonic themes of death and life, marriage and separation, with specific data about the deceased. Their monodic chant of rhymed verses is interrupted by crying, sobbing and/or shouting to dramatize the experience of sorrow. Dirge performance constitutes a dramatic event as the audience experiences a powerfully emotional ritual. The chorus of female voices offers a vivid interpretation of laments. Accompanying the deceased to the tomb, the women express collective opinions onthe social order and on tradition, and offera dramatic dialogue between the living and the dead. Similar to ballad performance, the enactment of Romanian dirges presupposes a public — villagers and participants in mouming the deceased — that knows the cultural repertoire. The audience is aware of the specific rules of the rite of passage, and takes active part in expressing the same feelings enacted by the lamenters. Amzulescu (1964: 7) notes in his study of Romanian folksongs and ballads that songs, dirges, ballads, and their performances are orally transmitted, by participating in the ritual. Watts explains how the performers actually learn their performance skills: [The oral poet has no choice but to create his whole song out of a reservoir of formulas in which commonly recurring ideas have been

tailored to fit the verse...

. Every time a song is heard it is different

and the young singer cannot therefore memorize it in a fixed form. Instead, the emphasis is on leaming enough formulas and well enough until they become part of the singers poetic thought, thus enabling him to sing a song...... The picture that emerges is “one of

the preservation of the tradition by the constant re-creation of it (Watts 1988: 35).

26

Ballads and Boundaries

Consequently, the performers become actors/participants as they literally and musically enact personal emotions and collective reflective opinions on the necessity of funeral ritual, and on the significance of the social and moral order for macrocosmic harmony. ‘Ong (1988) reinforces textual interpretation as a hermeneutic model for other interpretations. His explanation of intertextuality makes it relevant to the interpre-

tation of laments in the Romanian ritual of passage. Thus, he claims that all texts are

“interwoven with other texts in the most elusive ways” (Ong 1988: 262). Textualization builds all texts into one another and in this way they become salient. One can therefore trace “intertextuality” everywhere and in everything that is considered “text”. Ong considers, moreover, that oral habits of thought and expression are essentially interweavings with one another, deeply repetitive, built on formulaic expression, commonplaces, epithets, responsive to the total context in which they come into being, and supported in the formal art of rhetoric by the doctrine of imitation, which is repetition of sorts, a kind of interweaving of art and nature (1988: 265).

Oral utterance calls for interpretation, and Ong emphasizes the “climate of interpersonal negotiation in which meaning is brought into being and sustained and changed through discourse between persons set in a. . . context” (Ong 1988: 267). Meaning is not assigned in oral tradition, but negotiated. Accordingly, the ritual of passage becomes a continuous negotiation between the living and the dead. The lamenters talk to the deceased, they attempt to make them leave their condition and to rejoin the collectivity of the living with their specific daily duties. Contemporary oral tradition focuses on shared sets of meanings and communicative acts that enable the interpreters and the public to interact in the process of textual participation in the ritual communication. Advocating an anthropology of performance and ritual, Tumer (1982) analyzes the rites of passage as instances of social drama.

As such, life-crisis rituals do not distinguish between audience and

performers. Tumer contends that participants in rituals “all share formally and substantially the same set of beliefs and accept the same set of practices, the same set of rituals” (Tumer 1982: 112).

Ong’s hermeneutical perspective of oral tradition

and Tumer's anthropological analysis of rituals support the performative function of Romaniun dirges within traditional funerary rituals in contemporary Romania. Inconclusion, for Romanian folkloric tradition the dirge performance represents an act of negotiation between the living and the dead, an act of expressing painful emotions yet also an act of liberation as the soul of the deceased reaches immortality. Currently, Romanian rural communities continue to consider the funeral ritual and

the accompanying dirges mandatory rites of passage, hence preserving most of its folkloric tradition. Romanian funeral rituals contain elements of ancient Dacian and Byzantine ceremonial in synchronic interaction with characteristic of contemporary national folklore. Faithful to their folklore and rich historical past, Romanians believe in the Spiritual need to accommodate the immontality of the souls of the deceased by means

of the appropriate ritual observances. combines

ballad verses,

monodic

The enactment of the Romanian dirge

music

and

female

choral

voices

as active

reinforcers of these ancestral ceremonies of passage. The Romanian dirge, therefore, represents a ballad in its own right, one of the best preserved in contemporary oral tradition.

oo

Romanian Dirge

a7

References Cited

Amzulescu,Al. I. 1964. Introducere. In Balade populare romanestt, ed. Al. 1. Amzulescu, pp. 5-95. Bucharest, Romania:

Editura pentru literatura.

Birlea, Ovidiu. 1977. Romania and the Romanians,

Romanian Academy Publication.

pp. 175-275. Los Angeles, CA: American

Dima, Alexandru. 1982. Viziunea cosmica in poezia romaneasca.

Iasi: Editura Junimea.

Eliade, Mircea. 1957. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by W. R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. . 1971. The Mytb of the Eternal Return: or Cosmos and History. Translated by 'W. R. Trask, pp. 21-103. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Bollingen series.

1992. Symbolism, the Sacred and the Arts. New York: Continuum, Gennep, Amold van. 1960. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. First published 1908. Kligman, Gail. 1988. The Wedding of the Dead. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ‘Ong, Walter. J. 1988. Before textuality: Orality and Interpretation. Oral Tradition 3, 3: 259269.

Papahagi, Tache.

1967. Poezia lirica populara.

Bucharest, Romania:

Editura pentru

literatura, Rusu, Liviu. 1967. Viztunea lumtt in poezia noastra populara: Studit de folclor. Bucharest: Editura pentru literatura Scarlat, Mircea. 1982. Istoria poeziet romanesti, Vol. 1. Bucharest: Editura Minerva. Stoicescu, Nicolae, 1983. The continutty of the Romantan people.. Bucharest, Romania: Editura stiintifica si enciclopedica ‘Teodorescu, Barbu and Paun, ©. 1967. Folclor itterarromanesc. Bucharest: Editura didactica si pedagogica.

Tumer, Victor W. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: PAJ Publications.

The Human

Seriousness of Play. New York:

Ursache, Petru. 1976. Poetica folclorica, lasi: Editura Junimea. Vrable, Gh. 1978. Rbetorica folclorulut-poezii. Bucharest: Editura Minerva/ Universitas. ‘Watts, Niki.

1988. Tbe Greek folk songs.

Caratzas, U.S.A.

Bristol, U.K.: Bristol Classical Press/ Aristide D.

GUILLERMO

E.

HERNANDEZ

New Perspectives on the Corrido Although there is general agreement that Mexican ballads (corridos) are descendants of the Spanish romance, several hypotheses have been advanced regarding the forging of this New World tradition. It is not clear whetber the genre survived in latent state during colonial times, gradually evolving into its present form, or whether it suddenly, and unprecedentedly, emerged during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This paper addresses a number of these issues, proposing a pre-nineteenth century

origin whereby the corrido is the result of diverse generic influences that developed as a continental Spanish-speaking ballad tradition with various regional manifestations.

‘The origins, development, and generic characteristics of the cornido are still awaiting a satisfactory scholarly discussion. During the last few years scholars have eschewed such fundamental issues in the study of the genre, applying themselves, instead, to either studying a limited number of texts or else compiling large collections of corrido texts and melodies from various regions and historical periods. Nevertheless, the reassessment of these central aspects — the birth, evolution, and consolidation of the corrido — continues to be an urgent, though pending, matter. ‘Two important dates mark the discussion on the corrido as a historical genre that emerges and becomes clearly defined. First, the publication of Vicente T. Mendoza’s collection in 1954, which represented a new selection and, therefore, a new definition of the genre. At that time Mendoza chose to emphasize the heroic orientation of the genre, no longer including many of the satirical and humorous songs found in his 1939 volume, Romance y Corrido. The second important date

in the formulation of the corrido as a genre was 1963, when Merle E. Simmons and Americo Paredes, disagreeing somewhat polemically, voiced their respective views on several important questions: 1) When did the corrido first emerge? 2) how long had it been alive? 3) where did it first appear? According to Simmons, the genre is as old as the Spanish conquest and survived, perhaps in a latent state, throughout the history of Latin America. In his article, “The Ancestry of Mexico's Corridos,” ‘Simmons supported his thesis by providing many examples from distinct periods and regions of the New World. A response from Paredes soon followed in an article entitled, “The Ancestry of Mexico's Corridos: A Matter of Definitions,” where he made a number of important statements that questioned Simmons’ thesis. Thus, Paredes argued: 1) a few selected examples found diachronically and in various regions do not make a tradition; 2) there is no evidence ofa cornido tradition before the middle of the nineteenth century; 3) the genre possibly emerged in the Texas-

EE BE

New Perspectives on the Corrido

29

Mexico border area. The hypotheses held by these two leading cornido scholars may now be re-evaluated in light of the research conducted in the field in the last thirty years. In particular, attention must be paid to the important collection from the state of Zacatecas, published by Cuahutémoc Esparza Sanchez (1976). Zacatecas and the Corrido Tradition

In his valuable book (1976) Esparza Sénchez provides a detailed documentation of the longest living Mexican corrido tradition available today. The collection includes an early poetic narrative, with music, whose heroic protagonist is the leader of the Mexican independence, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, commemorating his arrival in Guadalupe, Zacatecas, in the year 1811. It is possible to compare this early narrative with the stanzas of corridos composed during the Mexican revolution, that is, with popular compositions made a hundred years later. A superficial comparison should be sufficient to demonstrate important similarities between the “Maiianitas de Hidalgo” and “Asalto a la Hacienda de San Juan.” 1) Both are octosyllabic quatrains whose second and fourth lines rhyme while the first and the third do not. 2) Both are local narratives, framing the deeds of a protagonist, represented in heroic terms and acting according to real-life circumstances. 3) Both narrators address audiences that are knowledgeable of important contextual information and who, therefore, do not require to be informed of the identity of people mentioned, the respective narrative backgrounds, nor the importance or dramatic significance of the events mentioned. 1. “Mafanitas de Hidalgo” (Esparza Sanchez 1976:11)

1A. “Asalto a la Hacienda de San Juan” (De Maria y Campos 1962, v. I: 403).

A las seis, a Guadalupe, por la casa de Cifuentes, Megaron el cura Hidalgo ¥ Su tropa de insurgentes.

El dia dieciséis de junio con regocijo y afin entraron los gutierristas a la Hacienda de San Juan.

At six, to Guadalupe, by Cifuente’s house, arrived father Hidalgo and his rebel troops.

On the 16th of June with joy and courage Gutierrez's troops arrived at the San Juan hacienda.

Both stanzas depict the protagonists (Hidalgo and his troops/Gutierrez’s men) at center stage, arriving decisively at the scene where ominous events will take place. Thus, the Esparza Sanchez collection forces us to reconsider the age of the corrido. That is, to question if indeed the genre has its beginnings during the middle of the nineteenth century as suggested by Mendoza and Paredes. ‘The existence of this collection from the state of Zacatecas, likewise, stands in opposition to the geographic suggestions thus far proposed: by Paredes — regarding the possible origins of the corrido in the border region of Mexico and the United States, especially in Texas — and by Mendoza, who places it in the center of México, probably in Michoacén. Indeed, as we shall see below, an important issue in the scholarship on the corrido, is the relationship of the genre with parallel or related geographic traditions

30

Ballads and Boundaries North and South in the Corrido Tradition

In the southernmost part of the continent — particularly in Argentina and Chile —there are compositions known as romances, cantares, corridos, corridas, vidalas,

averias, cielitos, logas, and tonadas that have been collected since the latter part

of the nineteenth century. These compositions offer striking resemblances with the corridos sung in México and the United States. In spite of their respective differences

and distances in geography and history, two branches emerge that appear to derive

from a common source: the Spanish romancero or ballad tradition. The parallels in both branches are characterized by similarities in vocabulary, tone, setting, character treatment, and dramatic portrayal. In the following pages I shall establish some comparisons in order to propose the existence of common features among both of these branches of what may called the North American and the South American corrido traditions.

Important cycles in the Mexican and the Argentine corridos are represented by confrontations between military forces. The following stanzas portray the bravado of two rival generals by alluding to popular imagery: bullfights and cockfights. In both the enemies act with boldness, anticipating their respective triumphs in battle. 2."Atiendan Sefores Mios” (Fernandez Latour 1960: 277)

2A. “La Toma de Zacatecas” (Esparza Sanchez 1976: 75)

Dice el general Medina -Vamos a jugar el juego porque llevo tres toritos

Les dijo el general Villa: -Conque est dura la plaza? Ya les traigo aqui unos gallos,

General Medina said: “Let's play the game Thave three bulls. Lizondo, Guayama y Cuello.”

General Villa said: “You say it is a tough position? I have brought you some roosters I think they are top breed.”

Lizondo, Guayama y Cuello.-

creo que son de buena raza

‘The insignias and nomenclature distinguishing the contenders are a source of identity and pride to their respective troops: 3. “Marchamos del Cerro Negro”

3A. “La Toma de Matamoros”

As a distinctive signal a fierce red band with lettering on the forehead: A Federal ‘tll death

The banner they carried was white and red it had words saying: “Second Batallion, Chao.”

(Femndez Latour 1960: 267) Como seftal distintiva cinta colorada y fuerte con un letrero en la frente: Federal hasta la muerte.

(Hemindez 1985: 20) La bandera que traian era blanco y colorado y en un letrero decia: “Segunda Brigada, Chao.”

An old cielito from Argentina describes, lyrically, a group of soldiers in a fiesta. ‘The composition employs poetic resources also evident in a variant dedicated to the exploits of the legendary Mexican bandit, Heraclio Bemal:

EB

31

BEBE RE

RRB

A

'

SE

New Perspectives on the Corrido 4. “Si No Bailamos el ‘Cielo™ (Femandez Latour 1960: 138)

4A. “De Heraclio Bemal” (Mendoza 1954: 207)

Qué es aquello que relumbra debajo de aque! cerrito? Son los bravos federales que estan bailando un “Cielito.”

Qué es aquello que relumbra

What's that shining light at the foot of that low hill? It's the fierce federal soldiers who are dancing a “Cielito.”

‘What's that shining light all over the road? It’s the guns of the “18th”

SEE

Son las armas de “El Dieciocho” que traen a Heraclio Bernal

bringing Heraclio Bemal.

The portrayal of the protagonist in heroic terms is another characteristic shared by the Argentinian and Mexican corridos. The following examples praise the feats of Gregorio Torrilla — hero of the Argentinian battle of Cepeda in the middle of the nineteenth century — and Quirino Navarro — Mexican soldier who fought in the Cristero rebellion in 1929.

5. “Este Gregorio Torrilla” (Feméndez Latour 1960: 184)

5A. “Quirino Navarro” (Hemandez 1985: 23)

Este Gregorio Torrilla mozo de mucho valor, de buena cara y buen cuerpo pero de mala intencién.

Ese Quirino Navarro, hombre de mucho valor, cinco dias duré sitiado ¥ no cambié de color.

This Gregorio Torrilla, a lad of great courage, a good countenance and presence

This Quirino Navarro a man of great courage, five days he was under siege but he did not become flushed.

but 2 mean disposition.

HBEERERE

por todo el camino-real?

Another traditional theme with ample diffusion throughout the Spanishspeaking world is the condemnation proffered by a mother whose child has disobeyed her. Especially fatal are the oaths directed by the mothers in the Mexican corrido of “José Lizorio” and the Argentine corrido dedicated to “Cepeda.” 6. “Salio Cepedita Un Dia” (Carrizo 1926: 120)

6A. “De Jose Lizorio” (Mendoza 1954: 258)

Permita Dios de los Cielos Nuestra madre consagrada Que al pasar nuestros umbrales Te cosan a pufaladas.

y también todos los Santos,

God in heaven, and our Holy Mother permitting, when you cross that door you'll be stabbed to death.

May it be God's wish, evil son, and also all the Saints, that you fall in the mine

Quiera Dios, hijo malvado,

que te caigas de la mina

y te hagas dos mil pedazos!

and break into 2,000 pieces.

These similarities between the corridos in Mexico and the southem part of the continent suggest a continuous tradition in the New World of forms and conventions

32

Ballads and Boundaries

inherited from Europe. It is my purpose in the pages below to establish the relationship that also exists between the Mexican corrido and the Spanish romance from various periods and thematic genres. The Sources of the Corrido: A Polygenetic Process

Itis necessary to mention, as was pointed out by Paredes and Mendoza, that the corrido is nota simple borrowing or imitation of the Spanish romancero. The literary evidence demonstrates that corridos are the creation of popular authors who have taken the materials of the Spanish legacy and have conceiveda new generic tradition with its own local characteristics and conventions. In this way, the variety in the

Spanish romancero feeds the creation of the cornido tradition which, taking some of the elements of the peninsular tradition and abandoning others, gives rise to new narrative songs with their own set of themes and problems as well as particular linguistic characteristics. It is possible to distinguish, at least, seven romancero sources in the formative stages of this new genre in the New World. These are as follows: 1. Spanish epic: historical songs

2. The novelesque romance 3. The romance of captives, prisoners and those condemned to execution 4, Cowboy songs

5. Sacred romances

6. Misfortunes and disasters by natural causes 7. The Spanish copla One important antecedent in the development of the cornido is represented by the epic romancero with historical and chivalrous branches which developed in

Spain as a popular genre depicting brave and reckless young men. The influence of this theme will be most prolific in Mexico, especially after the revolution of 1910. In these Mexican versions two rivals confront each other publicly — in a cantina, a dance, or a similar popular meeting place — and the encounter will help define the merits of the individual and, implicitly, the values of the community. The results of these conflicts very often result in death.

In spite of the chronological distance separating the two poems, the scene

between Ferman Gonzalez and the king (d. 970) sharesa number of similarities found

in the confrontation between Valente Quintero and the major, Martin Elenes (1922). In both cases, and in spite of their respective hierarchies, the confrontation of the Spanish subject, portrayed by Ferman Gonzalez on one hand, and the Mexican

officer, represented by Valente Quintero on the other, tum their differences into enmity and rivalry.

7. “Fernan Gonzalez y el Rey” (Alcina Franch 1969, v.I: 92)

TA. “Valente Quintero” (Mendoza 1954: 198)

Alli hablara el buen rey, ‘su gesto muy demudado: -Buen conde Fern Gonzélez,

Salié el Mayor para afuera, bastante muy irritado: -Valente, 16 no eres hombre,

mucho, sois desmesurado.-

no eres mas que ocasionado.-

New Perspectives on the Corrido

E] conde le respondiera,

-Yo no soy ocasionado,

-Es0 que decis, buen rey, véolo mal alifado.‘The good king spoke thus, with a stem look: “Good count Feman Gonzalez you are an insolent.”

nos daremos de balazos, si usted gusta, mi MayorThe major went outside, quite irritated: “Valente, you are not a man, you are nothing but a troublemaker.”

como aquel que era osado:

The count answered him

as a brave man would: “That which you say, good king, | find distasteful.”

33

yo soy hombre de valor,

“Lam not a troublemaker,

Tam a man of valor, we'll shoot it out, if you wish, major.”

Since poems depicting military battles frequently praise the heroic actions of

their protagonists, a number of values such as courage, boldness, strength, and skill are glorified in contrast to their antithesis — cowardliness, fearfulness, false pride, weakness, and incompetence. Thus, it is not fortuitous to encounter parallels

between an episode from the sixteenth century romance, “Los siete infantesde Lara,” and the twentieth century corrido, “Lucio Vasquez.” In both cases the mother of the heroic protagonist wams him of the dangers awaiting him at a public festivity. The genre allows the field of battle to be easily transferred to a public site where tragic events take place. 8. “Los Siete infantes de Lara” (Alcina Franch 1969, v. 1: 118)

8A. “Lucio Vazquez” (Ontiz G. 1992: 32).

Por Dios os ruego, mis hijos,

Su madre se lo decfa:

In God's name I beg you, sons, do not leave your lodgings because at those celebrations

His mother would tell him: “Beware of a treachery, don’t go, my son,

no salgtis de las posadas, porque en semejantes fiestas se urden buenas lanzadas

fights are provoked.

-Cuidate de una traicién, ‘no vayas hijo de mi alma me lo dice el coraz6n.-

Ihave a premonition.”

The influence of the romancero is clearly seen in the corrido celebrating the feats of bandits who have been condemned, either to be hanged, or to be executed by a firing squad. In Mexico this type of composition is identified by titles such as mavianitas, despedidas ot recuerdos, and are synonyms of the term “corrido.” It is conventional in these songs for a prisoner who is condemned to death to address the witnesses of the execution and to mention in his last words the names of living ordeath persons — friends, relatives,a lover — some symbol of personal importance —a gun, his horse — architectonic or geographic elements (churches, mountains, regions — or divine figures — Christ, the virgin, saints. This common tradition is evident in the romance of the Andalusian bandit Diego Corrientes (nineteenth century) and in the corrido commemorating the death of the Mexican revolutionary general “Benjamin Argumedo” (1916).

34

Ballads and Boundaries

9. “Diego Corrientes” (Marco 1977, v. 2: 449)

9A. “Benjamin Argumedo” (Henestrosa 1977: 187)

Aqui muero por mi culpa desgraciado infelizmente, pedirle a Dios que perdone culpas de Diego Corrientes. (Marco 1977, v. 2: 449) I die here and it is my fault unhappily and wretchedly pray to God's forgiveness the sins of Diego Corrientes

Ya se acabé Benjamin ya no fo oir_n mentar ya est4 juzgado de Dios ya su alma fue a descansar (Henestrosa 1977: 187) Benjamin is finished you won't hear his name anymore, God has judged him his soul has gone to rest. Conclusion

In the pages above I have provided a general outline of some distinguishing

literary features of the corrido. It is evident that the genre is closely related to a number of poetic expressions found in Mexico since the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present; in Argentina and Chile since the last part of the eighteenth century, throughout the nineteenth and until the first part of the twentieth century; and in Spain throughout the various transformations of the romancero. While this comparative framework

has not been exhaustive, the similarities found in the

various examples provided, allows us to suggest a number of rewarding possibilities in the research of the genre. The following provisos would be appropriate in order to obtain a new perspective on the corrido: 1) The corpus of the corrido must be subjected to a careful examination in order

to identify the themes, topics, scenes, and narrative cycles that have characterized it and which are parallel to what may be called the romance-corrido pan-Hispanic, Portuguese, and Catalan traditions.

2) Based on this previous identification, an attempt should be made in

establishing the regional and chronological characteristics that may help identify distinct evolutionary stages in the corrido tradition.

3) Future collections and studies of the corrido corpus will determine the

importance of examples that are particularly valuable to the development of the genre.

4) The research on the corrido must be undertaken as an interdisciplinary effort

that allowsa panoramic view of the genre, and explores its place in traditional culture — oral, printed, popular, and literary. It is within this framework that it will be possible to distinguish more clearly the diverse historical, cultural, and social currents that separate and unify the old from the new worlds as they have been synthesized in this most traditional of genres: the corrido.

References Cited

Alcina Franch, Juan, 1969. Romancero antiguo. 2 vols. Barcelona: Editorial Juventud. Avitia Hemnindez, Antonio. 1989. Corridas de Durango. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia 1987. Canciones y corridos ferrocarrileros. México: Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México.

=a

mee

eee

eB

BRR

ERE

New Perspectives on the Corrido

35

Bayo, Ciro. Romancerilio de Plata. 1943. Buenos Aires: Institucién de cultura espafola. Becco, Horacio Jorge. 1960. Cancionero tradicional argentino. Buenos Aires: Hachette. Bonfil, Alicia O. de. 1970. La iiteratura cristera. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia € Historia. Caro Baroja, Julio. 1969. Ensayo sobre la Itteratura de cordel. Madrid: Revista de Occidente. Carrizo, Juan Alfonso. 1926. Antiguos cantos populares argentinos: canctonero popular de Catamarca, Buenos Aires: Impresores Silla Hermanos. 1942. Cancionero popularde La Rioja. 3 vols. Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe. 1933. Cancionero popular de Salta. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Tucumén, 1933. . 1933. Canctonero popular de Tucumdn.. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Tucumén, 1935. Canctonero popular de Jujuy. Tucumén: Miguel Violetto. De Maria y Campos, Armando. 1962. La revolucién mexicana a través de los corridos populares. 2.vols. México: INEHRM. Di Lullo, Orestes. 1940. Canctonero popular de Santiago del Estero. Buenos Aires: s.

29%

ba #

doen-ti

™ Od Pas unger a me - nl -

?

- bo quin-dad’a-mo-es con-ti - go

ta

>

com va-ra__de mar-me-lei

2%

nha man-dei cha -mar_o

1%

fh vem

£

- lho

2%

a

mae nao me

wo

~-

- ro.

bar-bei - ro

*

> ’

com'na lan ce-t1 oa mado 9»

X10

#

= ma namie do com -¢0

(Fig. 5) The ballad “A fonte do salgueirinho” (from the village of Cagarelhos)

>

The Ballad in Northeast Portugal

261

The melodies of the ballads can themselves be divided into two main prototypes: the syllabic melodies (such as the first example above) and melodies displaying omamentation. These two prototypes correspond on one hand to ballads sung for diversion [in the broadest sense of the term, including those sung to accompany domestic tasks or agricultural work carried out indoors, and on the other to the harvest ballads. The latter may be embellished with melismas of a horizontal and sinuous nature. The harvest ballad takes an alternating form, with two women, or two groups of reapers, singing in a call-and-response pattern. The singing style is that of slow progression, based on the repetition of verses, in which the voices must carry a long way. Following is the most representative example of the harvest ballad that I was able to record. 6. O Lavrador da Arada (Tras-os-Montes, Grijé de Parada village)

Original field recordings (1978) ‘and musical transcription : Anne CAUFRIEZ

[4-60]

262

Ballads and Boundarie.

(Fig. 6)

The ballad “Ditoso do lavrador” (from the

The Ballad in Northeast Portugal

263

In this open-air ballad, the strong beats of the melody do not correspond to those

of the meter, contrary to the first syllabic ballad above (the stressed syllables of each verse are underlined). It is in fact a song I have been unable to fit into standard

measures (every attempt to do so yields unequal values). There is a lack of synchronization between the verse and the music. This mismatch is also accentuated here by the addition of the monosyllables 0, ai (third stave, beginning of voice 1), which shifts the verse out of synchronization with the melody, as does the anacrusis on the monosyllable with which the phrase begins (first stave, voice 1), a common feature of the harvest ballad. The latter ballad is thus characterized by the melodic

prolongation of the syllables and its elastic periodicity. The metric foot of the verse (two syllables) does not drive the musical rhythm, but merely provides a safe landing for the singer lost in the middle ofa melisma. The melody has considerable freedom

from the constraints of the meter (Caufriez 1994: 291-384). Conclusion

I can affirm that the ballad of Tras-os-Montes preserves the following features: on the sociological level, ballads are not strictly limited in their function. They may

accompany any moment of daily life, such as minor agricultural tasks (e.g,, shelling almonds or peeling chestnuts). But they are, above all, harvest songs. The singing of the harvest ballad at ritualized times (the canonical hours) springs in this region

from religious customs dating back to the Middle Ages. In former times, the ballad

also constituted a repertoire sung every evening around the domestic hearth. ‘On the melodic level, the ballad also preserves a medieval musical tradition that

has its counterpart in other regions. The majority of the melodies of the ballads I have been able to gather arise from a non-tempered musical system, with a predominance of pentachords and fluctuating rhythms close to those of medieval music. Some

melodies appear to be of earlier origin than others, but they cannot be assigned to a fixed chronology since they were composed independently of the lyrics. Portugal has also conserved more archaic melodies than has Spain. Other ballads comprise sixteen and seventeen different notes exactly like the melodies left by the Renaissance composers.

On the level of its vitality (or its survival), the ballad of Tris-os-Montes is

threatened today by the massive emigration that is characteristic of Portuguese

villages and which is fragmenting the ballad tradition. Even if the ballad is still alive

at the level of memory, it is no longer renewed or community is being weakened and deprived of its leaving in search of work elsewhere and abandoning the raison d’éire of the transmission process from

revitalized because the village vital forces. Young people are the agricultural system that was one generation to the other.

264

Ballads and Boundaries References Cited

Caufriez, A. ed. 1993. Chants du bié etcomemuses de bergers, Trds-os-Montes, Portugal. Paris: Ocora Radio France (compact disc, Sth edition from original 1980 edition), . 1994. Le Chant du pain. 2 vols. Paris: Centre Culture! Portugais (Fondation C. Gulbenkian). ‘Cruz, M.A. de Lima, ed.

1955.

Histéria da mtistca portuguesa.

Lisboa: Dois Continentes.

Morais, M. ed. 1986. Vilancetes, cantigas e romances do seculo XVI. Lisboa: Fondation C. Gulbenkian, Col. “Portugéliae Musica”.

Pidal, R. Menéndez ed. 1953. Romancero bispénico [Hispano-portugués, americanoysefardt) Teoria y bistoria. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Pito-Correia, J.D. ed. 1984. Romancetro tradicional portugués. Lisboa: Editorial Comunicagao.

265 JUDITH

Just How Bounded is the Ballad?

Brazilian Examples

SEEGER

Two

‘This paper suggests that the four main topics of the conference are intimately related to one another in the case of the Brazilian ballad. Generic boundaries in Brazil have been notably unstable for over a century. As compared with their Iberian counterparts, Brazilian ballads show a marked trend

toward the disappearance of narrative verse or toward replacing it with

prose. The increasing dominance of either dialogue or prose bas led to

renderings that can be identified as ballads in bistorical terms though in generic terms they are more accurately considered dramas or tales. The paper explores the issue of boundaries from both generic and cultural perspectives, tracing the development ofa living ballad tradition and calling into question the very nature of the boundaries that have seemed to define balladry.

I must say that when prompted by this conference to ponder the boundaries of the Brazilian ballad, ! had to face the fact that I could not think of a single boundary that I could assert was meaningful to the people who perform ballads. Genre, text, ballad-singing and performance, and boundaries of cultural experience — the four main topics of this symposium — may be categories that inform my thinking. But consider: as faras genre is concerned, I have recorded pieces that can be identified, in some respect, as ballads, performed as songs; performed as poems; performed as dramas sung by different singers taking different parts, occasionally accompanied by gestures; and performed as stories, with sung verses liberally and often imaginatively embedded in spoken prose. What do these have to do with ballads, or romances, to use the Hispanic term, which were originally identifiedin Spain and Portugal as octosyllahic, or occasionally hexasyllabic, verses, with alternate lines ending in assonance, and which we now write as 16-syllable lines divided into hemistichs? ‘The concept of text is no easier to define. Traditional ballad performers, to be sure, work with received material to produce organic wholes which, insofar as they are identifiable and separable, may be called texts; but it is no revelation to observe that, while traditional singers may attempt to reproduce admired performances, and succeed in doing so, they do not accept textual authority in its literary sense. That is, there may be preferred ways to render a ballad, but there is no right way which, by virtue of its approved existence, excludes all the other wrong ways.

266

Ballads and Boundaries

‘The boundaries are no less difficult to discern when we consider ballad-singing

and performance. This, too, is nothing new. The earliest collectors of traditional Hispanic

and

Luso-Brazilian

ballads,

or romances,

observed

that they

were

performed in events ranging from dances, to harvests, to evening spinning sessions.

In modem Brazil, ballads (whose verse, unlike that of its Hispanic counterparts,

tends to be strophic and to rhyme) have been performed in such contexts as street

celebrations, evening story-telling sessions, relaxation from work or accompaniment to it, children’s games, and lullabies. To a great degree, the performance setting seems to determine the generic tendency of any particular rendering. The oral traditional Brazilian ballad is malleable, generically permeable. It cannot be identified with a single time, place, or style of performance. The category of cultural experience is no more helpful as a distinguishing feature, in the sense of expressing a particular ethnic identity. Though the oral traditional Brazilian ballad is of European origin, I have no evidence that it retains any particular historic, cultural, or ethnic identity. On the contrary, it crosses both ethnic and class lines, a characteristic which may, in fact, have had a profound influence on what the ballad is becoming in Brazil. It does seem that the traditional

ballad is more readily found among poor and lower-middle-class people than among

the more well-to-do. It is also more likely to be found (in this case without class distinction) among those who live in rural areas or small towns, or who are no more

than a generation away froma rural or small-town upbringing. The traditional ballad is regarded by many as old-fashioned and rustic. Aside from this, however, balladsinging seems to imply no rigid cultural or ethnic distinctions. I suppose the questionI have raised is really “What is a ballad?” But rather than attempting to answer that question, I would like in this short paper to narrow its focus, first by looking in more detail at one of the grounds of my assertion that Brazilian ballads know no bounds — that of generic mutability — and then by retuming briefly to the central question of this conference, that of intercultural

context, which may help account for the striking tendency of Brazilian ballads to be transformed into stories.

‘Whatever the oral traditional ballad may be to those who sing and listen to it,

itis not an inviolable object. Like any living text it raises questions, but unlike a fixed written text it allows itself to be modified to answer them.

I would like to suggest

in particular that a tendency toward expanding the ballad to include prose fills a perceived need to answer questions raised by the characteristic spareness of sung

ballad diction. 1 will focus on a single ballad I recorded when I visited the states of

Sergipe and Espirito Santo in 1989." This is the very popular ballad called “O Cego” (The Blind Man), knownto Hispanic tradition as “El raptor pordiosero” (The Begging Abductor).

The sung words of this ballad, with the exception of an opening of onomato-

poeic knocking, consist entirely of dialogue. From the words we infer characters and actions. There is a knock at a door; someone inside asks who is there; the knocker

answers that he is a blind beggar; the unidentified speaker tells a woman, who is the only character givena name (in the renderings I recorded it was Helena, Aninha, or Naninha), to get up and fetch him bread and wine; the blind man says he does

not want bread and wine; what he wants is for Aninha to show him the way; Aninha

is told to guide him; they walk down a dark road; she, perhaps seeing horses and

a carriage, begins to fear that he is not what he seems, and he reveals that in fact he is not blind but instead has disguised himself in order to entice her out of her

Just How Bounded is the Ballad?

267

house so that he can carry her off and marry her; she bids goodbye to her house,

her garden, occasionally to her father, and finally to her mother, who she claims was

false to her.

The story thus sung is simple. Nothing in it answers such questionsas “why does

the blind man come to this particular door?” or “why does the mother ask her daughter to leave the house, evidently at night, to guide a stranger?” The daughter seems to think it was all a trick. But why does she think so? And, furthermore, does

anybody care? The nine renderings of “The “Blind Man” I recorded reveal that, yes, people do care. They also reveal that answers to these questions differ radically. In some cases the questions were raised and answered in discussions outside the

performance. In others, whichI have classed as sung stories, they were included in the performance.

The renderings of “The Blind Man” which I recorded in 1989, in

brief, were the following: There were four that had been leamed as dramatic pieces. In only two

performances, however, did different singers actually take the different parts. Of the other two, one had been learned in school as a dramatic game, though the singer sang it alone. Another performance consisted ofa lively encounter between two putative folklorists (a Brazilian and I) and an aged singer, forgetful but feisty, trying

her best to remember a game she had played and sung as a girl, all the while forcefully resisting being manipulated by the folklorists, too many of whose questions were those of people who thought they knew the answers. There were four sung stories. One of the performers began with an explanatory introduction in prose and continued with sung verse dialogue interspersed with prose segments, most of which identified the various speakers. Another first told me the story in great detail, none of which is included in the sung version of the ballad,

and then sang me the song, which, despite her announcement that the story would be sung, consisted in fact of sung verse interspersed with prose. The third had

transformed the piece into a cantefable: mostly prose, with a single repeated sung verse. The fourth performance was given by two women who had not seen each

other for years, trying jointly to recollect the ballad they had once known, Only one had been learned as a song. The singer was a 12-year-old girl who had

leamed it in school. This was the single time I saw a definitive written text. A friend

of the girl who sang it for me had written it out for her as a present, with a dedication and an elaborately designed border. In this short paper, I will consider only very briefly twoof the renderings of the ballad I recorded, representing two extremes with respect to generic integrity. The first presents the ballad in its most generically pure form. I recorded it from 46-yearold Maura Fernandes da Costa, in Conceigao da Barra, Espirito Santo. She had leamed it in school. The text and transcription follow. I have written the words

without intemal punctuation because the only pauses were provided by the tune, which was, roughly: eS

+

R=

=

J a4 3

a = t

=

;

=>

z=

———.

+

+

f

Ballads and Boundaries

268

Toques toc toque Toques toc toque

quem bate ai quem bate ai

Sou eu pobre cego esmola a pedir Sou eu pobre cego esmola a pedir

Vai Helena no armarinho Vai Helena no armarinho ‘panhar pao e vinho p'ra dar 20 ceguinho ‘panhar pao e vinho p'ra dar a0 ceguinho Nao quero Nao quero Quero que Quero que

seu pao seu p4o Helena Helena

tampouco tampouco me ensine me ensine

seu vinho seu vinho o caminho o caminho

Vai Helena mudar o vestidinho Vai Helena mudar o vestidinho

para ensinar 0 caminho ao ceguinho para ensinar o caminho ao ceguinho Pronto seu cego 14 est4 0 caminho Pronto seu cego

14 esté o caminho

Marcha Helena

mais um bocadinho

Eu nio sou cego € nem quero ser Eu no sou cego € nem quero ser

Me finjo de cego p'ra roubar vocé Me finjo de cego p'ra roubar vocé ‘Adeus ‘Adeus Adeus Adeus

minha minha minha minha

Knock Knock It's me It's me

knock knock who's knocking there knock knock who's knocking there poor blind man asking for alms poor blind man asking for alms

Go Go To To

casa casa mae mae

adeus meu jardim adeus meu jardim que foi falsa p'ra mim que foi falsa p'ra mim

Helena to the little Helena to the little get bread and wine get bread and wine

cupboard cupboard to give to the litle blind man to give to the litle blind man

I don't want your bread or your wine I don't want your bread or your wine

Just How Bounded is the Ballad?

269

I want Helena to show me the way I want Helena to show me the way 4. GoHelena change your Go Helena change your To show the way to the To show the way to the

little little litle little

dress dress blind man blind man

5. All right you blind man there is the road All right you blind man there is the road 6.

Walk Helena a little bit more

7. I'm not blind and neither do T'm not blind and neither do I pretend to be blind to steal I pretend to be blind to steal 8 Good-bye Good-bye Good-bye Good-bye

my my my my

house house mother mother

1 want to be I want to be you you

good-bye good-bye who was who was

my garden my garden false to me false to me

Maura, who was recognized as a good singer with a good memory, sang clearly, tunefully, and expressively but without gestures, or any direct address to the audience, which included, in addition to me, three women and four teen-aged girls. As is common in sung ballads, the dialogue begins immediately. The speakers are never identified, and as there was only one singer, listeners unfamiliar with the story would have had to follow the singing closely in order to recognize different interlocutors. The repetition of each line probably helped. The opening “toques-toctoque” represents the sound of knocking at the door, as is revealed almost immediately by the question, “Who's knocking there?” There has been no indication either of who is knocking or of who is asking the question, but the reply to the question appears to be clear and direct: “It’s me, a poor blind man, asking for alms.” The first musical quatrain, which is, verbally, a couplet with each line repeated, has established with characteristic ballad brevity the scene and two interlocutors. Each of the following stanzas belongs to only one speaker. Note that this is also the case with the stanzas I have numbered 5 and 6, despite their appearing on paper, in terms of assonance, to be two parts of a single stanza, artificially divided. The division may be artificial, but it is not mine: each of these “stanzas” was sung to the first half of the entire melody.

The response of the unnamed questioner seems simply charitable. Revealing itself to belong to a person with some authority, the voice in the second stanza tells “Helena” to bring bread and wine to “the little blind man.” Note that the blind man, though he has called himself “poor,” has not called himself “litte.” The diminutive is common enough in Brazilian speech to pass perhaps unremarked. But confusion mounts as the man responds that instead of bread and wine, he wants Helena to show him the way. What way? And why Helena? The unidentified voice instructs Helena to change her “little” dress and show the little blind man the way. Helena,

270

Ballads and Boundaries

though obedient, seems to lack enthusiasm for her task. Immediately after the stanza telling her to show him the way follows a broken stanza, in which we hear Helena’s first words, informing him, “All right, you blind man, there is the road.” She has not

used the diminutive, and she speaks shortly, as she might say “seu malandro,” that

is, “you rascal.” The musical incompleteness possibly indicates no more than that

something has been forgotten. The other rendering I recorded in Conceicao da Barra, however, also broke this stanza at this point, so this was not a momentary

lapse but rather was clearly an acceptable rendering. And, whether or not it was deliberate, considered together with Helena’s dry diction, the musical truncation contributes to both characterization and action. Helena seems eager to discharge her duty and go home, but the man, asif interrupting, urges her onward. Then, breaking

off his own stanza, he asserts his physical soundness and reveals his disguise and its purpose. Helena’s immediate capitulation to her fate does not indicate enthusiasm for it so much as realization that her home provided only an illusion of safety. She

first bids farewell to the place itself, and then to her mother, who we now know was the unidentified third speaker and the central player in what Helena belatedly

understands was a deception designed to lure her away from her home. What seemed at first to bea simple drama is revealed instead to be a drama within a drama, economically expressed within a few short exchanges of dialogue.

Still, one might ask whether Helena has reached the right interpretation of the

double drama. The diction of Maura's rendering seems to support her reading of the

events. In retrospect it appears that the man already knew her name. We also reevaluate the mother’s readiness to send her daughter on a possibly dangerous

mission, as well as her soothing diminutives. Yet it is possible to ask questions that Maura’s rendering does not explicitly raise. Was Helena’s mother really false to her daughter? Might she not have been taken in by the blind man, too? And if the mother did know who the blind man really was, why did she deceive her daughter? Maura’s rendering, while giving us a sequence of action revealed through dialogue, with a few hints as to interpretation, can, by virtue of its form, provide no more thana sketch

of a mystery as far as character and background are concemed. Such spareness is characteristic of traditional Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian ballad diction, and, indeed,

is part of its appeal (to me at least), but not all performers are content to accept such ambiguity. One singer, in fact, when asked, insisted that the mother did not know the man was an abductor in disguise. Another explained before beginning to sing

the ballad that the mother had indeed plotted the whole thing with a young man,

but added that she had done it for the daughter’s own good since the daughter was

too shy to accept anyone's proposal of marriage. A third, more elaborate, account

was that the mother had to trick her daughter into marrying a king because the

daughter had been so traumatized by all that her mother had suffered to bring her

up in poverty that she could not imagine marrying even a rich and powerful man. Still, even in that rendering, questions are left unanswered. Perhaps the mother was right and her daughter would go onto live happily ever after with her royal husband. Nonetheless, the daughter's last words are as bitter as those of Maura’s Helena, and we never know whether she later realizes that her mother knew best, after all.

A thorough consideration of these questions can be seen in the rendering of

Hildete Falc4o Baptista. Hildete, who

had learned “The Blind Man” from her

grandmother on the cacao plantation where she grew up, was the 68-year-old wife ofa federal senator from the state of Sergipe, and founder and director of an institute which provided a home for boys who were orphans or whose parents could not

Just How Bounded is the Ballad?

an

afford to keep them. Her style of delivery was neatly emotionless. She stared into space when I audiotaped her, and into the camera on the day I videotaped her, seeming almost to ignore the several women who were present both times, smiling only slightly as she approached the moral of the story. The tune to the sung verse was:

——— ppt

—

ov

=e

T

vr

—

T

T

r

=

+

=

Fig. 2]

Hildete began with prose. Line ends mark the places she paused. The sung verse is numbered Um dia tinha uma menina numa choupana E ela brincava assim na. na... assim no terreiro, quando passava um rapaz. Entdo ele virou-se para ela e pediu que ela 0 levasse até a sua casa pois ele era cego, € nao sabia como chegar. ‘A menina entio foi, perguntou 4 mae se podia levar. A mie disse, “E isso ai, vamos, minha filha. J4 que o lugar nao € longe. Vocé vai levando esse pobre rapaz.” Ela entéo pegou na mio dele e saiu com ele, né? Saiu, chega num certo lu com certo tempo, ela disse para ele que estava muito cansada. Ai ele cantou:

1.

Caminha Naninha mais um bocadinho que eu sou um pobre cego que ando sozinho

E nisso eles iam andando. Quando ela estava sempre cansada ele pedia esa misericérdia a ela: [rfl

272

Ballads and Boundaries 2.

Caminha Naninha

mais um bocadinho

que eu sou um pobre cego que ando sozinho

Mas deixe 14,

que esse rapaz, ele tinha essa missao a cumprir, devido a uma fada mA ter posto nele um feitico, que ele s6 voltaria a ser feliz quando ele encontrasse uma menina boa,

décil

e bela,

€ que ia levar-se a ele até o seu palacio. Pois ele, porque ele nao sabia mais onde era 0 paldcio dele. E ele encontrou essa menina por sinal ela era muito bonita, chamava-se Linda, e foi levando, ¢ acabou chegando ao palacio. Quando chegou a ver aquela. . aquela casa suntuosa, ela ficou abismada, né? de ver um ceguinho, né? que ela pensava que era um mendigo € no entanto ela estava diante de um principe. Ele ia entio confessou a ela que ele era um principe que ele nao era um mendigo, que ele apenas estava cumprindo uma sina e que, daquele dia em diante, que ele ia desposé-la pois ela mereceu dele. Nao s6 ela fez a caridade a ele como mereceu dele tudo o que ele que Ihe ia dar: riqueza,

posicao,

e tudo mais. Eu acredito que essa hist6ria mais fosse. seja uma forma de mostrar que o bem é sempre recompensado. Aqueles que faz 0 bem sempre a pessoa € recompensada por alguma coisa, € por isso que a gente deve, nao $6 nas historias mas em tudo que a gente faz, deve-se sempre olhar fazer o bem sem olhar a quem. Porque numa hora dessa a gente € sempre feliz.

Just How Bounded is the Ballad?

273,

One day there was a gitl in a hut And she was playing in . in.. in the yard, when a young man passed by. Then he tumed to her and asked her to take him to his house because he was blind,

and he didn’t know how to get there. So the girl went and asked her mother if she could take him. Her mother said: “That's right. Fine, daughter. Since the place isn’t far away ‘You go ahead, take that poor young man.” Then she took his hand and left with him, right? She left, arrives at a certain place . in a certain amount of time, she told him that she was very tired.

So he sang:

1. Walk Naninha just a litle bit more Because I'm a poor blind man who walks alone And with that they went on walking. When she was very tired she asked him to take pity: [laughs]

2. Walk Naninha justa little bit more Because I'm a poor blind man who walks alone But enough of that, for that young man, he had that mission to fulfil, because of a bad fairy who had put a spell on him, that he would only be happy again when he found a girl who was good, docile, and lovely, and who would take him to his palace. For he, because he didn't know where his palace was anymore. ‘And he found that girl by the way she was very pretty, she was called Linda (Beautifull And she took him and ended up arriving at the palace. When she saw that. that sumptuous house, she was amazed, right? to see a little blind man, right? because she thought he was a blind man and meanwhile she was in front of a prince.

274

Ballads and Boundaries

He was going then he confessed to her that he was a prince, that he was not a beggar, that he was only fulfilling a fate and that, from that day on, that he was going to marry her because she deserved him. Not only did she do a good deed for him but also she deserved from him everything he was going to give her: wealth, position,

and everything else. I believe that story really was. . . is a form of showing that good is always rewarded. Those who always do good, always the person is rewarded by something, and because of this we should, not only in stories

but in everything we do, we should always try to do good without caring for whom. Because at a time like that we are always happy. Clearly, Hildete, or her grandmother, had thought the story through. Everyone

in her fairy-tale telling is good and honest. The blind man is not disguised in order

to fool anyone, but is instead an enchanted prince fulfilling his unhappy destiny,

searching for the perfect woman to lead him to his palace, for he is really lost.

Naninha (or Linda, as she is called in the prose) is an unsophisticated (and, by the

way, pretty) girl with a heart of gold. There is no knocking. In fact, all that remains of the ballad besides a remarkable interpretation of its story, is a single stanza, which

emphasizes her charitable nature, sung twice, in the style of a cantefable. Naninha takes the initiative of asking her mother's permission to help the blind man. The mother is a kind and charitable woman, concemed only for her daughter's welfare.

She approves Naninha’s request to lead the blind man to his home, adding, somewhat mysteriously in what may be a trace of the duplicity seen in other versions of the story, that it’s all right because the place is not very far away. Naninha has no response except amazement to the revelation that the man who

has stolen her from her home is a prince who intends to marry her because she deserves him and all his wealth. In the absence of comment, it is probably safe to

assume that, unlike the daughters who accuse their mothers of betrayal, she is delighted. In any case, the question of deception on the part of the mother never arises, since the idea to help the blind man was Naninha’s.

Hildete herself, whose own life work has been charity, steps in at the end of the rendering to state and interpret the moral of the story. Doing good, as she sees it, is at least its own reward, and there is always the possibility that if we are good and docile and charitable (and it probably doesn’t hurt to be beautiful) we may be rewarded in more tangible ways as well. Her story, which generically is clearly not a ballad, expresses a widespread Brazilian belief that strangers, particularly needy strangers, appearing at one’s door, should be treated well. In secular stories the

Just How Bounded is the Ballad?

275,

mysterious stranger is often a prince in disguise; in sacred stories it tends to be Jesus.

But it doesn’t hurt to remember that things don’t always work that way. At the other extreme to Hildete’s interpretation of “The Blind Man” is that of the two women I mentioned earlier who were tying to reconstruct the ballad. They finally came to

the conclusion that the mother and daughter were so ignorant, frightened, lazy, and uncharitable that they never even answered the door.

‘This is far too brief to make my point convincingly, but I hope it is illustrative

of at least one sort of transformation that can be seen in the Brazilian ballad. Put most

starkly: Maura’s version of “The Blind Man’ is, generically, a ballad. Hildete’s is a story, or cante fable. I have renderings that run the gamut between them. What are those of us who are interested in balladry to make of them?

Thave no simple answer. I would just like to raise in closing two points regarding

generic transformation of the ballad in Brazil. The first is to reassert that there is a

tendency in Brazil to emphasize and develop the different generic markers — drama,

lyric, and narrative — inherent in the ballad. Which one is developed and emphasized will to a large extent be determined by the setting in which the ballad is performed. Furthermore, this is not a recent development. It can be observed, for

example, as early as 1873, in Celso de Magalhaes’ collection from the state of Maranhao (Magalhies 1973). The second point retums to the question of intercultural context, specifically to an intriguing similarity to what has happened to Child

ballads in the West Indies, as observed by Roger Abrahams in the Journal of the Folklore Institute (Abrahams 1987). The Brazilian situation differs in many ways from

the one Abrahams has described, but I cannot help but wonder if the mixing of

African and European populations has not had a significant effect particularly on the tendency of ballads in Brazil to become stories, a trend rarely observed, at least in

published collections, either on the Iberian Peninsula or elsewhere in America (with the apparent exception of the Caribbean). Perhaps the ballad in Brazil has survived insofar as it has been unbounded. This would be a curious kind of survival, as it implies the demise of the ballad as an identifiable generic form. It does, however,

provide those who are interested in the development and meaning of traditional verbal art with a window through which we may observe how such art develops and what it means to those who develop it. Notes

'My fieldwork in Sergipe and Espirito Santo in 1989 was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which I shared with Richard Bauman, John McDowell, Ronald Smith, and Joan Gross. All my tapes from this trip are available for consultation at the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music. References Cited

Abrahams, Roger D. 1987. Child Ballads in the West Indies. Familar Fabulations, Creole Performances. journal of Folklore Research 24: 107-134. Magalhaes, Celso de. 1973. A Poesta popular brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: MEC/DAC/BN. (Centenary edition of articles originally published in O Trabalbo of Recife in 1873.)

276 GERALD

PORTER

“Wee’l keepe our fingers playing”: Women’s Work Songs and the Appropriation of Tradition’ Some critics have maintained that work songs present the very act of working itself, not merely the representation of it. Work contributed to the rise of poetry since buman rbythm originated from the use of tools. Work songs are thus regarded as “primary” and all otber occupational songs as in some ways secondary. Yet the study of one occupational group, the lacemakers of

central southem England, suggests that work songs, far from being primary, reach into an already-established stock of songs, including ballads. Theyare allusive and evanescent in a way that undermines the whole notion of the

ballad “genre.” The lacemakers' songs indicate, too, that the development of occupational songs cannot be assumed to follow the “natural” progression from work song to figurative occupational songs to labor song. There is

instead a less schematic change: froma holistic view of work as social ritual

to a reification of the work process in terms of its tools and routines, with a

concurrent growth of group and class identity.

Singing by women as an expression of group solidarity has remained largely invisible in the great folk song collections (Porter 1992:115). Work songs are not

highly-valued products of our cultural life, and those by women have received the

least attention of all. Studies have concentrated on the songs of men engaged in

heavy collective labor, such as sailors and the inmates of prison farms in the southemn

United States (e.g. Hugill 1961; Jackson 1972), and this masculinist discourse has strongly characterized the early years of the Folk Revivals in Britain and the United States.’ In such company, women’s work has passed relatively unnoticed, or even been deliberately ignored. In his collection of the work songs of Afro-Americans on

prison farms, Bruce Jackson remarks significantly: “It was obvious that there was no point in collecting worksongs among.......the women at Goree [prison]” (1972: xix). Only one contextual account of rhythmic singing at work has been preserved in England, that of the women and child lacemakers of the south Midlands in the nineteenth century.

Performing a worksong is of course participating in the productive process itself.

The rhythm eases the work, but the songs also have an appropriating and a

transforming function: appropriating in that they put the work into the workers’

“Wee'l keepe our fingers playing”

277

framework rather than that of the employer (Jackson 1972: 30). The work provides

a kinetic subtext to the song. They are transforming in the sense that the work

becomes a dance, a game, a ritual (Zumthor 1990: 66-67). They are exceptional in that they have no audience apart from the performers themselves (Jackson 1972: 29).

Work songs are not songs about work, which is not, and cannot be, literally represented in song. It would have been absurd for a shantyman to describe an action that was already being realized both performatively and in the dynamic of the song. As John Fowles writes, “One cannot describe reality, only give metaphors that indicate it” (1977: 139). So the lacemakers who are the main subjects of this paper did not passively imitate the mechanical features of working life in their songs but related that life to wider experience or set up a challenge to those relations through distancing. ‘Work songs often progress by means of refusals and of negatives. Bruce Jackson

remarks that the songs sung by Afro-Americans on the prison farms he visited had as their central themes the signs of alienation, “things like unlove and unfreedom

and unimportance” (1972: xvi). Their themes are part of the text of meanings produced by any subculture, attempting to form a cohesive version of what is realized incompletely in the authoritative discourse. Studies of subcultures have generally concentrated on groups such as skinheads and bike boys. To describe a subculture like the lacemakers that not only includes children and aged women but

often standsin an antagonistic relation to male culture, is to overstep the boundaries of what is perceived to be a social fraction largely reserved for young, unemployed males.

‘Women's occupations have many features common to subcultures, in that they

offer women a place to stand, an authoritative stance. The dbobi woman

in colonial

India could challenge her English employers on matters relating to the washing of

clothes, but not on the upbringing of their children. In patriarchal Western

households, women have the authority to order their husbands out of the kitchen, but often do not have a say in the disposal of the family income or even their children’s education. The songs of the English lacemakers represent just such a “war of position,” an attempt to set up a text of meanings, and in so doing to transgress stereotypes set up in a male discourse in which they did not participate.

Bobbin lace, also known as pillow or bone lace, probably originated in Flanders

and became a standard form of decoration for linen. It should be distinguished from

the more sculpturally rich needlepoint, which is rare in folk art. Lacemaking was an important cottage industry in most villages in England from the early sixteenth to the

late nineteenth centuries. During much of this time it was the height of fashion, and

also worn by men. The traditional centers, set up by Flemish refugees in the late seventeenth century, were in southern central England. Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire lace was so widespread that it became the representative product of those counties. Machine-made lace, which gradually replaced it, grew out of the older frame-knitting industry in Nottingham at a time of depression in its staple trade of cotton and silk hosiery: the association between knitting and weaving, both ways of making up thread into cloth without interweaving, isa long one (Derry & Williams 1979:571).

Mechanization, which brought men into the industry for the first time,

rapidly encroached on the traditional centres. However many homeworkers, largely ‘women, were able to delay its progress by working for a lower remuneration, and in the middle of the nineteenth century, handmade lace still remained the specialized skill ofa handful of villages in these areas.

278

Ballads and Boundaries

From the seventeenth century onwards, lacemakers appear as the occasional subjects of London broadside ballads. In my book, The English Occupational Song (1992), | distinguished between insider and outsider songs, the former being based on shared group-intemnal experience. The latter, being parasitic on the occupation, rely on stereotypes set up elsewhere, often within patriarchal or bourgeois discourses. This is strikingly true of the street ballads that deal with the production and sale of lace. As Jean-Luc Godard says, “In every image we must ask who is speaking.” The London broadside publishers were in no doubtas to the signification of the lacemakers. They were “fine” and “flashy” lasses, part of the extensive broadside repertoire of willing and available women whose occupation was seen in terms of its metaphorical possibilities for representing sexual activity. The popular

nineteenth century London publisher John Pitts issued the ballad sheet, “The Flashy Lacemakers.” It plays on the sexual connotation of “lace” as the vagina:

They work at their pillow bobbins and pins, ‘And when your lace is done girls you may take it in. 7-8) This usage is not recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary but is still current, as in Shirley Conran's bestseller Lace (1982). By taking up this connotation, Shirley Conran crossed the gender border into the world of sex shops and the apparatus of male voyeurism. Within the male and printbound discourse of the street broadside, lace buyers and merchants enjoyed a corresponding reputation for sexual adventurism. A ‘Smithfield street ballad describes the bedroom romps of a “smart lace merchant” who is surprised by a returning husband (“The Lace Merchant Taken in by the Farmer”). In “The Flashy Lacemakers,” they scour the town for opportunities. The broadside once more plays on the meaning of “lace” and of “yard” as a unit of measurement or the penis Round goes the lace-buyers in every town, To see if there's any good lace to be found; ‘There's plenty of lace so you need not to fear, It's so much a yard and you'll find it not dear. (iL. 17-20) “The English Rover,” another Smithfield broadside, shows the hero as happy to pose to women as a seller of lace so as to “make her know more than a maid” before he goes away: At Aylesbury [I was] a lace-merchant, and carried my lace box, And oft times I my lace have sold to trim their Holland smocks; i. 13-14)

This male discourse, familiar today as the degrading language of sexist jokes and Tugby songs, is not primarily about sex but about power relations. As home-workers,

the lacemakers were exposed to a “divide and rule” policy operated by a cartel of male buyers based in the market towns. “For instance, payment in kind - or the truck

“Wee'l keepe our fingers playing”

219

system — forbidden as early as 1701 by Act of Parliament [because it deprived the lacemakers of part of their earnings), survived in the lace industry for nearly eighty years” (Mantoux 1968: 73). Such injustices were answered then, as now, by songs within the women’s tradition, which, unlike the broadsides, were both expressively

and territorially the singers’ own. These are the “insider” songs which were either “songs of delight” or counting songs in strict rhythm, a distinction already noticed by Blyau and Tasseel in Flemish lacemaking communities (1962: 25-38). The songs of the lacemakers in these villages, scattered in stray publications, have survived without details of the singers and minimal performance context by today’s standards, but several books (e.g., Wright 1924, 1930; Grimes 1991) have documented the lives of the women involved. Few of the singers are known by name, but they formed a cohesive group in each village. In 1854, A. E. Baker wrote about girls, some as young as five, working at their lace in summer “seated outside their cottage doors, or seeking the shade of a neighboring tree; where in cheerful groups they unite in singing their rude and simple rhymes” (1854, 1: 378). In winter they would gather in the parlor. In occupational songs, the existence of such a group seems to be a more significant factor in songmaking than, for example, a rural setting

or the degree of skill involved in the work itself, Before patterns of consumption

overwhelmingly favored the nuclear family, there was a plurality of social formations largely grouped according to working milieu or sources of supply. Many of these became centers of songmaking, The songs of the communal dwellings of farmworkers in northeastern Scotland, the bothies, were the first to be systematically collected and published. ‘As in many other occupations, the lacemakers had songs celebrating the exclusiveness of their skill. These included songs of sexual preference:

Come all you bold bachelors merry and free, If you want to live happy be ruled by me:

If you want to live happy all the days of your life, You must take a lace-maker to be your sweet wife. (Come all you bold Bachelors,” Il. 1-4)

The lacemaker performers invariably ranked themselves above other callings such as domestic servants: The great servant girl she runs down the hall Great holes in her stockings, no shoes on at all, Great holes in her stockings, scarce a rag to her back, So take the lace maker, itis all that you lack. (Lacemakers’ Song,” Il. 9-12.) By equating membership of the group with desirability, such songs were a form of paradoxical solidarity through individualism, but they basically articulate the same simplified position as those set up in the outsider songs. However, others emphasized membership of the group as a more attractive prospect than marriage, as in the early “Here is myrth and melody: The Bonelace Weauers Song” from the middle of the seventeenth century:

282

Ballads and Boundaries

technical language to express it serve equally to identify an outsider. But, as with occupational songs as a whole, the work process is not the subject. All technical terms are used figuratively. Since metaphor creation moves from the concrete to the abstract, from the specific to the general principle, these terms are obvious candidates. They are found even in street ballads which, as we have seen, relied on patterns of discourse far from the lacemakers’ own. But they appear constantly in the lacemakers' own work songs, as in the longest known tell, sung in both Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire, which opens: Nineteen long lines hanging over my door,

‘The faster I work it will shorten my score. And when I do play it'll stand at my stay; So my lite fingers must twink it away, For after tomorrow comes my wedding day.” (Old Songs 1904, 1) Unusually, details of the performance have survived in this case: A pin was stuck in as each line was chanted, and after the whole had been gone through a fresh beginning was made with “Eighteen long lines” etc., the number being reduced each time until “No long lines” etc. was reached. As there are 3 lines in the “tell,” a total of 700 pins was accomplished by the time the whole series had been gone through (Old Songs 1904: 1). ‘The singer's name is not recorded, but she was clearly very young. There are many references to ‘father’ and ‘mother’, and the tell includes six lines ofa nursery rhyme. In the lines quoted, the instrumental, the ruthless pace of work, overlays the

expressive element, the eager anticipation of the wedding day. The known milieu of the nineteenth century homeworker, where celebrating the rites of passage was not allowed to disrupt the production quota, is strongly present here, and confirmed in many contemporary accounts. In a closely parallel account from the same period,

a collier describes how his marra or workmate worked till the early moming of his wedding day and fell asleep on the way to the church (Bumet 1974: 112). However, in this tell, the conditions of enforced labor are crosscut by an erotic particularity centering on the lacemaking terms. The pillow on the bride’s lap, with its nineteen threads, conceals her “door” and therefore must be twinked away in double-quick time. Otherwise, the “stay” or loose thread will interfere with the lovemaking. The

stability of the term, which functions in single, not multiple meanings, has here been

subverted in a way that undermines hegemonic categories of work and play. Itis clear that, as here, children played a central role in the songmaking. Thomas

Wright records that at the end of the nineteenth century, thirty or forty children might be heard chanting the tells, “some of them little more than babies” (1930, 2: 193).

‘Thus the fabric that it was the height of bourgeois respectability to wear depended

directly on the work of one of the most powerless and exploitable sections of the

community, young girls. The hardheaded, antagonistic stance of the girl singers is in some ways disturbing because, like child labour itself, it displaces the Romantic construct of the pathos of the child. Also, as Terry Eagleton remarks,

“Wee'l heepe our fingers playing”

283

the child is a type of the critic in all kinds of ways: because of its incessant questioning, because it is parasitically dependent on a

language it none the less finds baffling and alien, because, being an outsider, it can see both more and less than the insiders, because it is an isolated ‘intellectual’ not fully conversant with common practices of feeling yet also more emotionally sensitive than most, because its social marginalityis the source at once of its blindness and insight. (1986: 150) Despite the work of the Opies and others, the concept of children’s culture as being dispensed from above dies hard. “Nursery rhymes” by adults for children continue to be more widely circulated than songs made up by children themselves. In the dialectic between for and by, ideology maintains its momentum. In folklore, the role of children as songmakers, as opposed to tradition-bearers, has received little attention. The reality is that, as Betty Messenger writes, “children, particularly girls, {have} contributed heavily to the creation and transmission of a corpus of lore” (1988: 225). Historically, this has been achieved more often through work than through play. Despite the rhetoric of individualist ideology, the children in the lacemaking villages were not treated as discontinuous individuals but exploited as part of the labor force. Even the local social historian Thomas Wright fails to give the name of a single informant, usually recording merely that a particular tell was sung by “a child.” The typical children's tell appropriated snatches of games or chants,’ often adding a sinister or Gothic element to emphasize the grave consequences of breaking rhythm or looking up before the count was completed. Dorothy Grimes records a version of the witch game “Wallflowers": Wallflowers, wallflowers, growing up so high, ‘We're all the ladies, we shall have to die, Except -- --, she’s the only one, She can hop, she can skip, She can tum the candlestick. So turn your back, you saucy cat, And say no more to me, For if you do, I'll chop you in two, And hang you on the tree.

(Grimes 1991:198)"

This is more gory than any collected by the Opies, who print a version ending: Tum your back, you saucy cat, And say no more to me, Or if you do, we'll set on you, And tie you to a tree.

(Opie 1985: 247)

284

Ballads and Boundaries

The relation of children to the adult world is mimetic and parodic rather than parasitical. It is known that lacemakers sang big ballads at work, versions of “Long Lankin” (Child 93), “Death and the Lady” and “Sir Hugh” (Child 155), for example (Wright 1930, 2: 184, 193). These were adapted by children to the form of the tell by leaving a core of narrative that would only be meaningful toa member of the circle who had heard the full version many times. In other words, the narrative was built on the gaps and silences of the song. Again, details of the work process would be incorporated symbolically. For example, a child in the Buckinghamshire village of ‘Weston Underwood sang:

A lad down at Olney looked over a wall,

‘And saw nineteen little golden girls playing at ball. Golden girls, golden girls, will you be mine?

You shall neither wash dishes nor wait on the swine, But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,

Eat white bread & butter and strawberries and cream, (Wright 1930, 2: 186]

A.common narrative ballad opening in England, found in at least seven Child-type ballads, including “Sir Hugh” (Child 20, 49, 81, 95, 155, “The Bitter Withy” and “The Trees they do Grow High”), refers to children playing ball in this way: As I strolled out one evening down by the college wall I saw four and twenty college boys all playing at bat and ball. (Kennedy 1975: 473) The setting has been changed to the small Buckinghamshire town of Olney, center of lacemaking in the county and close to Weston Underwood. The college boys have become “golden girls,” the gold-headed pins used to attach the lace. Counting the pins frequently started at nineteen. Finally, the narrative switches into a modified version of what is today a children's rhyme, “Curly locks, curly locks” (Opie and Opie 1951: 140), as it was sung by one of the many children who were working on the lace. Both urban and rural child labor was, it will be remembered, an essential instrument in setting in place the new structures of the Industrial Revolution. The polyphony of the song moves between the instrumental detail of the lace pillow and the expressive courtship narrative drawn from traditional and nursery song in a way that would be meaningful only to those who were at the point of intersection of all the intertexts. The lace bee, or communal working circle, was an ideal setting for such cross-cutting of narrative, and was a site for the frequently-observed tendency for ballads to pass into children's street songs (Messenger 1988: 44). The same process is seen in a song from Yardley Hastings, also sung by a child: Twenty pins have I to do,

Let ways be ever so dirty. Never a penny in my purse, But farthings five and thirty.

Betsy Bays and Polly Mays, They are two bonny lasses;

“Wee'l keepe our fingers playing”

285

They built a bower upon the tower, ‘And covered it with rushes.

(Wright 1930, 2: 192)

‘The counting of the pins is still the controlling idea, but the second stanza has appropriated the opening of the ballad “Bessie Bell and Mary Gray", known primarily in Scottish versions and printed by Child (no. 201). However, the building of a rush tower to escape the plague in the late Middle Ages had little resonance to children in a Northamptonshire village at the end of the nineteenth century, so the ballad was radically shortened and adapted to the local custom of gathering rushes on Rush-bearing Sunday. Here again, by transgressing its boundaries so radically,

the child singers of the lacemaking villages undermine the whole concept of a Child “canon.”

This dismantling of barriers between art, labor and a wider social life, a function the work song shares with all avant-garde art, is a feature common to many lacemaking songs. It is central to this children's chant from Renhold in Bedfordshire: Needle pin, needle pin, stitch upon stitch, Work the old lady out of the ditch. If she is not out as soon as I,

A rap on the knuckles shall come by and by. A horse to carry my lady about Must not look off till twenty are out.

It is followed by the relentless coda:-

Hang her up for half an hour, Cut her down just like a flower. (Wright 1930, 2: 190) In this case the technical process of completing the sequence of pins is not only expressed metaphorically through the old lady that must be pulled from the ditch,

but in the stark realism of an atmosphere of punishment that was both actual (the

rap on the knuckles) and menacing (Hang her up for half an hour,/Cut her down just like a flower"). The final couplet was sung to any girl who looked up before she had counted twenty pins. The task of counting is the subtext of many work song narratives, and suggests that some songs with apparently random numerical sequences, such as “The Whummil Bore” (Child 21) might be investigated on this basis.

The tendency of work songs to take sides, to interpret as well as describe, puts them inside the tradition of the occupational song, but not end-to-end in the sense

that they represent an earlier stage that was superseded. They seem to spring into

being when called for, often drawing on existing songs, and lead a much more ephemeral existence than, for example, ballads. They represent a specialization of the song for functional purposes, and as such show precisely the same tendencies to metaphorical extensions of the work process. Some critics and fieldworkers have maintained that work songs present the very act of working itself, not merely the

representation of it. Work thereby initiated poetry, since human rhythm originated

286,

Ballads and Boundaries

from the use of tools. In this hierarchy, worksongs are regarded as “primary” (and by implication, superior) and all other occupational songs as in some ways secondary. Yet the study of the repertoire of the lacemakers of central southern England suggests that work songs, far from being primary, reach into an alreadyestablished stock of songs, including ballads. They are allusive and evanescent in a way that undermines the whole notion of the ballad “genre.” They exist in what Bakhtin calls “jolly relativity” with the work process. They create the moment of camival in the stronghold of its antithesis, the workplace. They are fused with their setting in that for some singers, the working milieu is an essential condition for performance. As one of the Suffolk singers recorded by Ginette Dunn in the 1970s commented, Just as I'm setting here I couldn't think of a song, but [if] you walked out of that door and I got ascrewdriver in me hand, then I'd start (Reg Jay, Blaxhall, Suffolk, 1975, quoted in Dunn 1980: 147148). Taken together, the songs of the lacemakers represent the dreams of disalienation that are characteristic of the cultural production of any subculture. They indicate a change from a standpoint which has its roots in a holistic view of work as social ritual to reification of the work process in terms of symbolic structures, with a concurrent growth of group and class identity. Even at the most literal intersection of work and performance, the rhythmic chant, the song reaches into the metaphorical. Bakhtin suggests that the testing of an authoritative discourse may be performed through a scrutiny of its boundaries: A conversation with an intemally persuasive word that one has begun

to resist may continue, but it takes on another character: it is

questioned, it is put in a new situation in order to expose its weak sides, to get a feel for its boundaries, to experience it physically as an object (1985: 348)

The constructed definitions and genres of “traditional song” operate as an authoritative discourse that marginalizes the songs of women and young girls at work. Their songs have been either invisible, like the not-sufficiently-narrative tells, or broken up into categories of Courtship or Diversion that violate the dynamic of the circumstances in which they were performed. The fragments of this dispersed body of cultural expression make up an important document of what Edward Said calls the “voices dominated, displaced or silenced by the textuality of texts” (quoted in Preston 1992: 317). It is a continuing project to return to them their coherence and

social meaning.

Notes

1 should like to record my thanks to Jos van Rijt and Roy Palmer for their considerable help in preparing this article. “it has since became a subject of parody, as with the folk club singer who introduced his. song with the words, “The next piece I leamt on the chain gang with Paul Simon.” “This usage is well attested in broadside sources. See Holloway and Black 1975: 89, 102, 150.

“Wee'l keepe our fingers playing” ‘The Bothy Ballads (Tangent Records, London, TNGM

287

109, 1971); Ord1990.

Come all you Old Bachelors” is entitled “Another Lacemakers’ Tell” in Ol Songs Sung in Bedfordshire 3, suggesting it was also used for counting purposes. “The largest corpus presently known is probably the songs of the Belfast textile workers. See Messenger 1988. Old Songs Sung in Bedfordshire {1904}:1. Thomas Wright quotes part of a Nothamptonshire variant in 1930:191. “Tltell father, when father comes home,” from GG's Garland or The Nursery Parnassus, by R. Christopher, 1784 (Opie and Opie1951: 141).

*Lavoid the word ‘nursery thyme’ as associated with a middle class domestic arrangement quite alien to the lacemakers’ communities. "°Complete text. As the tells are generally short and not readily available in print, I quote them in full References Cited

Primary Sources: Come all you bold bachelors. Bedfordshire tell, ca. 1904. Old Songs Sung in Bedfordshire 23. English Rover, The. Nineteenth century London broadside (Holloway and Black 1975: 88). Flashy Lacemakers, The. Nineteenth-century London broadside (Holloway and Black 1975: 102). Here is myrth and melody: The Bonelace Weauers Song . Written by Leonard Wheatcroft ca. 11650 (Palmer 1981: 24) Lace Makers’ Song. Sung by “Mrs Robinson” (no first name given) in Bedfordshire in the 1960s (Richards and Stubbs 1979: 11) Lace Merchant Taken in by the Farmer, The: Nineteenth-century London broadside (Holloway and Black 1975; 149-150). Tells:

Bobbins are twisting and twirling. The. Northamptonshire, ca. 1900. Tune: “For He's a Jolly Good fellow” (Grimes 1991: 95) Come all you bold bachelors merry and free. Bedfordshire, ca. 1904 (Old Songs Sung in Bedfordshire 1904: 2) Dingle dangle, farthing candle Northamptonshire, nineteenth century (Wright 1930, 2: 187) Get to the field by 1. Northamptonshire, nineteenth century (Wright 1930, 2: 183). Thad a Iittle nutting-tree. Northamptonshire, nineteenth century (Grimes 1991: 96 [from Wright).

Lad down at Olney, A. Weston Underwood, Buckinghamshire, nineteenth century (Wright 1930, 2: 186). ‘Needle pin, needle pin. Renhold, Bedfordshire, nineteenth century (Wright 1930, 2: 190). ‘Nineteen Long Lines. Nineteenth century (Old Songs Sung in Bedfordshire 1; Wright 1930, 2; 191 [Northamptonshire]; Baker 1854, 1: 378 [Northamptonshire)). ‘Mineteen miles as Isat bigh (“Mr Fox"). 1) Northamptonshire, nineteenth century (Holloway 1975: 128; Grimes 1991: 97; Wright 1930, 2: 182-183). 2) One moonlight nigbt (variant). Northamptonshire, nineteenth century (Wright 1930, 2: 183). ‘Nineteen miles to Charing Cross. Northamptonshire, nineteenth century (Wright 1930, 2: 189). Twenty pins bave Ito do. Yardley Hastings, Northamptonshire, nineteenth century (Wright 1930, 2:.192; Grimes 1991: 96).

Up tn the morning. Bedfordshire, ca. 1904 (Old Songs Sung in Bedfordshire :3). Wallflowers, wallflowers. Northamptonshire, ca. 1900 (Grimes 1991: 198).

288

Ballads and Boundaries

Secondary Sources: Baker, A. E. Russell Bakhtin, M. Austin:

1854. Glassary of Northamptonsbire Words and Phrases. 2 vols. London: John Smith. 1985. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. ‘Trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist. U. of Texas Press.

Blom, A. G. 1977. Folkevisert arbeidsiivet.

Oslo: Universitetsforiaget.

Blyau, A. and M. Tassel. 1962. Jepersch Oud-Liedboek Brussels. Bumett, John. 1974. Usefiul Toil. London: Allen Lane. Church, R. A. 1968. Economic and Soctal Changesin a Midland Town. Nottingham: Frank Cass. Day, W. G., ed. 1987. The Pepys Ballads. 5 vols. Cambridge: Derek Brewer. Demy, T. K., and Trevor I. Williams. 1979. Short History of Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunn, Ginette. 1980. The Fellowsbtp of Song. London: Croom Helm. Eagleton, Terry. 1986. Against the Grain. London: Verso. Finnegan, Ruth. 1970. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fowles, John. 1977. Notes on an Unfinished Novel. In Tbe Novel Today, ed. Malcolm Bradbury, pp. 136-50. London: Fontana. Grimes, D. A. 1991. Like Dew Before the Sun.

Lie and Language tn Nortbamptonsbire.

Northampton: Dorothy A. Grimes. Holloway, John, and Joan Black. 1975. Later Englisb Broadside Ballads. London: Routledge. Hugill, Stan. 1961. Shanties from the Seven Seas. London: Routledge. . 1977. Sea Sbanties. London: Barrie and Jenkins. Jackson, Bruce. 1972, Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. Kennedy, Peter, ed. 1975. Folksongs of Britain and Ireland. London: Cassell. Loyd, A.L. 1975. Folk Song in England. London: Granada. (First published London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967.) Mantoux, Paul, 1968. The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. Revised ed. 1961. London: Jonathan Cape. Messenger, Betty. 1988. Picking up the Linen Threads. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. Nettl, Bruno. 1983. The Study of Etbnomusicology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press Northall, G. F. 1892. English Folk Rhymes. np. Notes and Queries. 1899. 4th Series, Vol. Il, 8, 281. London. Old Songs Sung in Bedfordshire. 1904]. Bedford: Bedfordshire Times Publishing Co. Opie, Iona and Peter. 1951. Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Opie, Iona and Peter.1985. The Singing Game. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ord, John. 1990. Bothy Songs and Ballads. 1930. Edinburgh: John Donald. Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2ded. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Palmer, Roy, ed. 1981. Ballad History of England. London: Batsford. Palmer, Roy, ed. 1979. Everyman's Book of British Ballads. London: Dent. Porter, Gerald. 1992, The English Occupational Song. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Preston, Cathy. 1992. The Tying of the Garter: Representations of the Female Rural Labourer in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century English Bawdy Songs. Journal of American Folklore 105: 315-341,

Richards, Sam, and Tish Stubbs, eds. 1979. The English Folksinger. Glasgow: Collins. ‘Thomson, George 1980. Marxism and Poetry. 1945. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ‘Wright, Thomas. 1924, 1930. Romance of the Lace Pillow. (First published in 2 vols., Olney: H. H. Armstrong, 1919.) Zumthor, Paul. 1990. Oral Poetry. Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press.

289 SHEILA

DOUGLAS

Ballad Singing and Boundaries The paper summarizes some of the boundaries that exist in the current folksong situation in Lowland Scotland today. It draws attention to a number of boundaries: linguistic and geographical, social, psychological, and artistic, those of time and place, and those between singing, songmaking and song-collecting. Finally, the paper points to boundaries of education and taste that are changing official attitudes towards folk culture and its expression in Scotland.

This papers written from the point of view of the present-day Scottish Lowland ballad singer of the post-Revival period. Much of what I have to say may apply to other traditions and other times: it would be interesting to discover the degree to which this is true. In considering boundaries in connection with the singing of ballads, I have interpreted this to mean different kinds of boundary that would seem to the ballad singer to be relevant to what he or she does. First of all, mention must be made of the main linguistic boundary in Scotland, ‘one which is also to some extent a geographical boundary, namely that between Scots and Gaelic. The Gaelic-speaking area is usually regarded as that covered by the Northwest Highlands and Hebridean Islands, although since the early nineteenth century Clearances, when Highland estates were cleared of people to make room for sheep, Highland people have also been found in the cities of the Central belt. ‘There has been revival of interest in Gaelic recently, which is bound to be increased by the millions of pounds the Gaelic lobby has won for media promotion of the language, and more people are leaming Gaelic, but it still only represents about 2% of the population, the rest of which speaks, and sings, in Scots or Scots-English. Also within the traditionally Gaelic-speaking areas, as well as everywhere else in Scotland, there are large numbers of what are referred to as “white settlers” — English people who have opted out of the rat-race south of the Border to live in a more civilized part of the country. This is ironic when one remembers how the English have historically regarded Scotland as a barbarous country, one whose culture had to be suppressed. Of course they are now suppressing it by diluting it.

There is also a small proportion of what are called New Age Travellers — mainly urban dwellers who have dropped out of society south of the Border and gone on the road. The main difference between them and our own native tinker travellers is that the latter know how to live a nomadic life — the newcomers do not. They are mostly quite harmless people but live squalidly and are sometimes involved with drugs, but more often regarded as a public nuisance. The tinkers do not want to be identified with them, as they sometimes are by the authorities, and recent legislation brought in to deal with the New Age Travellers also applies to the more traditional

ones.

290

Ballads and Boundaries

We also have in Scotland a sizeable Asian community, including Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese, all well integrated with the population and playing

important roles in our cultural and economic life. Some prejudice does rear its head from time to time, but on the whole there is much less of it in Scotland than further

South, While their own cultures are respected, Asian children are also winning prizes at Gaelic Mods and taking part in Festivals all over Scotland, singing Scots songs, reciting Scots poetry and playing Scots music. The Scots ballads that are found in the Child collection, the Greig-Duncan Collection and other collections in the last 250 years, are from Lowland Scots. Gaelic also has its superb ballads (or rather lays), but they are a different and separate corpus. Although being part of the European cultural map, they do include parallels and share motifs with the Lowland and other traditions. For example, Margaret Bennett of the School of Scottish Studies tells me, there are Gaelic equivalents of “The Twa Sisters” (Child 10) and also “The Cherry Tree Carol” (Child 54) and there are quite possibly others. Thus ballad tradition does not necessarily observe linguistic boundaries. The forebears of traveller ballad singers like Jeannie Robertson and Belle Stewart were Gaelic speakers after all, and retain features of the Highland style of singing, which is more lyrical and passionate than the more down-to-earth and straightforward Lowland style. Broadside ballads, music hall songs and bothy songs are still popular with older singers and some younger ones too. Present-day Lowland ballad singers in Scotland range from tradition bearers who have inherited their ballads through oral transmission, who have anything from the most accurate to the most fanciful notions of their origins, to Revival singers, who may have researched about the history of the ballads they have chosen to sing, often learned from source singers, but also from books and records. In between there are various gradations of motivation and knowledge, some singers having a sense of tradition, some singing purely for enjoyment — or money — and a wide variety of performance styles from solo unaccompanied to harmonized group with instrumentation, and from highly decorated to simple and unadomed. The sheer enthusiasm of the Revival of the 1960s, which is a personal memory, has largely abated; there are fewer people in folk clubs leaming classic ballads now. More than anything, festivals have kept ballad singing alive. 1 think it is safe to say that all ballad singers have different ideas of boundaries that affect their singing, boundaries that may be bistorical or geograpbical, social,

psychological or artistic. These boundaries may be respected, or they may be crossed, depending on the individual singer. Let us consider a few simple examples. Most singers know that ballads have been sung for many centuries and were usually based on real events, however much they were modified and even submerged in the course of time. Often the older singers like to sing about events that happened in their own locality. They identify strongly with them and live out the emotions of the song. For instance, the Perthshire singer, Belle Stewart, is fond of “The Bonnie Hoose 0 Airlie” (Child 199), a ballad that commemorates the burning of a Perthshire castle by the Argyll Campbells in the seventeenth century. William Beattie from Canonbie in the Borders sings about Border feuds that took place on the ground wherever he lives: his house is only a mile or so from Gilnockie Tower where Johnnie Armstrang lived. The Northeast traveller singer Jane Turriff is fully aware that “Mill o Tifty’s Annie,” also known as “Andrew Lammie" (Child 233), was about something that really happened, in an age very different from our own, because the ruin of the

Ballad Singing and Boundaries

291

Mill o Tifty still stands (Jane was photographed beside itfor the sleeve of The Muckle Sangs record, issued by the School of Scottish Studies in 1975). And Fyvie Castle, with its tower topped by a statue of Andrew Lammie, Lord Fyvie's trumpeter, can be seen and admired by any visitor to the Northeast of Scotland. She knows that it belongs to an age in which women could be ill-treated, punished, and even killed for falling in love with the wrong man in the eyes of their family. But she is able to cross this time boundary to bring the story to life in her singing. A curious fact about Jane’s version of this ballad is that, while most others describe how Annie's parents and sisters and brother beat her “wondrous sore,” — her brother is supposed to have broken her back — Jane sings that she died of a broken heart, which is in fact what is on Annie's gravestone, dated 1631, in Fyvie kirkyard. Whether the inscription is a cover-up or whether in fact the violence actually occurred we cannot know now, but I am inclined to believe with Shakespeare that, "Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” 1 also think along with William Motherwell (1827) that oral tradition is often truer than historical record and most versions of the ballad record the violence. Annie's father was notorious for his savage temper. Jane is more of a romantic and abhors violence. She also came from a close and loving family. This shows how the character of the singer can influence the version of the story he or she tells. ‘One of my earliest and most memorable experiences of listening toa ballad was hearing Ewan MacColl singing “The Cruel Mother” (Child 20) in the mid-1960s at

Perth Folk Club. I have seldom had such a powerful feeling of being taken back in time into something outside of my own experience: when a woman who had a bastard child could feel so trapped and so desperate that she had to take its life :She's taen oot he wee penknife An twined this bonny boy o his life. She's laid him aneth a marble stane

Thinkin tae gang a maiden hame.

But far from being able to “gang a maiden hame” she had to live with the consequences, which in those days meant the fires of Hell. I can still remember the sense of terror that gripped me as the atmosphere of that ballad closed round me. I felt what it was like to be in that girl's situation: desperate to the point of being able to kill her own baby. Of course we have heard of that happening countless times, but Ewan’s singing took me inside that experience. This shows how the individual ballad singer's interpretation can help listeners to cross boundaries that otherwise might inhibit their understanding, You can read a fact in a history book which your intellect will put into your mental filing system, but you have to be knocked sideways by ballad singing like this to understand it in terms of human feelings. When it becomes real in this way, you realize that in fact we are not perhaps so far removed from this kind of horror as we think. I remembered the ballad recently when I read a newspaper story about a girl who workedin a stables and who became pregnant by her boyfriend. She was afraid to tell him, in case she lost him, or her parents, in case they disowned her, or her employers, who would sack her. She concealed her condition, gave birth secretly, disposed of the baby and ended up in a mental hospital. I think I was able to

292

Ballads and Boundaries

understand that girl's suffering more because I had experienced the emotions

evoked in the ballad sung by Ewan MacColl. Thus ballads which seem to belong to a far-off and different time can in fact reveal to us elemental forces that are still at work in what we think of as modern and more enlightened times.

‘Many people know the difference between book songs and those handed down

in oral tradition, and we are fortunate in Scotland in that we have had oral versions

right down to the present century. The travelling people, many of whose forebears

were Gaelic speakers, and from whose ranks came Jeannie Robertson, Lizzie Higgins, Lucy Stewart and her niece Elizabeth, Belle Stewart, Willie MacPhee,

Duncan Williamson, Stanley Robertson, Betsy Whyte and Jane Turriff, all inherited

ballads within their family and community circle by word of mouth. These oral links

cross the boundaries of time and place, In the Folk Revival, other singers, mostly younger, leamed these ballads at least partly by hearing them sung. But of course Scottish balladry is endlessly confusing because our folk tradition is largely the inspiration for, rather than the opposite of, our literature and respected oral tradition bearers have also been known to get ballads from print.

‘The multiplicity of versions that is the glory of the oral tradition is a very different thing from the concept of “the right words and right tune” that is current today. Some

people find it difficult to cross this boundary. It is a more creative approach than we are accustomed to in the modern world. Robert Burns understood this and felt free

to make his own versions of songs as well as add verses to fragments he came across. But many Burns worshippers — and there is a worldwide Burns cult that ignores Scottish song tradition, apart from him — attribute everything to him, whether he wrote it, rewrote it, partly wrote it or just collected it. Much labor has been expended in recording a whole series of Burns songs to their original tunes, some of which are unsingable and therefore no longer attempted. Projects like that miss the whole point of folksong, which is that it is kept alive not by adherence to one version or by a handful of highly accomplished star performers, but by ordinary folk singing songs in their own way. ‘There is no reason why songs cannot be leamed from books, but singers must be free to develop their own way of the song, which means telling the story, conveying its feelings and shaping it with a tune according to their own taste. Some of these versions will be better than others, but of course, even this is a subjective judgment. You have only to listen to adjudicators in traditional singing competitions to realize that, in spite of efforts to the contrary, different criteria can be applied by

different judges.

In my case, combining the aesthetic with the practical, the two most important

considerations, are feeling and breath: the singer must express the emotions behind the song and listeners must be moved; and quality of voice, phrasing and expressiveness all depend on the singer having enough breath. Having said that, one of the most moving versions I have ever heard of a song called “Bonnie Udny” was sung by a wheezy-voiced old travelling woman called Ruby Kelbey who could not sing more than three words at a time in one breath, but who had such passionate intensity, such a coniacb, as the travellers would say, that her singing touched the heartstrings. The same song sung by the most beautiful voice in the world, with

perfect phrasing, cannot have the same moving effect unless the singer's heart is in the song, and he or she is not using it as a vehicle to show off musical prowess.

‘This is what draws the boundary between the real traditional singer and the rest,

rather than age, sex, social class, ethnic group or training. In Scottish folk clubs and

Ballad Singing and Boundaries

293

festivals it is possible to hear both kinds and it has to be said that most people are not even aware of this boundary and apply criteria that very often have little to do with what they are actually hearing. The singer's looks, age, and sexual attractiveness, his or her skill with the guitar or other instrument, the use of gimmicks, whether he or she is a “big name” and even how many drinks the listener has had, can count for more than the actual quality of the performance. While the Scottish folk tradition has tended to be a more democratic one, shared by everyone from kings to beggars, social boundaries have appeared at times and disappeared at others. Ballads have, at different times, or even at the same time, been courtly entertainment; sung at the spinning wheel or the fireside; performed at fairs and markets or in the street or pub; family heirlooms; schoo! book material; or — perhaps worst of all — corpses for dissection by scholars and antiquarians. Ballads and songs are alive only if they are sung. In the Folk Revival, which began as an urban phenomenon, there was a tendency, particularly in the industrial Central Belt, to identify folk music with the working class and it was felt that teachers and academics or anyone well-off had no right to aspire to cross class borders to be folksingers. In Glasgow it was almost obligatory to be a card-carrying Communist (very often a lapsed Catholic) living in a Council house; anything else was “bourgeois.” It is certainly true that people who are interested in folk tradition are seldom on the right wing of politics. But then right wing voters are a small minority in Scotland, There is also a tendency for the Central Belt urban audience to dismiss the rural singers from further North contemptuously as “teuchters” — a kind of Scots equivalent of “hayseeds.” Of course the Revival had its own aristocracy, who paradoxically were the lowly travelling people, “discovered” by the academics and professionals like Hamish Henderson and Ewan MacColl. In addition to this, many folk club organizers, like me, were teachers, as were some of the commercially successful performers, like the Corres, the McCalmans, Jean Redpath, and Adam MacNaughtan. Once again, as happens frequently in Scotland, the social boundaries were blurred. The Union of the Crowns in 1603 removed the royal court to London, but it was mainly after the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 — which was not, in spite of what John Major will tell you, a democratically agreed Union — that the erosion of Scottish culture began. This affected our language and literature adversely but it served only to stimulate our folk tradition, which remained and remains, distinctively Scottish. This is one reason why it has been suppressed for political reasons because it is a clear affirmation of our national identity. Hamish Henderson realized this when he said in the Fifties, when the School of Scottish Studies was founded, that “we rapidly came to realize that by embarking on the study and collection of folk material, we were engaged willy-nilly in a political act” (Henderson 1980: 11). Every song collector since the eighteenth century has declared the folk tradition to be in its death throes; yet it lives on. 1 know this from my own experience of working with the Greig-Duncan Folksong Collection under Emily Lyle, which showsa rich abundance of folksong in the early 1900s, my own singing and collecting experience in the midcentury Folk Revival, and my present day participation in folk club and festival activities, in which ballads and traditional songs can still be heard. I myself nearly made the same mistake as collectors of the past in entitling my book on old singers, The Disappearing Generation. | changed it to The Sang’s the Thing (Douglas 1992). It contains the life stories of 28 singers that include people fromall walks of life, rural and urban, a fairly democratic mixture. Some of these have

294

Ballads and Boundaries

been involved with the folk scene in Scotland, but others were just people for whom singing was a natural part of life. Some were conscious song collectors; others simply picked up songs and learned them for enjoyment. ‘Manyof our song collectors have been literary men: our two best known writers

of the past, Robert Bums and Sir Walter Scott, were collectors and Bums, at least, could sing. Our best known collector today, Hamish Henderson, is also a poet and

a singer. They were, or are, also all songwriters; songs are not written by non-singers. Thus the boundaries between singing, song-making and song-collecting have always been blurred or non-existent. ‘There is, as far as present day ballad singing is concemed, a psychological boundary

in the minds of both singers and listeners that has to do with memory

and attention span, which in modem living conditions are shorter than in the past. ‘We rely on the printed page or the tape too much nowadays, for our memory is looked on as a formidable task. Moreover we have lost the knack of creative

performance. With their listening ability dulled by constant wallpaper music on the radio or canned music in public places, which they hear but to which they are not really listening, people are used to listening to songs that have only about three verses and they do not listen to the words closely. This tends to determine the length

of program spots or broadcasting slots. Friends of mine were once asked by the

Scottish BBC to reduce the ballad of “The Earl of Errol” to three verses for a radio

program. Even in folk clubs, long songs are regarded as heavy going by many of the audience. I think one reason for this is the failure of the Revival to see the link between

ballad singing and storytelling. Most of the old traveller ballad singers are also storytellers, Ballads are, after all, stories told in song. Length is not something to be held against them, especially since words are not wasted in ballads; even when there is repetition it is for emphasis to the ear of the listener. I compared the length and approximate number of words in the longest Scottish ballad I could find, and it was

shorter than one of the shortest short stories I know: Ray Bradbury's Tbe Pedestrian. An interesting side effect of this experiment was that Adam MacNaughtan, one of our best songwriters, tumed the short story into a ballad with the refrain, “Keep on

walking Leonard Meek.” My husband Andrew, as Ken Goldstein knows, uses old stories and the ballad form for some of his poetry. ‘There has recently been a revival of interest in storytelling in Scotland, with festivals taking place and a club called the Guid Crack Club appearing in Edinburgh asa result of the Scottish Storytelling Festival that takes place there every year in the ten days leading up to Halloween. The good thing about this is that it involves adults as well as children. People are inclined to think of storytelling as something for children —I think that’s why schools think ballads are for the younger pupils. Ihave run two story festivals in Perth, taking stories to community groups and schools, and am on the committee of the Scottish Storytelling Forum that has been set up and will

receive Arts Council support. Ballad singing is included in the storytelling. A number of storytellers, my husband and I among them, regularly visit schools to do storytelling, and I always sing ballads on these visits. This is also done by other storytellers who are ballad singers, like Duncan Williamson, Stanley Robertson, Willie MacPhee and Elizabeth Stewart. This is something new for schools, because up till now ballads only figure in poetry books and English lessons. Hearing ballads ‘sung startles not only the pupils but also the teachers.

Ballad Singing and Boundaries

295

‘A new emphasis on Scots language and culture in Scottish schools — strange as it may seem — is pushing back the educational boundaries that have kept Scottish children from becoming aware of their heritage for nearly three centuries. The Scottish Arts Council has recently conducted a series of seminars based on discussion papers for Arts for the Twenty First Century and has produced a new Charter for the Arts. I was asked to write the discussion paper for the Traditional Arts, and one of the principles enshrined in the new Charter is that support is to be given to these. The only problem is, after all the talking, that there is not enough money for all the things they want to do, but at least the Scottish Arts Council is saying the right things; in the past we have had to fight for recognition of the value of traditional music. We have now crossed that boundary. ‘AS regards the artistic aspects of ballad singing, there has been much experimentation over the years since the Folk Revival, which has pushed the boundaries of ballad style to an extreme. Apart from the solo unaccompanied singer, ballads have been performed by a capella harmonizing groups, by solo singers or groups with instrumental accompaniment in all sorts of styles. I have to say that I prefer the first of these, which is the most traditional, although I am not averse to a solo singer being accompanied by one instrument, as long as it is an accompaniment, Too many musicians, particularly string players, allow the instrument to dictate the pace and rhythm and virtually fit the song to the accompaniment instead of fitting the accompaniment to the song, or drown the words with the sound of the instrument, Many instrumental backings are too elaborate and preoccupy the listener more than they should. The best singers let the ballad speak for itself, without feeling obliged to tart it up in some way to make it “modem.” You do not need to modernize what is timeless. It would be like putting jeans on the Venus de Milo. I tend on the whole to be tolerant of the liberties taken with ballads, on the grounds that it is better that they should be sung, however inappropriately, than not sung at all. I am glad to say I detect a tendency at the present time to sing ballads unaccompanied or with minimal accompaniment, to allow the singer freedom to tell the story and transmit its emotions in a way that will engage the listener, even though there may be fewer people trying to sing ballads. Other boundaries that have been pushed back are boundaries of taste — songs that at one time would have not been popular or not sung in “polite” company —

this includes songs about political issues, as well as songs with sexual content. To sum up, I would say that the extent to which boundaries of one sort or another affect ballad singing in Scotland has largely been determined by changing circumstances of time, place, and individual preference or perception, and has not been characterized by rigidity or slavish adherence to convention. References Cited

Douglas, Sheila ed. 1990. The Sang's the Thing : Scotttsb Folk, Scotttsb History. Edinburgh: Polygon.

Henderson, Hamish. 1980. “It Was in You That It A’ Began": Some Thoughts on the Folk Conference. In The People's Past, ed. Edward J. Cowan, pp. 4-16, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Student Publication Board, Motherwell, William. 1827. Minstrelsy Anctent and Modem. Glasgow: J. Wylie. Scottish Arts Council. 1993. Charter for the Arts in the Twenty-First Century. Edinburgh.

296

SPIRO

SHITUNI

Boundaries of Musical Style in Albanian Folk Ballads

Albanian folk ballads continue to exist in the twentieth century as part of Albanian folklore. From an bistorical viewpoint they represent a relatively ancient cultural level, and from the aesthetic viewpoint they are quite

unique, They bave survived by means of folk performers living in the ethnographic zones around rural villages. Tbe musical substance of the ballads does not change according to the poetic text, but depends on the relevant ethnographic zone. Thus, in northern Albania ballads are sung in the monophonic style while in the south they are sung in polyphony. During the half century of communism in Albania one could find mainly ballads that told of beroism in the past against foreign invaders. Ballads were also created during this period that, while maintaining the traditional form, were politicized through communist ideology.

In Albania, the concept of ballad has gone through many changes. During the first half of the twentieth century it was understood to represent any kind of narrative song, Similarly, the legend-based epic of northem Albania was regarded as a ballad Later, scholars began to narrow their concept and definition of the ballad so that, today, it has come to mean those legendary and factual songs that differ from epic songs both in content and in form. Several Albanian scholars, including the folklorists Qemal Haxhihasani and

Anton Cetta, used to collect and study legendary songs as well as folk ballads." Meanwhile the American scholars, Albert Lord and Milman Parry, studied in particular the Albanian legend-based epic, as did the Russian scholar, Besnichaja. The interest in folk ballads within Albania increased especially during the 1980s, when the Academy of Sciences organized an international symposium in Tirana on the subject of “The Albanian Epic.” Until today, the ballad has been studied only from a literary and not from a musical point of view. In presenting this paper, I shalt concentrate on giving a brief outline of the musical dimension of Albanian folk ballads. During the twentieth century, folk ballads continue to exist asa part of Albanian folklore. They represent a relatively ancient cultural level from the historical viewpoint and are quite unique from an aesthetic viewpoint. Ballads preserve their characteristic features in, for example, content, narrative character, dramatic nature of the subject, tragic death of heroes, the emotional qualities, and so on as well as

Boundaries of Musical Style in Albanian Folk Ballads

297

in form (the exchange of dialogue, the accompaniment of the text by rhythmic refrains, verses often in blank verse, or containing eight syllables, and so on). The ballad has survived due to the work of folk artists, especially in the various ethnographic zones surrounding villages. ‘There are many active artists involved with our folk ballads — poets, singers, instrumentalists — in almost every village or town, zone or region of the country. But of course some representatives of this group of folk artists are more outstanding than others. They may draw our attention either as poets, singers, or instrumental performers. More often they are multi-talented artists, being both poets, singers and instrumentalists. The possession of more than one artistic skill is a general feature of our folk artists. Albanian artists perform folk ballads in a completely spontaneous manner, from their love of the traditional art. Their desire to sing ballads, play musical instruments, and so on comes usually as an expression of the necessity to practice their art, to amuse, and to fulfill their aesthetic needs. Historically, our folk artists in general have not become commercialized even up to the present.

In Albania, the heritage of folk music is normally transmitted orally. Through this means the performer of the ballad leams to sing and play without formal education. Only those artists who are self-taught can really become well known. Although the main trend of oral transmission in the folk music heritage is mostly characteristic of the rural social environment, it should, however, be pointed out that, in the last few decades, written methods of transmitting folk music have emerged. Even though these newer method have a future — due to the social and economic development of the country — oral transmission will continue to exist as the main form of passing on folk music from one generation to the other and from one historical epoch to the other. The musical substance of the Albanian folk ballad, in general, does not change

along with the poetic substance; it may be enriched with some nuances, but, in general, it remains the same. This substance, as a rule, differs not so much from one creation to the other but from one singer to another. In other words, whereas the same singer may perform several ballads with the same essential intonation, several singers may perform the same ballad with different essential intonation. While the poetic substance changes uninterruptedly, the musical substance remains almost the same, as can very well be seen in other genres of our folk music. This seems to be a universal phenomenon, which constitutes a specific aesthetic feature of the relations between text and music within musical folklore In researching the problem of ballad style throughout Albania, one can find at least four main groupings of ballads from the musical point of view. Among these four groups, the folk ballads of Northem Albania are probably the most distinguished. They are characterized by such fundamental features as, for example, 1. monophonic structure, and 2. a recitative melody, and 3. an inner, modal-tonal diatonic structure, and 4. a free or semi-free musical rhythm, and 5. an accompaniment by musical instruments such as the labuta, the gifteb, and the sbarki. One can conclude that the folk ballads of Northern Albania, from their intonational and modal characteristics, are similar in nature to the legendary and historical songs of the north. In addition to other factors, this similarity exists because of the musical accompaniment by the same instruments, among which the prime role is taken by the lahuta. This is an ancient instrument of the chordophone family similar to the gusla of the Southem Slavs and the rababa of the peoples of the Near East. Although legendary

298

Ballads and Boundaries

songs are different from ballads, the lahuta brings them closer to each other from the inner modal-tonal structure. Therefore, one can differentiate them more readily from the text than from the music.

=

=

wmas ite eal ae

td se

Ribas

ie

SES

ae

(Fig. 1) “Kur Pércolla Yiberin”

Kur _pércolla ylberin, ktheva, hina n'odé, kur ia pashé martinén vjerré, ia lava me lot Mos ¢ laj me lot, oj zan-o, mos e aj me lot 5

se shkon viti i paré, oj zan-o, porsi dita sot.

Kur pércolla ylberin, ktheva, hina n'odé, kur ia pashé sahatin n'ank-o, ia lava me lot,

Mos € laj me lot, oj zan-o, mos e laj me lot, se shkojné vitet ¢ kurbetit porsi dita sot.

Mora harxhet, dola n'bage, gorapin me shkrue,

10 prej mérzie mbi corape plasa tuj lotue,

©. ylber i dadés-o, a thue m’ke harrue? Vitet e kurbetit ylber, qofshin té mallkue!

Another important grouping is the folk ballads of Central Albania. In the towns, these ballads are characterized in general by 1. a homophonic structure, 2. a developed and omamented melody, 3. 2 modal-tonal structure that is often chromatic, 4. a usually free musical rhythm, 5. a solo singer, 6. accompaniment by musical instruments, and so on. But in Central Albania an apparent difference between the folk ballads of the cities and villages can be observed. Urban folk culture in general is clearly distinguished by its modal-tonal inner structure. Therefore within village ethnographic zones one can also find ballads that are

Boundaries of Musical Style in Albanian Folk Ballads

299

characterized by diatonic or even pentatonic structures, a definite musical rhythm, the lack of musical accompaniment, and so on. Central Albania has always been seen by scholars as a region where urban musical culture and that of the village are different from the point of view of inner modal or tonal structure. ‘The third grouping is formed by the folk ballads of Southwestern Albania. Their fundamental distinctive features are 1. polyphonic structure, 2. a recitative melody, 3. pentatonic structure, 4. the multiform contrast between main vocal lines, 5. a usually well-defined musical rhythm, 6. the lack of musical accompaniment, and so on. The intonational alterations that these kinds of ballads take from one ethnographic zone to the other are very apparent. From this point of view, they perhaps are richer than the other groupings. Whereas the folk ballads of Southwestem Albania approach the legendary and historical songs of the relevant ethnographic zones in style, they differ clearly from the laments, which are sung monophonicallyby a soloist. Finally, according to the regional poetic style, they are, in general, very short but very powerful and dramatic.

ane daw

(Fig. 2)

“TRriti Néna Pa Buké Ty”

300

Ballads and Boundaries

5

Trriti néna pa buké ty, djal' i nénés, shpirt i nénés, bir! té dha nuse si flori, té varfér si ti até dité dasme, oh, seg ram! né zi, nierzit e ktij beut, seg té vrané ty,

se njé dité vjeshte, 10 i zure pusi, beun le té vraré, mbi kalin dori. nusja mor’ haberin, erdh’ té t'qajé ty, 15. u mblodh i giith’ fshati, té merr' hakén, bir!

The fourth grouping is represented by the folk ballads of Southeastern Albania. Amongst their fundamental features, we can mention 1. polyphonic structure, 2. developed melodic idiom, 3. pentatonic structure, 4. multiform imitation between the main vocal lines, 5. the often free musical rhythm, 6. the lack of musical accompaniment, and so on. In these ballads it seems as if the emotional, dramatic, and tragic aspects harmonize naturally with the lyrical ones. Then again, there is a special vocal line. As one can understand, the main differences between folk ballads of Southwestem Albania and those of Southeastem Albania are in either the melodies or the pentatonic structures. The former are characterized by a recitative melody and apply the principle of contrast between main vocal lines, while the latter are characterized by a developed melody and apply the principle of imitation between the main vocal lines In presenting the main musical groupings of Albanian folk ballads, we are conscious at the same time of a multitude of styles that exist within them. The musical styles very often change when passing from one ethnographic region and zone into another. Sometimes they change even from one town and village to the other. These differences can also be distinguished not only from one group of singers to another but also from one singer to another. This is the only way we can visualize in a general manner the intonational riches of Albanian folk ballads. This heritage has been created over centuries. In actual fact, this is only one example of the way through which our entire folk music has developed historically. During the second half of the twentieth century, a period that coincides more or less with the domination of Communist dictatorship, Albanian folklore, as well as folk ballads, developed widely. I can testify that our folklore was, during this period, very active. The phenomenon developed because of two main factors. First, social property was the means of production. In fact, since the people did not own property they were less occupied with it. Also, from the economic viewpoint the population was totally dependent on the goverment. This means that they were also forced to obey the government's requests for them to take part in numerous cultural and artistic activities. Second, the Communist goverment was concemed about cultural life in particular. But, in fact, they articulated this for political reasons such as to prolong the dictatorship, the ideological subjugation of the working masses, and the cultural isolation of a very small country from the rest of the world. It is clear that national folklore festivals — a very expensive activity for such a poor country — deifed only the dictatorship, idealized only communism, and raised up only the politics pursued by the Albanian government. ‘The main disease that touched Albanian folklore, as well as folk ballads, during the second half of the twentieth century was class consciousness, or, in other words, politicization. Unfortunately, this phenomenon sometimes entered into the essen-

ADDENDUM

Shituni, pp. 298-300 English translations: Kur Pércolla Yiberin:

WHEN

1 WALKED MY HUSBAND OFF

1 walked my husband off,

And tumed back to the house.

‘When I saw my poor mother-is law, I cried with tears.

Don't ery, my bride, don't cry,

For the year before passes like a day.

I walked my husband off.

And turned back to the house.

When I saw his watch on the table, I cried with tears.

Don't cry, my bride, don't cry. For the years of the emigration Are going to pass by quickly.

1 took the yam and went out into the backyard

To knit some socks.

Because of my frustration, I cried while I knitted the socks.

My loving husband.

Perhaps you have forgotten me.

Accursed be the years of emigration! Titi Néna Pa Buké Ty:

YOUR MOTHER RAISED YOU WITH NO FOOD

Your mother raised you with no food,

Your mother's soul, your mother's son.

She gave you a beautiful bride,

A poor one, just like you.

But on the wedding day Doom fell over us.

The people of the chieftain Came and killed you. ‘Cause a few days ago You lay in ambush And killed the wicked chieftain, The bride got the message, She came and cried for you. All the villagers gathered To avenge on your behalf.

Boundaries of Musical Style in Albanian Folk Ballads

301

tials of our folkloric enrichment. Hardly a single genre or folk creation was spared from the penetration of Communist ideology. Class consciousness touched not only lullabies, laments, songs and dances created during the last fifty years but even

earlier ones. In legendary songs and ballads, or in exclamatory songs and historical

cones one can find political verses that were dictated by the Communist regime in power. Everything was done to actualize folklore, to make it conform to political theory. However, this was a barbarous act and the ethnic and national originality of our folklore began to grow pale. During the half century of Communist domination in Albania, ballads that were

recovered were mainly of a legendary or functional nature, and these told of the heroism of Albanians during past centuries and their battles against foreign invaders. Meanwhile, ballads created during this period, although maintaining a traditional title, were politicized and are related to Communist ideology in their content. This

is a concrete illustration of the great damage done by Communism to the culture of

many peoples.

In conclusion, let me point out that the well known singers of Albanian folk

ballads, who exercised their artistic activity during the first half of the twentieth

century, are now old and unable to perform any more. Meanwhile, there exists a second generation of ballad singers. But Albanian society has to prepare a newer generation of folk artists. Only in this way will the ancient tradition of narrative singing survive in the future as well. Notes

"The main works on folk ballads by Albanian scholars are:

Anton Cettu, Disa te dhena mbi zhvillimin strukturor te balades shqipe.

Cesbtje te folklorit

Sbqiptar 1 (1982): 242-258 {Tirane]; Kole Luka, Balada e Lule Frangut. Ceshyfe te folkloris shqiptar 1 (1982): 175-239; Qemal Haxhihasani, Balada popullore shqiptare (Permbledhje me 60 tekste baladash). Tirane, 1982: 181f; Qemal Haxhihasani, Balada shqiptare e rinjohjes. Cesbije te folklorit shqiptar 1 (1982): 148-172; Qemal Haxhihasani, Balada e Tanes dhe disa

perkime te saj ballkanike. Cesbye te folklorit shqiptar 4 (1990): 3-41; Zihni Sako, Balada shqiptare e rinjohjes moter e vella dhe lidhjet e saj ballkanike. Cesbyfe te folklorit shqiptar 1 (1982): 139-148; Jorgo Panajoti, Baladat popullore dhe historia, Kultura popullore 1 (1983): 163-179; 2: 187-202 [Tirane]; Razi Brahimi,

Balada legjenda dhe epika historike, Kultura

popullore 2 (1985): 121-137; Riza Hyso, Ceshtje te balades shqiptare. Kultura popullore 1 (1986): 129-139; Dalan ShapllO (1987), Vecori estetike dhe giinore te balades. Kultura popullore

1 (1987): 203-209; Aleknander Mita,

Ne kerkim te dimensioneve ideo-estetike te

nje balade. Kultura popullore 1 (1988): 175-181.

302 JANET

HERMAN

Ballads With An Edge

While scholars often treat balladryas a dead art form, traditional ballads, and new songs modeled upon them, are performed and recorded in the

United States by a significant number of musical artists. In this paper I look

at one contemporary band, Tempest, of Oakland, California, in order to explore issues concerning the appeal of classical ballads and songs. The work of Tempest is innovative, technically proficient, and provides a compelling example of the transformations enacted on balladry today. It has been almost 30 years since the crest and fall of the greatest “folksong

revival” of this century in North America, an explosion of interest in primarily American and British folksong that occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Since

then, “revival” artists and their musical heirs have pioneered some of the more vital

trends in commercial music: topical songwriting, “folk-rock” fusion, and the exploration of an ever-widening array of traditional “roots” genres, from blues and Cajunto Irish ceili, Today, the repertoires of commercial folk artists are increasingly marked by eclecticism, as performers consciously draw from a variety of materials, styles and instrumentation for contrastive, experimental effects.' Given the history and current complexity of commercial folk music, one might think the appeal of the basic “Anglo-American” folksong, the original catalyst for so much activity, had run its course. Yet the genre, far from being a depleted one, is still capable of generating new interest. Even the Child ballads, the most conservative and celebrated of folksongs, retain such potential. The hardy persistence of these ballads on the commercial landscape raises interesting questions conceming the backgrounds, perceptions, and goals of people in the business of music production — and the lingering influence of the revival and its values. In order to explore in a given instance why and how traditional ballads might be selected, arranged, performed, and recorded commercially by people today, in this paper I take a look at a Norwegian-bom musician, Lief Sorbye, who is currently leading a modestly successful rock band out of Oakland, California. The band,

Tempest, is promoted as a “Celtic rock” group, and has réleased a handful of tapes and CDs since its inception in 1988. Specifically, | shall examine Lief's involvement

with an “all-traditional” Tempest album recorded in 1992. This release, entitled Serrated Edge (Firebird Arts & Music FAM 10100-2, 1992), includes several ballads

among its arrangements of folk songs and fiddle tunes. In the process of analysis, Thope to pinpoint the kinds of artistic, economic, and ideological factors that may impinge upon the choice to present traditional balladry in today’s commercial music market.

Ballads With An Edge

303

‘Tempest is essentially a “folk rock” band in the tradition of such innovative British groups as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. The band features electric guitar, bass, drums, fiddle, and the pennywhistle and twin-necked electric mandolin/mandola playing of Lief, also the lead singer. A veteran of the acoustic “folk” circuit, Lief spent eight years playing with the American “Celtic” trio Golden Bough

prior to founding Tempest. Except for the fiddler (a former Morris dance musician), other band members have rock and punk-rock backgrounds. The drummer in this eclectic group is Cuban-bom.? On albums other than Serrated Edge, much of their material is original, though traditional “covers” are a mainstay of all their recordings and performances. Lief’s jump from acoustic to rock styles enabled him to expand his audience by crossing from a “specialist” folk market into mainstream marketing channels and venues, but the “folk” presence in Tempest is paradoxically perhaps its greatest marketing asset. As Lief commented:

T wouldn't want to be a straight rock and roll band trying to compete on the market because how many people are doing that? You gotta be a little different in order to stick out Lief asserts that the “Celtic rock” label is a convenient way for the bandto convey

their “crossover” nature and to tape into segments of both the roots and rock markets. The ear-catching term is well-designed, for while evoking the familiar “folk rock” category it also suggests an association with a wave of Irish bands (e.g. The Pogues,

The Waterboys) recently successful in America, as well as the more established American “rock n’ ree!” band Boiled in Lead, from Minnesota. Tempest also benefits

from association with other phenomena sometimes considered vaguely “Celtic” by the public, such as “New Age” recordings, or fantasy books (a connection to be taken up later, below). The “Celtic rock” label is seemingly more specific in reference than “folk rock (as befitting the current “roots” industry orientation) yet is nevertheless

left open to wide interpretation. Tempest members are thus free to develop artistically within very broad parameters as long as they continue to borrow significantly from Anglo-irish materials and styles (in spite of the fact that “Celtic” and “Irish” are not equivalent terms). ‘These marketing facts provide a certain backdrop to the decision to record and perform traditional ballads, but they are not the whole story. As a musician, Lief has been directed as much by ideological as economic motives, Believing the older ballads and tunes to be intrinsically worthwhile, he hopes to make otherwise esoteric

materials appealing to contemporary audiences by “updating” their performance on electric guitars, the “folk instruments of today.” A rock club setting, rock

instrumentation and danceable rhythms all serve, ironically, the aims of Liefs

preservationist mission. All in all, Lief conceptualizes Tempest as part of a larger movement providing an interesting aesthetic alternative to mainstream commercial music. He states:

People are sick of top forty, mindless stuff. What happens when you have roots in your music, whether it's African or whatever— if it’s rooted in some sort of tradition the music has substance because there's something real there... That's what's lacking in average, popular music, in my subjective opinion —there’s no substance.

304

Ballads and Boundaries

As Neil Rosenberg, among others, has observed, folksong has repeatedly been “touted as an antidote against the alienated and meaningless modem popular music of the times” (Rosenberg 1993: 5). Itis intriguing, then, to find this stance articulated by a musician essentially working within the “popular music” realm. Lief may be adapting folksong to a rock aesthetic, but he seems to view his work with Tempest

as a natural extention of his acoustic, revival-influenced background. From his

perspective, superior aesthetic and moral qualities are inherent in folk material. ‘These qualities may be injected into new contexts, even (or especially) when accompanied by ever greater transformations of presentation. regarding traditional ballads also reflect this attitude:

Lief's comments

The old ballads never really lie. They always have some truth to tell, in a sense...there’s always something in the old ballads that you can learn from, that has validation for today.... Ballads on the Serrated Edge album include “Tam Lin” (Child 39), “The House

Carpenter” (Child 243), “James Harris/The Daemon Lover’), “Raggle Taggle Gypsy” (Child 200), “The Gypsy Laddie”), and the Irish ballads “A Kiss in the Morning Early” and “Whiskey in the Jar.” The circumstances leading up to Tempest’s decision to record an album featuring ballads further reveals a great deal about the different kinds of values that may be projected onto ballads and the varied perceptions of their potential worth. Reviews of the album and of Tempest performances that featured Serrated Edge

material generally reported or implied that Tempest was “inspired” to put together

this project by the “Serrated Edge” series of fantasy novels authored by Mercedes Lackey

wrote

of Firebird Publications.

For instance, a writer for the Fresno Metronews,

‘The songs on the album are based on the Serrated Edge series of novels from author Mercedes Lackey, who also penned the lyrics to the second song on side B. . Sorbye tells me that she writes myths in a modem day setting and the bandis a big fan of hers. Come to find out, she’s a big fan of the band. They plan to have book and album signing sessions together (July 22, 1992:13). In my discussion with Lief, he admitted that the band had actually been unfamiliar with Lackey's work before the start of the project, though she indeed had been a fan of Tempest.

The Serrated Edge album was a “dual marketing scheme” initiated and coordinated by the Firebird company. Lief worked out the all-traditional concept with company representatives after familiarizing himself with Lackey's work, which is geared to a young teenage, urban market. Firebird subsequently financed the album and marketed it together with the Lackey novels in “New Age” book stores. Reflecting on the association with Lackey, Lief commented:

The thing is it a similar thing old myths and it in a modem

might not necessarily be our cup of tea, but she does with her writing as we do with our music. She takes elves and all that stuff and kind of updates it and puts setting.

Ballads With An Edge

305

The promotional connection between Tempest and Lackey was plausible because Lackey features musicians and musical settings in her writing. For example, the hero in one of the “Serrated Edge” books, Born to Run, spends much of his time in a music-filled Irish pub. At Firebird’s request, Lief strengthened the connection

further by putting Lackey's own lyrics, “Dark Vampire,” to music. Tempest also

conceded to the inclusion of “Tam Lin,” since Lackey refers to the character of Tam Lin in the series. Despite concessions made to the business side of the arrangement, Lief insists that Tempest in no way sacrificed artistic integrity, and in fact seized the opportunity to explore favorite traditional material they might not otherwise have had the chance to record. In the case of “Tam Lin,” he asserts: ‘We worked it up just for that, to fulfill the contract. But! love the song.

I've known it for years, so... we tried to give ita new twist melodically.

Reviewers, in fact, praised the innovative, syncopated delivery of the vocals on the “Tam Lin” track, and also commented favorably upon the guitar work. In general, Lief pronounced Serrated Edge an all-around “worthwhile” project. Others must agree, for Lackey is evidently currently working on another “Serrated Edge” novel in which Tempest band members themselves will be the protagonists. Another ballad, "House Carpenter,” found its way onto the Serrated Edge album for quite different reasons than “Tam Lin.” As Lief related: I was doing some studio work for this producer with MCA, right, for another band, and | was really trying to get him interested in Tempest. He came up and checked us out and he goes, like, this is great— because he grew up in the ‘60's in New York and he used to hang out listening to Joan Bacz and Dylan and all that. According to Lief, the producer freted over Tempest’s commercial potential, but eventually contacted Lief again to encourage him to work out a “Celtic metal concept” (in reference to the “heavy metal” rock style) with which they might be able to impress MCA executives. Lief continued: . And then he said, you know there's this one song that I'd love to see you guys do, one of my favorite songs. It's called “the House Carpenter.” And I said, oh I know that song, different versions, that I've heard in the past. Well, he said, if you could try to give it a Celtic metal treatment I'd love to see what you could come up with. Though only eight stanzas long, the resulting Tempest demo version of “House

Carpenter” lasted almost seven minutes due to extended electric guitar passages that were designed to illustrate the emotional turmoil of the piece. Though the producer was pleased (and in fact wanted to produce a whole Tempest album of “heavy treatment of Child ballads”), the buyout of MCA by SONY put an end to negotiations. In the meantime, Tempest founda place for “House Carpenter” on the Serrated Edge album, where it was well-received by critics. ‘What emerges here is a pragmatic band attempting to find a workable balance between their own musical preferences and goals on the one hand, and the demands

Ballads and Boundaries

or tastes of the consumers and business people they depend upon on the other. It is a delicate dynamic, but Lief maintains that the band ultimately puts artistic considerations first. He insists:

We don't try to change or put the music in a certain direction or shape

because of a certain marketing goal... We're trying to develop the music the way it's natural for us...as opposed to somebody telling us what to do next to fit a certain market.

In 1992, Tempest members satisfied a variety of intersecting needs in large part through the use of traditional ballads. Creative treatment of these songs enabled Tempest to accomplish several critical activities: maintenance of the “Celtic rock” marketing tag, initiation of new, successful promotional activities, and the catering

to a music producer nostalgic for the revival of his youth. As Tempest continues to market and perform selections from Serrated Edge, Lief, at least, is also able to act in concordance with deeply felt values about the larger social worth of perpetuating this kind of material. As Lief states:

You go out there and you want to create an effect on your audience, to give them something that's valuable... something that gets people interested in who they are and where they came from and where they're going and you know, make people think a little bit, or react, even if they just get up and dance and have a good time. There’s some

interaction there... there's an exchange of energy and communic: tion

As the case of Tempest reveals, the commercial ballad is still capable of awakening significant activity. It deserves, I think, our close attention. Notes

'See David Evans(1979) fora concise discussion of the basic phases of the revival through the 1970s. The contemporary eclecticism of commercial folk releases was noted by Norm

Cohen (1987: 214) and has only increased since the time of his writing. 2Current band members are Rob Wullenjohn (guitar), Ian Butler (bass), Adolfo Lazo

(drums), and Jon Berger (fiddle). Country-influenced fiddler Michael Mullen plays on the Serrated Edge album “All quotes from Lief Sorbye excerpted in this paper are from personal interview, February 6, 1993.

References Cited

Cohen, Norm. 1987. Record Reviews: The Revival. Journal of American Folklore 100: 206216. Evans, David. 1979. Record Reviews: Folk Revival Music. Journal of American Folklore 92: 108-115. Lackey, Mercedes, with Larry Dixon. 1992. Born to Run. Riverdale, NY: Baen Publishing Enterprises. Rosenberg, Neil V., ed. 1993. Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

BEEBE EEEREESEERBREER EE

306

307 SABINE

WIENKER-PIEPHO

Karaoke: Singing Beyond National Boundaries

Traditional ballad singing is usually conveyed orally by one or more performers to a relatively small group of listeners without the medium of print or otber media. In modern times, however, a single recorded performance may be beard by millions unseen by the musicians. Karaoke (Japanese for “empty orchestra") bas been disseminated worldwide and its

success is based on a simple principle: feedback and contact with an audience that occurred in former times. Karaoke allows anyone to sing a favorite song toa full orchestral accompaniment provided on playback. This paper, in presenting a description of karaoke in Germany, also poses the questions: iskaraoke “intercultural singing" or “narrative singing in an intercultural context?” what kind of songs do karaoke singers sing worldwide?

In their 1992 editions, both the Oxford Dictionary and Chambers included the

term “Karaoke.” A typical entry reads thus: Karaoke: noun, the original Japanese form of entertainment in which amateur performers sing pop songs to the accompa‘niment of prerecorded music from a karaoke machine. ‘The German dictionary Brockbaus has not yet accepted the term; it will, however, in 1994. The compound karaoke is composed of two terms kara and oke, which means empty band. Otherwise the term is translated as empty orchestra, empty because the human voice is left out. Ina third sense, karaoke is sometimes translated as music minus one, suggesting something rather similar to a trend in the 1960s where one instrumental voice was left out so that the instrumentalist could play his solo part with a full and perfect background.! The best way to describe the phenomenon is to state that haraoke is a high tech sing along. First of all let us describe karaoke. Today, karaoke refers to the proliferating trend as well as to the electronic gadget. It allows any (amateur) to sing his or her favorite song with the proper equipment to a full orchestra accompaniment. The typical set-up includes a cassette tape (or disc) playback machine on which is played a prerecorded soundtrack of the musical accompaniment to a song. One or more microphones amplify the voice as the amateur sings the melodic line. The text — usually two lines of the lyrics— is provided on a monitor, the “songbook of today.” The equipment itself varies: it can be anything from a simple tape-recorder microphone device to an elaborate apparatus that can measure how far off the tune

308

Ballads and Boundaries

the singer is singing. Special tools can grade every deviation by scoring, for instance, how well the singers stay on pitch and keep time with the beat. Other tools check how intense the applause is. The singer's voice is modulated by echo, diverse sound intensifiers, and by an equalizer to a high degree of alienation that would make Madonna or Pavarotti pale with envy (advertisement from Pioneer). This live entertainmentis a cultural import invented in Japan some 23 years ago? In Germany, karaoke is still in the beginning stages but is becoming more and more popular and technically perfect. One technological development in the eighties has been the karaoke -background video, in which a singer can tape himself against a videotaped landscape, especially designed for a particular song, and later watch himself on television (Herd 1982: 83).

These music-video tapes can be short

promotional videos, others are lengthier tapings of concerts sold in stores.’ The latest technical innovation is laser karaoke: a standard laser karaoke professional set consists of a laser disc player, amplifier with key control, systemrack, synthesizers and a microphone. Regarding statistics, the following numbers from a Pioneer press information release from 1991 might be of interest: while in Japan one will find about 520,000 professional karaoke systems, in Germany there were only about 100,000 sold up to the present. One pro-set costs about 20,000 Deutschmarks (approximately $15,000 US), but home units may be cheaper. Karaoke , however, is an investment that pays quickly, as the manufacturing firms eagerly guarantee. If you rent a set for one evening — and this is trendy in Germany for private parties — you have to pay between 4000- 5000 D-marks (approximately $3500) for one evening. The prize depends on the quality of the equipment. The rentability and amortization of public instalment is ensured also by an entrance fair: usually one has to pay five or ten marks just for entrance in a karaoke bat and more than 20 marks fora bigger festival. Some karaoke sets have slots for coins. The background music and the text for one song are provided after putting 5 marks into the machine. ‘The German software is mainly intercultural, global, transregional and certainly beyond national boundaries. Software with the typical Euro-American pop fepentoire costs about 300 marks, laser karaoke discs with German soundtracks about 400 Marks. One German disc contains about 28 song titles. But the leading firms are beginning to advertise more national software production. According to a thorough analysis of the market, software that is German and that comprises folksongs seems to be one of the basic preconditions for successful marketing. In 1992 the German consumer could make his choice between 52 discs in English (21,456 song titles) and about 4 German laser karaoke discs (112 German titles). In 1993 the expanding market guarantees at least another two German discs (Pioneer press information). The growth of the karaoke -boom is due primarily to an ologopolization of international karaoke industries, the leading firm of which is Pioneer. The list of German titles is interesting for our context:

the singers prefer

“evergreens” and “oldies.” In order to extrapolate the most popular of pop songs, collectors of karaoke songs had to look through the charts of the last thirty or forty years. Karaoke repopularizes songs with a cultural lag. Therefore, we may find karaoke hits among the lists of German hits of the early fifties. Among others, the following German idols are reglorified: Conny Froboess, Daliah Lavi, Drafi Deutscher, Freddy, Lolita, Peter Alexander and Vicky Leandros. Their names appear

Karaoke: Singing Beyond National Boundaries

309

among the favorite German pop stars whose songs are now imitated in 1994. One title, “Wochenend und Sonnenschein,” by the Comedian Harmonists, was written as early as 1929. One can therefore encounter more than four decades of the German Schlager (hit) tradition if one participates in a karaoke performance today (Pioneer Newsletter, June 1992). And since several traditional folksongs were taken up by interpreters like Heino (e.g., “Blau, blau, blau bliiht der Enzian”), we may find many such songs in the repertoire. There is, for instance, “Muss i denn, muss i denn zum stédtele hinaus,” a Swabian folksong written in 1824 that was repopularized in the sixties by Elvis Presley, who sang it partly in German.3 Whereas basic intemational pop music still forms the majority of karaoke repertoire, there is, however, a growing minority of national folksongs on the market. As the karaoke boom continues, these traditional folksongs may spread, fora second time, across our national boundaries. These would be the kind of classic folksongs, perpetuated thus in their third or fourth form of existence, that Walter ‘Wiora has called secondhand folkmusic (Wiora 1959). Fan magazines, meanwhile, are published. Whereas in the United States one may find three fanzines that specialize in karaoke exclusively (two of them in Los Angeles), there is no such karaoke journal on the German market yet. In these

magazines experiences are shared, sets are exchanged, sold or offered and, in a

fashion similar to some traditional German customs, a karaoke queen is chosen every month. There are several German karaoke series on television. Among them, for instance, is a so-called mini playback show by Radio Television Luxembourg (RTL), in which children, dressed like adults, imitate pop stars like Michael Jackson or Tina ‘Tumer. The audience rates this disappearance of childhood as “sweet.” But let us leave these introductory data since only field investigation of karaoke can explain the psychological parameters surrounding the tremendous public success of this new wave. Therefore, under the presupposition that karaoke is a new kind of cultural (or intercultural) expression, the folklorist should not hesitate to interview participants in the performances. An average wine- and beer pub in Freiburg (“Wunderbar”) could be taken as representative for the contemporary karaoke milieu in Germany. Mr. Miller, the bar owner, held a laser juke karaoke premiere in the fall of 1992. He swears by Erlebnisgastronomie (gastronomic experience), as he calls his new and profitable system. After just one week a new, and latterly a steady clientele of about a hundred teenagers and twenty-year-olds (but also older people of both sexes) took over the pub every Tuesday. The social boundaries or determinants were not easy to distinguish: some came from distant villages, even from Alsace (France). Most were from urban and suburban areas. Many guests drank heavily, perhaps to find courage for their solo performance. For this public appearance the majority were obviously better dressed than they usually are in discos. They tried to sit as close as possible to the stage, and in quick succession, more than 50 singers followed each other at the first Tuesday night program, deciding the order by drawing lots. ‘With regard to the songs, one could say that the melodies were simple and easy. Of other songs, there were more versions in English than German in spite of the fact that the foreign pronunciation was poor. But there was also some “reterritorialization,” because about ten German songs, some of them traditional folksongs, were performed. There was a flood of booze, beer and wine. In this bar the tumover —

310

Ballads and Boundaries

according to the owner — from the beginning was 300% more than before karaoke was installed. The atmosphere was relaxed; everything was under control. No one expected spontaneous outbursts of singing. The collective spirit of the karaoke community seems attributable to a complex set of restrictive factors. First of all the songs were obviously familiar to the entire group of listeners. There was something in the air. The mood was eagerly expectant and communicative, though tense, because highly competitive. Although Miller as a sort of stage manager tried to encourage the first hesitant effort, the audience soon became the main entertainer

itself. There was not much space for improvisation. Creativity was not requested. Instead of creativity, mimesis as the basic principle ofkaraoke (Keil 1984:95), that is to say, the pinnacle of every attempt involved a close imitation of the original, was these amateurs’ goal. The public, too, demanded identity even in gesture and outfit from every participant. “Karaoke is like a drug,” said a 20 year old girl, “you become addicted.” A small, shy boy of 18 added, “You learn to overcome your inhibitions.” Another aficionado told of a karaoke bar in Frankfurt where the champion can win acar every week. One male evaluated the communicative aspect of the new fashion, “I like the activity. It is better than just listening. You do something and you make friends.” Another rather sophisticated remark was that karaoke had increased live performance. There were standing ovations for every successful solo, but the audience also encouraged minor talented performers with shouts and applause before and after their performance. The result of all this is that karaoke fans can be tactful: they seldom complain openly that the copies are inferior to their models. The singers themelves mostly hold (or “swallow”) the mike closely, pushing it very near to their mouth as if to treasure the moment.

In this manner, their identification

with the medium and their adapting to the machine was complete by the time the evening ended with its award ceremony. An early psychoanalytic commentary has maintained that karaoke can certainly serve as an outlet for aggressions (Tiickmantel 1991). It is not surprising that crime strikes a sour note in big cities like Frankfurt, Hamburg and Berlin, where bars have

small private rooms in which one can sell or bring along abundant liquor and drugs. In larger arenas, however, with a greater degree of social control the function of karaoke may be less problematic. In general, the greater the number of participants the less is the danger of crime. The texts obviously contain much more in the way of conformity than they do of protest. Since the goal of each singer is a perfect replication of a specific star in a specific style, since the repertoire consists of love songs rather than protest songs, and since parodies are never requested, one may speak of karaoke as a conformist, system-stabilizing genre, with implications of an affirmative concept of culture (Schoenebeck 1987:150). Karaoke also has an integrative aspect. The participants seek a nest-like comfort by grouping themselves together in a community. Since there are few small bar rooms for karaoke

in Germany, one cannot retreat into

privacy as in the United States and Japan. Consuming and reproducing popular

music, therefore, is a public act, a collective symbolic ritual that can assume an

integrative effect. On the other hand, this effect has typical leisure time qualities insofar as we characterize leisure time by a dominance of the need for individual expression and search for individual identity (Liidtke 1975: 27). But in karaoke, this individual expression and identity are both false because the mode of expression is neither individual nor providing authentic identity. Instead, karaoke provides fake, second-hand identity in cans.

Karaoke: Singing Beyond National Boundaries

31

Simplicity is the watchword. Just as in traditional folklore, karaoke aims at simple and repetitive structures. There is something, however, that could be termed innovative. Pop music from radio and TV, the entertainment from the conveyerbelt that Bourdieu once thought would only permit passive, absent-minded consumption (Bourdieu 1984: 602), has changed its character in this respect, namely that karaoke allows people to activate models of passivity. The songs become active personal property as soon as they are converted into the singer's individual repertory. The participation of both performer and listener is an active one, and the in situ context is esential. In this respect there is a surprising linkage between very traditional and modem, artificially-generated singing. The technical challenge of karaoke may be another factor. On this point Charles Keil approves, in karaoke singing, the courage of a certain heroic coping with hostile electronics: the bumanizing or, better still, the personalization of mechanical processes is especially Striking. The singers are not afraid to match themselves against the perfection and

strictures of prerecorded accompaniment, or to match their oun voices against those Of their big star models in public. They “are not locking themselves away from the world but contending against the world’s best singers” (Keil 1984: 95). Altogether itseems as if the new market is reacting toa long-suppressed, basic instinct: singing. But karaoke in turn manipulates this instinct by offering a limited set of strictly prescribed songs. I am afraid that karaoke therefore is able to manipulate, or better, minimize the active folksong repertory ofa nation more than any other media have already done. Singing as the reproduction of a prefabricated product is in itselfa challenge for research into contemporary singing behavior. As Linda Fujie and Toru Mitsui have put it: ethnomusicologists should think of undertaking further research in this area

of mediated modem singing and should consider it more or less a top priority. Notes

"The German Folksong Archive (DVA) recognized the phenomenon in 1991 by collecting material (Cf. box sign. GR XID. 2Karaoke has not yet been subject of research in published work. Authors who have analyzed the new entertainment in a Japanese cultural context are — in this survey, at any rate — Linda Fujie (1989), Walter Giesen (1979), Charles Keil (1984), T. Tadasu (1979), and the Japanese ethnomusicologist Toru Mitsui (1991). Heath Macan (1990) and William Kelly (4991) have both written a BA thesis (not seen). Robert Creuze is working at a Ph.D dissertation on karaoke at the University of Pennsylvania. At its annual conference, the Intemational Association for the Study of Popular Music offered a panel on karaoke (chair: Toru Mitsui, Dept. of Music, Kanazawa Univ. Ishikawa, Japan) on July 11, 1993. °DVA Freiburg, sign. KIV 228, EB 785. Text: 1824 by H. Wagner, composer (F. Silcher arr.) D. Krug, W. Rein. Before: Swabian folksong. Lit. cf. A. Holder: Muss { denn, mug t denn zum Siadiele binaus. Ein Schwabischer Beitrag zur Naturgeschichte der Volkslieddichtung. in Alemannia 19 (1882): 144-148. References Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Die feinen Unterschiede. Kritik der gesellschafilichen Urteliskraft Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Brednich, Rolf-Wilhelm. 1974. Das Lied als Ware. In Jabrouch fir Volkstiedforscbung 19: 11-20.

312

Ballads and Boundaries

Closet Carusoes:

Japan Reinvents the Sing-Along. Time Magazine,

February 1983: 47.

Deutsche Gesellschaft fir Music des Orientes (ed.) 1981. Musthologische Feldforschung: Aufgaben, Erfabrungen, Techniken. Bettrage zur Etbnomustkologte , vol. 9. Hamburg:

‘Wagner.

Fujie, Linda. 1989. Popular Music. In Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Richard Gid

Powers and Hidetoshi Kato, pp. 197-220. New York, Westport, London: Greenwood

Press. Giesen, Walter. 1979.

Aspekte des modernen Musiklebens. In Japan nach 1945 - Bettrage

zur Kultur und Gesellschaft, ed. Klaus Kracht, pp. 133-160. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Heimann, Walter. 1982. Musikalische Interaktion. In Mustkalische Volkskunde. Schriftenretbe

des Instituts far mustkalische Volkskunde vol. IX, pp.? K6In: ?.

Herd, Judith Anne. 1985. Trends and Taste in Japanese Popular Music: A Case Study of the 1982 Yamaha World Popular Music Festival. Popular Music 4: 83. Karbusicky, Vladimir. 1975. Empirische Mustksoziologte. Erscbeinungsformen, Theorie und

Philosophie des Bezuges ‘Music - Gesellschaft’. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Hartel.

Keil, Charles. 1984. Music Mediated and Live in Japan. Ethnomusicology 28: 91-96. Klusen, Ernst. 1981. Feldforschung bei Medienproduzenten und

zu zukiinftigen Forschungsansatzen.

-konsumenten. Anmerkungen

In Mustkologische Feldforschung.

Aufgaben,

Erfabrungen, Tecbniken. Ed. Deutsche Gesellschaft flr Musik des Orients. Bettrdge zur

Ethnomustkologie, vol. 9, pp. 93-105.

, 1989. Singen. Materialien zu einer Theorie. Perspektiven zu Mustkpadagogtk und Musikwissenschaft 11, pp.? Regensburg: Bosse.

Lodge, David. 1984 Small World. London: Secker and Warburg. Lidtke, Hartmut. 1975.

Freizeit in der Industriegesellschaft.

Opladen.

Mitsui, Toru. 1991. Karaoke. How the Combination of Technology and Music Evolved. Paper presented at the Sixth International Conference on Popular Music Studies (LASPM) in

Berlin, 15-20 July 1991, ed. Peter Wicke. University, Berlin (forthcoming).

Institut fir Populare

Musik,

Humboldt

Mitsui, Toru. 1992. Karaoke again at the Conference in Japan. In Review of Popular Music [Newsletter of LASPM] 17: 8-9.

Postman, Neil. 1982. The Disappearance of Childbood. New York: Delacorte Press.

Rudolph, Wilma. 1991. Echt besser als nur zuhause im Bad zu singen: Karaoke wird auch im Deutschland immer beliebter. Saarbritcker Zeitung 217: 8-9. Von Schoenebeck, Mechthild. 1987. Was macht Musik populdr? Untersuchungen zu Theorie

und Geschichte populdrer Musik.

Europdische Hochscbulschriften:

Mustkwtssenschaft, vol. 31. Frankfurt: Lang.

. Brandhorst, Jirgen Brandhorst, and H.-Joachim Gerke (eds.).

Retbe XXXVI, 1992.

Politik

und gesedilschafilicher Wertewandel im Spiegel populdrer Music. Essen: ? Tadasu, Toshio. 1979. Artistically impoverished popular music. In Japan Quarterly XX 3: 359-364.

Tickmantel, Uli. 1991. Karaoke — Der Volkssport aus Japan soll auch hierzulande uniiberhérbar werden. Wie man dem Publikum die Haare in die Hohe treiben kann. Badische Zeitung, December 12.

Part Four: Cultural Experience in Ballads

315 STEFAAN

TOP

Chants populaires des Flamands de France (1856): A Contribution to Comparative Folksong Research, France/Belgium: Flanders' Edmond de Coussemaker was 51 when in 1856, as a respected judge in Dunkerque (Dunkirk, France), be published the results of bis folkloristic (field research in the Flemish city of Ghent. With the publication of this study bewas recognized asa fully-fledged folklorist and an indisputable authority in the field of folksong and folk music. This folkloristic activity was no coincidence, but fitted in perfectly with the cultural-bistorical climate of the mid-nineteenth century and witb the many activities that bad made de Coussemakera well-known philologist, archaeologist, historian, musicologist, and composer. This paper discusses the political situation in which the Chants populaires des Flamands de France came into being, and points to the innovative qualities in the collection that make it important even today.

Introduction: French Flanders in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Let us first clarify what “French Flanders” refers to. According to historians, two.

interpretations are possible. On the one hand French Flanders can signify an area in the north of France, in which during the Middle Ages Dutch was spoken and written and which for centuries belonged to the Flemish and Dutch spheres of cultural influence. The term, then, concems quite a large area, bounded by the North Sea, the French-Belgian border, and the Somme. The rural vernacular architecture, the belfries in the towns, the architecture of the churches and chapels, and the many houses in Flemish Renaissance style prove that this region once formed a cultural unity with the Low Countries. In addition to this “Greater” French Flanders, which with its towns of Douai, Dunkerque, Lille, and Lens forms an economically very important French region, historians also refer to the “Lesser” French Flanders, or the Westhoek (West Hook), which consists of the contemporary arrondissement of Dunkerque. This is a very rural area, the borders of which are the River A, the North Sea, the French-Belgian border, and the River Leie (Lys). The Westhoek has approximately 200,000 inhabitants, of whom roughly 60% still speak Flemish (Deleu-Niessen 1968: 16-21). This is the area in which de Coussemaker collected his songs in the middle of the nineteenth century.

316

Ballads and Boundaries

Several political developments have led to the slow but irreversible annexation of French Flanders by France. We refer to the Treaty of the Pyrenees (November 7, 1659), the War of Devolution between France and Spain which led to the First Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (May 2, 1668), the coalition war of France and England against the United Provinces (the Dutch War leading to the First Treaty of Nijmegen, August 10, 1678) and the Peace of Utrecht (First Treaty signed on April 11, 1713) between

France and Spain on the one hand and Britain and The Netherlands on the other. From 1659 onwards the enforced frenchification of French Flanders began. Initially the French authorities adopted a fairly flexible approach towards the vernacular language. This changed with the 1684 Royal Edict, which stipulated that from that moment on, all official documents (such as public instruments and verdicts) had to be composed in French. However, the lower clergy, the schoolteachers, and a strong Flemish-language community life (chambers of rhetoric, rifle associations, and fraternities) ensured that a quick assimilation during the eighteenth century was ruled out (Deleu-Niessen 1968: 30-31) This situation changed after the 1789 French Revolution, and several attempts were made at liquidating the vemacular. Talleyrand's declaration of September 10, 1791 clearly illustrates the new position:

Les écoles primaires vont mettre fin a cette étrange inégalité. La langue de la Constitution et des lois y sera enseignée a tous; cette foule de dialectes corrompus, demier reste de la féodalité, sera contrainte de disparaitre; la force des choses le commande (Verbeke 1978: 10). The primary schools are going to put an end to this strange inequality. The language of the Constitution and of the laws will be taught to everyone there; this mess of corrupt dialects, the final vestiges of feudalism will be forced to disappear; the force of circumstance

commands it.

On October 17, 1793 the Decree, in which French is laid down as the language of

education throughout the entire Republic, was published. The situation deteriorated in 1794, and minority groups were even represented as anti-revolutionary forces, as the following quotation bears out:

Nous avons révolutionné le gouvernement, les moeurs, la pensée, revolutionnons aussi la langue; le fédéralisme et la superstition parlent bas-breton; l'émigration et la haine de la République parlent allemand; Ja contre-révolution parle italien; le fanatisme parle basque... (Deleu-Niessen 1968: 34).

‘We have revolutionized government, customs, thought, now let us also revolutionize language; federalism and superstition speak Lower Breton; the emigration and the hate against the Republic speak German; the counter-revolution speaks Italian; fanaticism speaks Basque...

Chants populaires des Flamands de France (1856)

317

‘This provocative presentation of the facts led to the conclusion:

Ces dialectes divers sont sortis de la source impure de la féodalité. Cette considération seule doit vous les rendre odieux; ils sont le demier anneau de la chaine que la tyrannie vous avait imposée; hatez-vous de le briser. Hommes libres, quittez le langage des esclaves (Deleu-Niessen 1968: 34-35).

These different dialects have originated from the impure source of feudalism. The very thought itself should render it odious to you; they are the final link in the chain that tyranny has imposed upon you; hasten to break it. Free men, leave the language of the slaves behind you. On June 3, 1794 the National Convention declares an all-out war on the regional languages: Citoyens, qu'une sainte émulation vous anime pour bannir de toutes les contées de France ces jargons qui sont encore des lambeaux de la Féodalité et de 'Esclavage (Deleu-Niessen 1968: 35)

Citizens, may a holy zeal inspire you to ban from all the lands of France these jargons which are rags still left by Feudalism and Slavehood. ‘With the crowning of Napoleon Bonaparte state absolutism even increased, and this led to an intensification of the language policy. Under Louis-Philippe the Guizot Law (1833), which aimed to frenchify education even further, was passed. A next step was the law of March 15, 1850, which explicitly prohibited regional languages. On January 27, 1853 this led to an order of the Academic Council of the Département du Nord, in which the teaching of and in Dutch was forbidden expressis verbis. Reaction to this order came from seven intellectuals in Dunkerque, who on April 10 of the same year founded the “Comité flamand de France” (Flemish Committee of France). The motto of the Comité was: “Voor Moedertael en Vaderland” (For the Mother-tongue and the Fatherland). ‘The first chairperson was Edmond de Coussemaker, who at the time was a judge at the civil court of Dunkerque. For 23 years he was to direct the Comité, which had the following aims: rude de la littérature flamande, recherche et conservation de tous

documents historiques relatifs aux sciences, aux lettres, aux arts, au droit féodal, aux coutumes et aux juridictions seigneuriales, aux institutions littéraires telles que Chambres de Rhétorique et Confréries

théatrales, aux légendes et aux chants populaires, aux usages et

traditions, aux croyances, aux inscriptions tombales, a la biographie des Flamands de France et a leur bibliographie (Détrez 1954: 314; Debevere 1968-69: 3, 90).

318

Ballads and Boundaries Study of the Flemish literature, research into and preservation of all historical documents relating to science, to the letters, to the arts, to

common law, to customs and to seigniorial jurisdiction, to literary institutions such as the Chambers of Rhetoric and Theatrical Fraternities, to legends and to popular songs, to customs and traditions, to beliefs, to tombstone inscriptions, to the biographies of the Flemish

people of France and to their bibliographies.

The society's choice of the name, and the fact that the originators had formulated

their aspirations in French, show that they were not pursuing extremism. On the contrary, as conscious Flemings they wanted to be good French citizens: seed en face de la grandeur imposante de l'histoire de France, nous

devons étre fiers d’appartenir a cette belle nation, dont la génie sert de guide a la civilisation de l'Europe et du Monde. Mais, dans ce beau pays nous avons une famille, dans cette histoire générale, nous avons notre histoire particuliére, dans cette oeuvre civilisatrice, nous avons notre part a nous. Pour nous, Flamands de France, francais de nation, flamands d'origine, nous pouvons, nous devons, dignes enfants d'une noble mére a cété de la gloire nationale, faire briller I'honneur de notre maison, de notre famille, de notre ancienne et belle Flandre

(Deleu-Niessen 1968: 90).

in the face of the imposing grandeur of the history of France, we have to be proud of belonging to this beautiful nation, the genius of which will serve as the guide to the civilization of Europe and of the World. But in this beautiful country we have a family, in this general history we have our own particular history, in this civilizing endeavor we have our very own part. For us, Flemings of France, French in

nation, Flemish in origin, we, worthy children of a noble mother on the side of the national glory, we can, we have to make the honor of our home, of our family, of our old and beautiful Flanders, shine.

The French authorities were able to reconcile themselves to this point of view and,

through the figure of Hippolyte Fortoul, Minister for Public Education, sanctioned the Committee's statutes on August 24, 1853. Official activities could begin. In its first year this resulted

in the

membership

of 140 members

from

France,

Belgium,

Germany (inter alia, the Grimm brothers) and The Netherlands. De Coussemaker and his supporters had apparently succeeded in arousing a lot of domestic and foreign sympathy. As long as de Coussemaker directed the “Comité flamand de France” the committee adopted a cautious language policy and put the study of folklore, archaeology, and history at the center of its activities. The Committee was mainly concerned with making the Flemish history, the linguistic peculiarities, and the Flemish character of the area better known, and with continually and vividly testifying to the genuine ethnic presence of South Flemings in France (Verbeke 1970: 53). This shows the significance of the care for, and interest in, folklore matters. E.

de Coussemaker proved that this care and interest were not restricted to words and intentions only.

Chants populaires des Flamands de France (1856)

319

“Chants populaires des Flamands en France”

Following the example of what was happening in Germany in the midnineteenth century in the field of folksong collecting (e.g., the work of H. Hoffmann von Fallersleben, L. Uhland, L. Erk, J. M. Firmenich) Emperor Napoleon Ul, at the ‘suggestion of his Minister for Public Education, H. Fortoul, on September 16, 1852

issued a decree, The object of this decree was to intensify attention, in France, to the collecting and documenting of popular traditions, the historical importance of which had come to be recognized. The execution of the decree was entrusted to the “Comité de la langue, de histoire et des arts” (Committee for Language, History, and the Arts). This national appeal was not without its effects, and everywhere in France people avidly started looking for folksongs: George Sand recorded laborers’ songs in the area of Berry; others worked in the provinces: Prosper Mérimée on Corsica,

Charles Bordes in the Basque Provinces, Theodore de la Villemarqué in Brittany, Alexandre Dumas in the Bourbonnais, and Vincent d'Indy in the Vivarais. Edmond de Coussemaker concemed himself with Northern France, in particular the arrondissements of Dunkerque and Hazebrouck (Anon 1977: 145). Itisa striking fact that de Coussemaker was not some wild romantic who thought collecting folk traditions in general and folksongs in particular to be a useful and decisive way of stirring up regional nationalism. In his erudite way he attached a completely different value to this material. As a precursor of the historians of mental life, he considered folksongs to have a very special source-value. Songs are not so. much what they are, but what they express or suggest: Ce sont les chants populaires qui révélent lexistence, pour ainsi dire, entire d'une nation, sa vie intime encore plus que sa vie extérieure; ce sont des chants qui font connaitre son état moral, ses joies, ses souffrances, en un mot tous les sentiments qu’a pu lui faire éprouver la situation sociale au milieu de laquelle il a vécu (de Coussemaker 1855-56:

ID).

Itis popular songs that reveal the entire existence, so to speak, of a nation, its inner life even more than its outer life; it is the songs that disclose its moral state, its happinesses, its sufferings, in one word, all the sentiments that have enabled it to experience the social situation in the midst of which it has lived. As a result, these sources are indispensable for anyone devoted to the history of

civilization. In reality they have been neglected, however, as historians have usually looked to important figures and historical events. Nonetheless, de Coussemaker wanted to describe history from another angle. That is why he paid a lot of attention to folk traditions, which reflect an entirely different reality. In 1859 he formulated this view even more forcefully: Non, [...] nous ne nous contentons plus du simple narré, ni méme de l'appréciation des événements et des grands faits militaires; nous

voulons pénétrer dans la vie intime des peuples, assister en quelque sorte & leurs joies, a leurs souffrances; nous voulons savoir comment

320

Ballads and Boundaries ceux qui nous ont précédés ont résolu le probléme de la vie. Nous interrogeons le passé dans toutes ses phases, nous le scrutons dans ses détails les plus minutieux pour nous éclairer sur les sentiments,

sur les idées de nos aieux (Détrez 1954: 318).

No, [...] we are not satisfied with the simple account, not even with

the assessment, of events and of great military feats; we want to

penetrate participate those who interrogate

into the intimate lives of peoples, in some way to in their joys, in their sufferings; we want to know how have preceded us have solved the problem of life. We the past in all its aspects, we scrutinize it in its most minute

details, so as to understand the feelings, the ideas of our ancestors.

‘When de Coussemaker suited the action to the word and began to travel around recording Flemish folksongs, he did so in a way that was innovative for his time. He took an exclusive interest in songs as they were sung, which means he paid attention to the singers and the circumstances of singing. As a result he handed down unique and invaluable first-hand contextual information. His notes show him to be a reliable and participating observer who considered details important and who gave special attention to the musical expression of the songs that were sung. Since de Coussemaker himself studied singing and harmony in his student days, he knew the tricks of the trade and took particular care in transcribing the musical notation. De Coussemaker's collection contains a selection of 150 Dutch-language songs recorded in Sunday schools and in laceworkers’ circles, as well as from fishermen

and sailors (Dunkerque). He usually mentions the singer and the place where the song was recorded. Most songs are genuine folksongs known in several FrenchFlemish locales. Very often geographical boundaries are crossed. In those cases de Coussemaker will mention that a particular song is also known in Belgium and/or in Germany,

and

will refer to older or more

recent collections

of songs;

the

collections of the Fleming, Jan Frans Willems (1848) and the German, Johannes Matthias Firmenich (1843-54) are mentioned frequently. The fact that de Coussemaker notices many textual similarities between French-Flemish song material and that of Flanders and Germany strengthened his conviction that French-Flemish popular culture is Germanic in origin. This remarkable collection of folksongs, which includes a number of evergreens

such as “Heer Halewijn” (“Sir Halewijn"), “de Hertog van Brunswijk” (“The Duke of Brunswick”), the parable of the Prodigal Son, the legendary life of St. Genoveva, the sad vicissitudes of the Wandering Jew, and a Pierlala song, is prefaced by an introduction that is important in many senses. In it de Coussemaker, referring to the Breton collector de la Villemarqué (1839), sets forth his ideas concerning the unique cultural-historical meaning of folksongs. Furthermore, he reports on the realization of his work. His fieldwork revealed one thing very clearly to him, namely that the Flemish language was under severe threat. This in turn implied that the future of Flemish popular culture looked gloomy. His publication ought, therefore, to be seen mainly as a kind of rescue operation for a valuable cultural heritage from a charming but bygone era: En les publiant, nous avons eu en vue surtout de ne pas laisser périr certains vestiges que nous considérons comme de précieux souvenirs

Chants populaires des Flamands de France (1856)

321

de notre antique et naive Flandre. Nous avons voulu les faire connaitre a ceux pour qui ces vieilles traditions ont encore du charme (de Coussemaker 1855-56: iv).

In publishing them we have had the prime objective of not allowing

certain relics, which we consider precious souvenirs of our antique and naive Flanders, to perish. We have wished to disclose them to those for whom these old traditions still have some charm.

In his introduction he also discusses the material actually collected, which he classified under 13 headings. This division, made on the basis of different criteria (content, cause or occasion, function, cultural-historical background) is indeed prone to criticism, but it does offer the advantage of clearly showing which genres of songs were fairly popular in French Flanders in the mid-nineteenth century. Important, also, is the interesting information that de Coussemaker adds to the different musical genres. He tries to explain why certain songs are still sung frequently. From time to time his interpretations founder somewhat as he tries to link the songs to Celtic or Germanic backgrounds (song categories 4 and 5) (de Coussemaker 1856: viii-xiv; Vanneste 1974: 336). In order to ensure due esteem for his collection, de Coussemaker translated all 150 Flemish song texts into French. The excellent notes to the songs are also in French. Thus he creates a powerful contrast between, on the one hand, the enthusiastic and spontaneous collaborators who sing as they were wont to and, on the other, the leamed judge who adopted the role of folklorist so as to realize the objectives of the “Comité flamand de France” in publishing his work, It is evident that de Coussemaker wanted to score politically with his remarkable collection of songs. With this pioneering work he proved, in any case, that it is perfectly possible to be both consciously Flemish and at the same solidly French. Finally, I should mention the fact that the 1855-56 edition includes a eulogy by the Flemish poet Prudens Van Duyse, himselfa member of the “Comité flamand de France.” The encouraging verses of an ally from Flanders should certainly have pleased de Coussemaker. Reception and Influence of Chants populaires des Flamands de France”

‘There is no doubt that de Coussemaker's collection was highly successful. Especially in Flemish-Belgium, and particularly in the province of West-Flanders, his ceuvre can be judged to have been very influential, The collecting duo of A. Lootens and J. Feys recorded songs in Brugge (Bruges) and the surrounding areas and ordered them according to de Coussemaker’s example (Lootens and Feys 1878) Their collection was published by the leading Bruges historical society, “Société d'Emulation,” of which de Coussemaker had been a member. Additionally, A. Blyau and M. Tasseel were very active in the neighborhood of leper (Ypres). Their harvest of songs, which constantly refers to the work of the French-Fleming, was published inthe journal Volkskunde (1897-98) and later (1900-1902) reprinted in a one-volume edition (Blyau and Tassel 1962). The Rev.J. Bols, too, who recorded songs in the province of Brabant, speaks highly of de Coussemaker and his dedication to the

Ballads and Boundaries

study of Flemish folksong (Bols 1897). The same holds for F. Van Duyse, who published a provisional but magnificent synthesis of Dutch and Flemish folksongs (van Duyse 1903).

De Coussemaker’s work initially appeared in illustrated installments: the first (pp. 1-135) in 1855, the second (pp. 137-244) in 1856, the third and fourth (pp. 245419) together with the introduction (pp. i-xxvi) also in 1856. The publication of the first instalment was preceded by the circulation of a prospectus (1853), which

contained elements from the introduction pointing out the significance of this collection of songs. The prospectus also mentions the places where interested readers could subscribe to the series, namely in 11 French and 21 Belgian towns, as well as in The Hague, Amsterdam, and Bonn. In 1930, René Giard published a reprint in Lille, with an interesting musicological preface by the Reverend Paul Bayart, in which he reports the following. In March, 1923 Bayart himself and the then chairman of the “Comité flamand de France,” Canon Kamiel Looten, invited the

Lillois public to an artistic presentation of some of the songs from de Coussemaker’s

collection. A renowned singer performed the numbers as faithfully as possible.

‘Those present were immediately converted to the musicand the beauty of the songs. This favorable response then led the organizers to reprint the Chants populaires des

Flamands de France. \n that year (1930) the same publisher, René Giard in Lille, published an Edition abrégée (shortened version) that contained 31 Flemish songs

with their French translations, but without any comments, notes, or even the name ofthe compiler. The Hildesheim/New York-based publishers Georg Olms published an anastatic reprint in 1971. The “Malegijs Committee” from Kemmel, very active in the cultural field between French Flanders and West-Flanders, in 1976 also brought out an anastatic reprint of the 1855-56 edition. The most recent edition dates from

1987, and was published by the same “Malegijs” working-group. Noél Joséphe, president of the Conseil Régional Nord-Pas de Calais, welcomed the reprint and declared that the songs reminded him of his happy childhood and of his mother, “flamande par excellence” (Fleming par excellence), who often sang them to him. In the same edition Wannes Van de Velde, the most important representative of the revival of Flemish folksong, pays tribute to de Coussemaker, who was a real musical

discovery for him, and Albert Boone once more underlines the specific value of de Coussemaker’s collection, which is a comerstone in the entire study of Flemish

folksong, But the aura of de Coussemaker’s songs extends further, for they have appeared prominently on the French-Flemish folk scene: the Groupe Folklorique De Kadullen (Bailleul), the Giant Choir (Dunkerque), the singing couples Marieke en Bart and Alfred den Ouden en Kristien, the folk music group De Haeghedoorn, and the dancegroup Paquotins Paquotines (Hazebrouck) repeatedly perform the songs and keep the memory of Edmond de Coussemaker alive. In recent years, meanwhile, a number of de Coussemaker’s songs have been released in audio-format, with suitable musical arrangements.’ Although the cultural context now differs enormously from that of 140 years ago,

the pioneering work of de Coussemaker remains, and tens of thousands of French-

Flemings are enabled to make direct contact with that rich popular culture. After

centuries of frenchification we owe this cultural survival to de Coussemaker and his allies of the “Comité flamand de France,” the dynamic “Komitee voor FransVlaanderen” (Committee for French Flanders), established in 1948, and to the hundreds of enthusiastic Flemings on both sides of the border for whom Flemish

npEReEHeHHEREHEFRHEREEE EE eee

322

Chants populaires des Flamands de France (1856)

323

popular culture in the Département Nord-Pas de Calais is much more than a piece of nostalgia or folklore. Notes

'Revised version of the paper presented at the 23rd International Ballad Conference, June 2Our thanks go to Gilbert Huybens from Leuven, who lent us his four original and bound instalments and the prospectus for the purposes of this study. SNoteworthy are, inter alia, the LP, Chants des populations marttimes des cOtes de Flandre \Songs of the Maritime Populations of the Flemish Coasts), Les disques Citadelle, CIT 1503 (1988), and the cassette, Chants des marains de Flandre (Marinets' Songs of Flanders}, Editions Pluriel, PLK 93011 / Code 500 (1993). Both LP and cassette are 21-24, 1993, Los Angeles, California.

distributed by the “Blootland” Foundation, 47 rue Jean Morel, F-59210 Coudekerque-Branche,

France. In addition one should also mention the CD, Edmond de Goussemaker, Ltedboeken, deel 2 (Edmond de Coussemaker, Songbooks, part 2], Granota 0210, edited and distributed by BRTN-Radio

1, Brussels.

References Cited

‘Anon. 1977. Edmond de Coussemaker. Neerlands Volksleven 26: 144-147. Blyau, Albert and Marcellus Tassee! 1962. leperscb oud -Hedboek. Teksten en Melodietn utt den Volksmond opgeteekend {Old Ypres Songbook. Texts and Tunes Recorded from Oral Tradition], New edition. Brussel: Ministerie van Openbaar Onderwijs - Koninklijke Belgische Commissie voor Volkskunde. Bols, Jan. 1897. Honderd oude Viaamsche Nederen met woorden en zangutjzen (One Hundred Old Flemish Songs with Texts and Tunes). Namen. (A reprint {Antwerpen: K.C. Peeters - Instituut voor Volkskunde, 1992] has been published with a postscript and indexes by Stefaan Top.)

de Coussemaker, Edmond. 1855-56. Chants populaires des Flamands de France (Folksongs of the French-Flemings]. Gent: F. and E. Gyselinck. Debevere, Rafaél. 1968-69. Edmond de Coussemaker (1805-1876), een belangrijk Frans‘Viaming (E. de Coussemaker, an Important French-Fleming). Ons Erfdeel 12 (no. 2): 105-113, (no. 3): 87-94, (no. 4): 101-105. Deleu, Jozef and Frits Niessen. 1968. Frans-Viaanderen (French Flanders). Lier: Van In, Verhandelingen van de Katholieke Vlaamse Hogeschooluitbreiding, vol. 506; Campusreeks, vol. 6. Détrez, L. 1954. Notre fondateur. Edmond de Coussemaker (1805-1876) {Our Founder. E. de Coussemaker]. Annales du Comté flamand de France 55: 308-323. Firmenich, Johannes Matthias. 1843-54. Germantens Volkerstimmen. Sammlung der deutschen Mundarten in Dichtungen, Sagen, Mabrchen, Volkstedern [Voices of Germany's Peoples. Collection of the German Dialectsin Poetry, Legends, Tales, Folksongs]. Berlin. La Villemarqué, Hersart de. 1839. Barzas-Bretz: Chants populaires de la Bretagne. (BarzasBreiz: Folksongs of Brittany]. Paris: Delloye.

Lootens, Adolphe and J.M.E. Feys. 1878. Chants populaires flamands avecles airs notés et Poésies populatres diverses recuetlis @ Bruges (Flemish Folksongs with the Tunes and Other Folk Poetry Collected in Bruges}. Bruges. Re-edited in book form: Bruges: Imprimerie classique de St-Augustin Desciée, De Brouwer & Cie., 1879. (A reprint (antwerpen: K.C. Peeters - Instituut voor Volkskunde, 1990] has been published with a Postscript and indexes by Stefaan Top.) van Duyse, Florimond. 1903. Het oude Nederlandsche led [The Old Dutch Song). 3 vols. ‘s_ Gravenhage/Antwerpen: Martinus Nijhoff. (Unchanged reprint, 3 vols. Hilversum: Frits A.M.

Knuf, 1965.)

Ballads and Boundaries

Vanneste, Alex. 1974. E. de Coussemaker en de Frans-Vlaamse volksmuziek [E. de Coussemaker and French-Flemish Folk Music]. Viaanderen 23: 332-337. Verbeke, Luc. 1970. Viaanderen in Frankrijk, Taalstrijd en Vlaamse Beweging in Frans- of Zuid-Vlaanderen (Flanders in France. The War of Languages and the Flemish Movement in French or Southern Flanders}. Leuven: Davidsfonds, Keurreeks no. 113 - 1 . 1978. De Nederlanden in Frankrijk en bet Komitee voor Frans-Viaanderen [The Netherlands in France and the Committee for French Flanders). Waregem, ekstranummer KFV-Mededelingen 1978. Willems, Jan Frans. 1848. Oude Viaemsche Liederen ten deele met de melodtén {Old Flemish ‘Songs, Partly with their Tunes). Gent: F. and E. Gyselynck, 1848. (A reprint [Antwerpen: KCC. Peeters- Instituut voor Volkskunde, 1989] has been published with a postscript and indexes by Stefaan Top.)

npEReeERHHEREReEREHEBRHBHEEEn Fw

324

325

JESUS

MARTINEZ

Tigers in a Gold Cage: Binationalism and Politics in the Songs of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley’ This study considers popular songs a form of cultural expression capable of

revealing important aspects of the political experience in Mexican immigrants to the United States. The focus of the study is the musical production

Of the San Jose, California-based norteiio musical group, Los Tigres del Norte, one of the most commercially successful exponents of this genre.

Specifically, the study examines immigrant political expressions in their

songs, a movie, and a dance-concert.

‘We live in an era of intense opposition to the continuation of Mexican immigration to the United States. The anti-immigrant attacks by California governor Pete Wilson, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Nathan Glazer, and other politicians, interest groups, and influential intellectuals, transcend restrictionism and undermine attempts to advance democracy by seeking to reduce the social, economic, and political spaces available to newcomers. Thus, while immigration is politicized, anti-immigrant forces attempt to place limitations on immigrant rights in the American polity. New forms of political disenfranchisement

emerge in an era of continental free trade accords.

In some ways, this democratic regression is reflected in the existing scholarship on Mexican immigration. Scholars tend to emphasize the Mexican immigrants’ relationship to the production process, and many perceive them only as workers. This reductionist interpretation ignores important dimensions of the immigrant experience and disregards other social roles they play in Mexico and the United States. As a consequence, we know little about the political dimension of the Mexican immigrant experience. For example, there are no seminal works analyzing their ideologies, nor partisan preferences in the sending and receiving societies. Briefly stated, Mexican immigrants are not considered political beings. This essay offers an alternative interpretation: the Mexican immigrant as citizen of a binational system. This conceptualization considers Mexican immigrants as citizens with rights and responsibilities in the two republics to which they are connected by historical accident, social linkages, or economic relations. Orthodox political science approaches are not entirely appropriate for understanding a transnational social group with a history of exclusion from the two national political systems, as well as low rates of naturalization in the United States.

In order to begin to understand Mexican immigrant politics, it is necessary to

Ballads and Boundaries

‘overcome disciplinary boundaries and seriously assess the value of cultural expressions, including popular songs. According to the pioneer Mexican immigration researcher Manuel Gamio, the popular songs of the Mexican immigrant make fascinating revelations about “his likes and dislikes, his hopes and his disappointments. They constitute, taken together, a sort of collective autobiography” (Gamio 1971: 84). ‘This study pursues the line of inquiry suggested by the Mexican anthropologist in analyzing the musical production of Los Tigres del Norte, one of the most important norterio groups in Mexico and the United States. The group members are natives of Sinaloa, Mexico and they have lived in California's Silicon Valley since the late sixties. Furthermore, the autobiographical character of the songs is particularly relevant in the case of the group, as a majority of their most significant songs recorded during the last decade were written by Enrique Franco, a Sinaloa-bormn

composer who also lives in San Jose, California.

‘This work presents a central argument: the artistic work of Los Tigres del Norte

‘suggests that among Mexican immigrants there is a fervent adherence to Mexican

provincialism and nationalism as a response to the social subordination and alienation they find in Silicon Valley. Furthermore, the musical production manifests

and expresses a binationalism that is consistent with the transnational character of

Mexican migration. This became evident in their June 1990 dance-concert in San Jose. Flashback to 1990: The Dance-Concert as an Interrupted Celebration of Mexicanness in Exile

The last week of June 1990 seems to be the official Tigres del Norte week in the

Mexican-origin community of San Jose. The two local Spanish-language theaters where Mexican movies are shown have a Tigres del Norte double feature: La Camioneta Gris and the premiere of Los Tres Gallos, both film versions of similarly titled songs in the long play, Gorridos Probibidos. The Spanish-language radio and television stations announce day and night the return of the “idols of the people and winners of the Grammy award” to their beloved city “in a sensational dance at the new Convention Center of San Jose.” Tickets, $30, are available in advance, and with a discount, at the usual retail outlets.

On June 30, the awaited date, the cavernous convention center is invaded by waves of predominantly young immigrants wearing the latest fashions of Silicon Valley's Mexican working class. At a similar dance a year earlier, Los Bukis registered the then highest attendance at the enormous center by drawing some 14,000 souls. The record is not broken on this occasion, as the attendance appears to approximate half of the figure reached by the group from Michoacin. Nevertheless, these numbers represent an attractive captive market for the cigarette and restaurant businesses that have set up booths in the dance hall to peddle carcinogens and overpriced foods It is near midnight and the main attraction readies

its presentation.

After a

musical break, the hall is brought back to life by the special lighting set up at the principal stage to illuminate a countryside landscape that combines elements of norteno and wild west cultures: nopales, a covered wagon, riding saddle, and a wooden entrance made notable by the “Tigres del Norte” engraving on the crossbar.

BEEBE RBE RE R ERE BRE BE

326

Tigers in a Gold Cage

327

On the back wall, dominating the ideological content of the setting, the stage lights form a gigantic tricolor flag: green, white, and red. Ananxious crowd congregates about the stage as the show begins with lengthy recorded introduction in which a narrator utilizes background music and appropriate segments of selected songs to tell a history, in verse, of the group and its songs before introducing, one by one, to the anticipated delirium of the crowd, cousin Oscar Lara and the four Hernandez brothers, Jorge, Heman, Octavio, Eduardo:

“cinco bombres, cinco bermanos, cinco nobles mexicanos. Para ustedes, jLos Titiitigres del Noooorte!"*

No further words are necessary. The first notes are transmitted by the elaborate sound system to inundate the San Jose Convention Center in Silicon Valley, followed by words that immediately establish the ambiance desired by one and all, and in the construction of which every consumer/citizen/ dancer/singer/musician actively participates, after covering the price of admission, with his/her voice/vote because the words are known by one and all. Those not dancing sing, and those dancing sing as well: Que digan que estoy dormido Y que me traigan aqui

Let them say that I sleep And let them bring me here

Si muero lejos de ti

If I die far from you

México lindo y querido

Beautiful and dear Mexico

The collective joy is unleashed and prolonged by what turns out to be a nationalist and regionalist potpourri partly based on the “Popurri Mexicano” from the long play Gracias ... Aménca . . Sin Fronteras, which eamed the group a Grammy for the best regional Mexican-American recording in 1988. The singing

continues uninterrupted, and previously suppressed pride in the nation and town of origin is now permitted to emerge through shouts, whistles, and cheers from a sheltered but suffocating concealment as the group pays homage to Mexico, Jalisco, Nuevo Leon, Guanajuato, Michoacdn, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Sinaloa before the nortefo rendition ends with the reaffirming nationalism of “Como México No Hay Dos.”

As the introductory segment evolves, mature women climb to the top of the sixfeet high stage with a feline agility which defies their age and physical condition in order to embrace and kiss Los Tigres. Jorge Hemandez instructs the stage hands and security personnel to allow access to the admirers, encouraging the formation of a consistent parade of men, women, and children to the stage, all eager to show affection to the musicians and become, at least for a few seconds, protagonists themselves in this celebration of Mexicanness in exile. A union takes place, to the rhythm of norteria music, between the multitude, “the people,” and Los Tigres to transform everyone into a single Mexican

superorganism in Silicon Valley. To become Mexico in the United States. To create “El Otro México.” To transform the Silicon Valley and California, the land of “English Only” legislation. To transform the United States. At the end of the potpourri the dance continues with “La Puerta Negra” and all other songs that can be sung during the next hour and a half, a period which includes mandatory interruptions to greet and thank the public, please requests, and dedicate songs to the unending number of people writing, on whatever material is at their disposal, messages of love for cherished beings and places of origin.

Ballads and Boundaries

An hour and a half later, as the public maintains high spirits and requests more songs, the group prepares to leave. For the umpteenth time, the “five men, five brothers, five noble Mexicans” thank the crowd for their presence and embark on a final potpourri to provide a definitive ending to the event. The concluding words say what has been repressed throughout the night De que me sirve el dinero Si estoy como prisionero Dentro de esta gran nacién Cuando me acuerdo hasta loro Y aunque la jaula sea de oro No deja de ser prision

Of what use is money to me If I am like a prisoner Within this great nation When I recall I even cry And even if the cage is made of gold It does not cease being a prison

‘The people do not permit the group to leave and force them to continue with the silliness of “El Contagio.” Los Tigres intend to follow up with another song, but some unseen authority decides the program must come to an end and the sound

system is shut off without giving a damn about the energetic protests of the crowd.‘ The Mexicanness phenomenon crumbles as the dance hall is illuminated and the

people exit alone or in groups. Several scores of admirers remain attached to the stage to speak and be photographed with Los Tigres. Upon leaving the building one walks through the nearly solitary streets of the

historic center of the city. The entertainment establishments have closed or are

closing, and the financial and administrative buildings have not been occupied since Friday evening when some of the dancers, in their role as janitors, cleaned them from top to bottom,

Silicon Valley and Los Tigres del Norte: Hegemony and CounterHegemony

Los Tigres del Norte are natives of the municipioof Mocorito in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa. They have lived in San Jose since 1968, when they were contracted by a local promoter for a two month stay. Although they began to record shortly after their arrival in this city, commercial fame did not arrive until 1975 with the production of a love-and-drug smuggling corrido, “Contrabando y Traici6n.” Since then, their musical success has evolved to include over two dozen original LPs and participation in commercial films as stars and producers. In twenty years they have climbed to the pinnacle of their profession and become a major musical phenomenon in the United States and Mexico. For more than a decade, Los Tigres and composer Enrique Franco joined forces to create an impressive and unique repertoire of songs that includes many

specifically concerned with the experiences of the Mexicans who migrate to the

north. With these migration-related songs, the musicians and the composer became eloquent articulators of the experiences and views of many members of the Mexican

immigrant community in San Jose and the United States. The continuing marketabil-

ity of the songs indicates, among other things, their persisting relevance to the cultural consumption standards of many Mexican immigrants. Despite their commercial popularity on both sides of the border, Los Tigres del Norte are relatively unknown in their place of residence, Silicon Valley. In Silicon

=z nenenmrneanRreReEeEeEEe fee 2 22

328

Tigers in a Gold Cage

329

Valley only Mexicans and other Latinos known about the group. The musical style and the subject matter of the songs recorded by the group are alien to the values and lifestyles of the rest of the members of the sharply segregated society. In Silicon Valley, the culture of the dominant social sectors celebrates the achievements of high technology scientists, managers, and entrepreneurs. Local heroes and role models are industrial leaders David Packard, William Hewlett, Steve Jobs, Stephen Wozniak, and others. These individuals are perceived as being responsible for tuning the region from an agricultural area into the high technology capital of the world. Their achievements are celebrated by an extraordinary concentration of the nearly 200,000 work-obsessed professionals and technicians

who have made the Silicon Valley the premier national and international milieu of technological innovation (Castells 1987:

1).

The dominant social sectors of the Silicon Valley are not particularly concemed with the views, needs, or interests of Mexican immigrants who tend to be on the opposite end of the occupational and social spectrum. As janitors, assemblers, dishwashers, laborers, secretaries and, at best, technicians, many Mexicans of the Silicon Valley are limited to playing menial and labor intensive roles that are of peripheral importance in the information-based industries. In some respects, these Mexican workers can be considered losers according to the dominant cultural standards of this region. In Silicon Valley, a region regarded as the “Wild West of private enterprise” by a local executive of Fortune magazine,’ elites value and encourage fierce competition at the individual and corporate levels. Mexicans are drawn by the dynamism of the Silicon Valley economy, but lack the resources and opportunities to become successful and competitive corporate

officers. They are drawn to the Silicon Valley by the expansion of unskilled low-wage labor, most remain employed in such occupations, and they have been unable to make major advances in the local socio-economic hierarchy. In comparison to the achievements of local elites, Mexican immigrants can only be regarded as economic failures. Under these conditions, Mexicans have attempted to develop their own definitions of success. Historically frustrated accomplishments in politics, the economy, education and other areas have been accompanied by a search for relief in the cultural realm and the emergence of popular figures. Los Tigres del Norte play this role for the Mexican community in Silicon Valley. In contrast to the indifference of mainstream society, Mexicans hold Los Tigres del Norte in high regard. Their

songs are requested frequently on radio stations, their recordings are purchased in stores and from peddlers of pirate cassettes, their movies are exhibited in the remaining Spanish-language theater, their videocassettes are rented from video stores, and each of their performances in the Silicon Valley and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area is attended by many thousands of people. The work of the musical group can thus be said to appeal to many local Mexicans who consider the songs, movies, and live performances effective artistic vehicles for the transmission of valuable cultural codes. As working class immigrants themselves, Los Tigres del Norte were well positioned to understand the local Mexican immigrant community. Los Tigres learned about the joys and frustrations of the binational migrant experience. They knew first hand what it was to long for friends and loved ones left behind in Mexico. ‘The musicians, members of a rural family with eleven children and a temporarily disabled father, abandoned their town in Sinaloa and moved to Mexican border city

Ballads and Boundaries

of Mexicali to look for work, with aspirations of becoming well-paid professional musicians (Birnbaum and Nathan 1989). Once in Mexicali they were hired to work in San Jose by a local promoter. In the following years they went from performances

in bars for as little as two dollars to rising commercial stars. In the interim, as residents

of the Mexican barrios of San Jose, Los Tigres discovered the hardships faced by members of a predominantly working class racial minority group in the United States. Fora time they were also undocumented because “their employer confiscated their passports” (Bimbaum and Nathan 1989). In a 1992 interview, composer Enrique Franco provided personal information that reveals he underwent experiences comparable to those of other immigrants. Annative of Mazatlin, Sinaloa, he was taken to the border city of Tijuana by his parents while still an infant. As an adult he lived in Tijuana and Mexico City working as band leader and composer. He was recruited to San Jose in 1979 by the owner of a record company, Fama Records, to be the firm's musical director. After five years of work with groups in the Fama label, which included Los Humildes, Los Tigres del Norte, and others based in Mexico and the United States, the firm closed and left him unemployed.

His immigration documents also expired, making him an undocu-

mented Mexican in Silicon Valley. Los Tigres hired him to work as their musical director but Franco had to wait until the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) to legalize his status. He accomplished this with the aid ofa local church after being swindled by ineffective immigration attorneys. Despite his legalized status, however, Franco claims United States immigration authorities

regularly give him problems and treat him as a possible drug smuggler due to his Mexican appearance and norterio attire. By the time Franco began to process his IRCA documents he was already composing songs that reflected his experience in the United States and that of people around him. For example, during a conversation he heard an acquaintance compare

life in the United States to a gold cage. The idea resulted in a song, “La Jaula de Oro,”

and a movie with the same title. The perception of life in the Silicon Valley and the

United States expressed in this song is the opposite of that held by local industrial leaders

Like other Mexican immigrants whose reason for migration to the United States

tends to be primarily economic in nature, composer Enrique Franco wishes to return to Mexico if he achieves economic success, preferablyto live in Tijuana, Guadalajara, or Mexico City, three places that permit the realization of his artistic work. It is with these ideas in mind that he wrote the songs recorded and performed by Los Tigres

del Norte.

Songs of the Tigers: Life in the Gold Cage

Los Tigres del Norte have produced over two dozen records during the nearly two and a half decades of their professional career. While all of their songs reveal in some way their binational migrant experience, it is noteworthy to point out that in nearly every LP recorded until recently there is at least one song dealing directly with some aspect of the migration process. Los Tigres may thus constitute the most

consistent example of a migrant artistic group consciously concemed with the interpretation of the migrant experience. Their impressive work provides a rich source of information on the evolution of Mexican immigrant perspectives of

=enRrREBEnBeeEBEBEB BEBE e222

330

Tigers in a Gold Cage

331

numerous relevant political issues, particularly their relation to the United States and their perception of immigration policies. A high point in the interpretation of songs of this nature was the period that preceded, included, and followed the passage and implementation of IRCA. Coincidentally, it was also during this time that Los Tigres solidified their commercial

appeal in the United States and Mexico. The inclusion of migration-related songs in the recordings during this period may be considered a successful marketing strategy encouraged by the immense popularity of “Los Mandados,” a delightful, vengeful, and neatly subversive satire recorded in 1978 by Vicente Fernandez. It may be accurate to argue that the continued production of migration songs by Los Tigres over a period of time that spans three decades most likely indicates the continuous and evolving preoccupation by the consumers, the group, and the composers with this issue. To a great extent, the increased frequency in such recordings during the eighties reflected the rise of migration to the level of preeminence in the binational political discourse. Los Tigres del Norte attempted to capture the imagination of the binational social sectors with the production of

commercial songs and interpretations of them that approximated the interests and

concerns of their target audience.

‘The songs discussed in this work covera broad range of migration-related issues and experiences. These begin with “Esperando el Cheque,” a satire involving the desperation ofa married couple awaiting the arrival of the monthly welfare check, and end with “Cuba,” a counter-revolutionary song in which the singer assumes the identity of an exiled Cuban awaiting the opportunity to launch a new invasion on the island in order to oust the Castro regime. The songs constitute the historical poles of a musical legacy that articulates the evolution of the group and the significance of broader developments which influence the lives of Mexican immigrants. “Esperando el Cheque” is followed by the Texas-Tamaulipas border corrido, “Jacinto Trevifio,” and the closely related “El Chicano.” While the former is the

account of a specific figure, the latter is the announced temporary, probably seasonal, departure from Laredo to other parts of the United States of a proud

Mexican of uncertain nationality. The two songs underscore the influence of the norterio tradition (that found along the Texas-Mexico border) on the initial musical production of Los Tigres. The

influence could have been transmitted by the mass media, the recording company, and the numerous Texan migrants who settled in Silicon Valley in the post-World War Il period.

In addition, the reaffirmation of the Mexican-origin identity in “El Chicano” stands in rebellious contrast to one of their latest recordings, “El Suefio de Bolivar,”

which presents what appears to be an assimilationist perspective from a permanent resident who accepts the imposition of the Hispanic identity. However, composer Enrique Franco states that it is a song with an utopian perspective that, above all, seeks to elicit the improvement of relations among Latinos in the United States.”

Ahora ya estamos aqui

Now we are here

Vamos todos A watar de superamos Y orgullosos siempre

Let us all Try to improve ourselves And proud always

‘Vamos a unimnos

Habremos de sentimos

Let us unite

‘We shall feel

That here By name We are called Hispanics

‘This composition may suggest the arrival of a conformist or U.S.-centered stage in the thematic orientation of the group's immigration-related songs. However, the inclusion in the same record of the “Norma Corona” corrido, one that honors the achievements of a Sinaloan attomey who was involved in human rights activism but was presumably assassinated by Mexican government authorities, indicates that the wansition is not altogether clearcut. Indeed, the binational perspective of the

composer, Enrique Franco, is manifested once again after composing corridos that

celebrate an assassinated Mexican journalist, “El Gato Felix,” and a Chicano labor organizer, “Cesar Chavez.” Furthermore, the group has already included songs that may be considered apolitical or assimilationist, only to continue the tradition of irreverent and nonconformist migration songs afterwards. Some light is shed by public declarations of the group. For example, in 1989 group leader Jorge HemAndez declared ina Mexican national television program, transmitted to Mexico and the United States, that they considered the 1980 conservative religious song “Un Dia a la Vez,” the Spanishlanguage version of “One Day ata Time,” their favorite and most important recording

because it steered them in a new direction, away from corridos about killings and drug trafficking, The group's best migration songs followed this recording, which demonstrated the influence of U.S. country music and a revived religious fundamentalism.

‘At the opposite end of the assimilation and acculturation scale are songs such as “Plaza Garibaldi,” “Me Voy de Estas Tierras,” “Bajo el Cielo de Morelia,” “Pueblo Querido,” “Acuarela Potosina,” and “Mi Distrito Federal.” They focus on making favorable references to specific locations in the home country. “Plaza Garibaldi” lauds the famed location where mariachis congregate in Mexico City to be hired for every imaginable celebratory occasion, including the serenade discussed in the song. “Me Voy de Estas Tierras” discusses the pain of abandoning the woman he loved (one of the “Flores de Mi Pais") in the town of origin. The virtues of the hometown and of the loved ones are praised eloquentlyin “Bajo el Cielo de Morelia,” a song first popularized by the Michoacdn singer, Felipe Arriaga. ‘A discussion of the hometown's virtues is further developed in “Pueblo Querido,” which also presents a masterful exposition of the pain associated with departure from the home community and social displacement in a foreign land. “Bajo el Cielo de Morelia” and “Pueblo Querido” include appeals for divine intervention, and the second directly expresses a desire to reunite forever with the ancestors of the Mexican rural home community. Like “Bajo el Cielo de Morelia” and other songs of this nature, “Pueblo Querido” rejects the presumed advantages of modemity, represented by the well-lighted cities of the United States. The social and cultural ramifications of modemization are also ridiculed in “Muchachas Modemas,” wherein women abandon tradition in favor of shorts, bikinis, and a life of leisure. “El Celular” presents a critique of modemity in the form of the technology represented by the cellular telephone. The gadget, a modem necessity for corporate executives and other social elites, at first appears to provide spatial freedom and prestige to the common person, represented by Los Tigres, but

BERBER EREERERESE.

De que aqui Por nombre Nos digan Hispanos

ERE

Ballads and Boundaries

EE

332

Tigers in a Gold Cage

333

results in incessant, around the clock control by superiors, specifically the employer, and the jealous spouse. “El Otro México” presents an important departure from the tendency towards the romanticization of life in Mexico. Instead, the song emphasizes the accomplishments of the rural migrants who are able to recreate Mexico in territory that was once part of the Mexican nation. “El Otro México” portrays Mexican migrants as nationalists, a theme repeated later in “Popurri Mexicano,” and as heroes and progressive social actors who make important economic contributions to the homeland. The song has a defensive beginning but manages to evolve into an eloquent critique of stereotypes found among non-migrant social sectors in Mexico. Franco presents class inequality and national economic policies as forces that drive Mexicans to leave their homeland. More importantly, the composition by Franco highlights the binational institutionalization of Mexican migration. However, the song does not recognize the changing nature of Mexican migration and the new waves of middle class and urban Mexicans that were developing in the early eighties in the aftermath of the 1982 Mexican economic crisis.

The pre-migrant peasant life of Mexico is once again romanticized in 1988 by the Enrique Franco composition “Campesino Soy,” albeit in a most unorthodox way: the second half of the recording is sung in English. Bilingualism becomes the central theme in “El Bilingue,” a humorous account of a rural Mexican who leams English to establish a relationship with a visiting English monolingual young Mexican American woman, a pocbita, who is accompanying her parents to their Mexican hometown, Language does not unify but becomes a divisive element in the inter‘generational relation presented in the dialogue between an immigrant and his son in “Jaula de Oro.”

“Vivan los Mojados” and “El Gringo y el Mexicano” deal with two different but related issues: the first defends and celebrates the economic and social roles of undocumented workers, while the second song narrates the violent outcome of a

confrontation between a Mexican immigrant and a U.S. employer who forces the wife of the worker to become his lover. A fourth character, the Mexican couple's son,

is introduced in the song after the immigrant has been released from a twenty year sentence in prison and retums to Mexico. The son declares moral support for the father's double killing and states that he, too, would have done the same.

“Vivan los Mojados” presents an overview of the pre-IRCA undocumented immigrant situation, emphasizing the economic and social importance of the workers to the receiving country, pointing out their vulnerabilities, and celebrating their persistency and ingenuity when persecuted by United States authorities. The optimism of this well-received composition has a sequel, “Ya Nos Dieron

Permiso,” which celebrates the acquisition of a permit, through marriage to a US. citizen, and calls upon immigration authorities to legalize Mexican workers in light of their economic productivity and contributions. This daring attitude contrasts with the harsh conditions, humiliations, and fatal destiny encountered by immigrants in other songs. “Reloj Maldito” tells of misfortune, involvement in drug trafficking, and subsequent imprisonment in the United States. In tum, “La Tumba del Mojado” begins with a first person statement declaring an inability to cross the border due to the presence of the Rio Bravo. The song goes on to inform of the immigrant’s

capture while in the United States, exhibiting an awareness of the contradictions involved in migrating to the United States:

No pude cruzar Ia raya

I could not cross the line

Se me atravezo el Rio Bravo

Me aprendieron nuevamente Cuando vivi al otro lado Los dolares son bonitos Pero yo soy mexicano

The Rio Bravo got in my way

They apprehended me again When I lived on the other side The dollars are pretty But I am Mexican

The song’s title is a reference to the river which runs along most of the international border. The danger involved in the migration process and in making such crossings is retaken in “Tres Veces Mojado,” an account of a Salvadorean who flees the violence and poverty of his country, crosses three international borders with respective rivers, and encounters hardships in the three foreign countries (Guatemala, Mexico, the United States), before obtaining legalization in the United States and achieving a lifestyle that more than makes up for the suffering previously undergone. The border and civil right struggles become the foci of other important compositions like “Cuando Gime la Raza,” “Frontera Internacional,”

“América,”

and

“El Suefio

de

Bolivar.”

In these songs,

“Sin Frontera:

Los Tigres criticize the

imposition of political borders that divide Mexicans and other peoples. The songs

also espouse Latin-American brotherhood and celebrate mestizaje.

“Frontera Internacional” is a melancholic appeal directed at the international

borderby a Mexican who has lost a brother attempting to make the crossing and i preparingto take his loved woman into the United States. The existence of the border is questioned:

Frontera Frontera internacional

Si somos hombres igual Porqué divides la Tierra

Border International border

If we are all equal men Why do you divide the Earth

“Sin Fronteras” reiterates pride in the mestizo heritage and transcends continentalism to develop a global perspective on life. An analogy is made with the life of an eagle to impress upon the audience the natural origin of freedom and the

artificiality of earthly divisions. Soy como el Aguila Que vuela por el cielo

1 am like the eagle Which flies through the sky

Por donde es amo y sehor

Where it is master and lord

Libre su vuelo

Arriba no esté dividido Como el suelo Que la maldad De algunos hombres

Dividid

Free its flight

It is not divided up above Like the ground That the evil Of some men Divided

“América” expresses cultural pride and seeks to reappropriate an identity the

United States attempts to monopolize:

EBERBRERBREREREEEF.

Ballads and Boundaries

BEEBE

334

Tigers in a Gold Cage Del color de la tierra

Yo he nacido Por herencia Mi idioma es castellano Los del norte Dicen que soy latino No me quieren decir ‘Americano

335

Of the color of the earth

I have been bom By heritage My language is Castilian Those from the north SayI am Latino ‘They don't wish to call me American

One of the most significant expositions of an undocumented immigrant’s relation with the United States is explored at various levels in “Jaula de Oro,” a song that also brings into the open personal and familial dilemmas commonly experi-

enced by Mexicans who cross the intemational border and settle in this country. It handles two other major themes: (1) intergenerational conflict between the adult

migrant acculturated in Mexico and the young migrant raised almost entirely in the United States, the latter being unfamiliar with and unwilling to retum to Mexico

where his father can, presumably, lead a happier life; and (2) the irrelevance of material gains within the context of social alienation, legal persecution, and unhappiness. In “Jaula de Oro” the United States becomes a prison and Mexico is

perceived as the site where the migrant’s dreams may be fulfilled Aqui estoy establecido En los Estados Unidos Diez afios pasaron ya

En que cruce de mojado Papeles no he arreglado Sigo siendo un ilegal ‘Tengo mi esposa y mis hijos Que me los traje muy chicos Y se han olvidado ya De mi México querido Del que yo nunca me olvido Y no puedo regresar De qué me sirve el dinero Si estoy como prisionero

Dentro de esta gran nacién

Cuando me acuerdo hasta lloro Y aunque la jaula sea de oro No deja de ser prisién

(Dialogo entre padre e hijo) Escuchame, hijo

éTe gustaria que regresaramos A vivir a México?

Whar'cha talking about, dad? I don't wanna go back to Mexico No way, dad

1 am established here In the United States Ten years have passed

Since I crossed as a wet one

T have not regulated my papers I remain an illegal Ihave my wife and my children I brought them very young ‘And they have already forgotten ‘About my dear Mexico ‘The one I can never forget And cannot return to

Of what use is money to me

If | am like a prisoner ‘Within this great nation When I recall | even cry And even if the cage is made of gold It does not cease being a prison

(Dialogue between father and son) Listen, son

Would you like for us to return To live in Mexico? ‘What'cha talking about, dad? I don’t wanna go back to Mexico No way, dad

336

Ballads and Boundaries

Piensan como americanos

(Sung) My children don't speak with me ‘Another language they have learned And forgotten Spanish ‘They think like Americans

Aunque tengan mi color

Even if they have my color

De mi trabajo a mi casa Yo no sé lo que me pasa Que aunque soy hombre de hogar Casi no salgo a la calle

From my work to my house Idon’t know what is happening to me Even though I am a homebody

(Cantado) Mis hijos no hablan conmigo Otro idioma han aprendido Y olvidado el espafiol Niegan que son mexicanos

Deny they are Mexicans

I hardly go out on the street

Pues tengo miedo que me hallen

Since | fear them finding me And deporting me

De qué me sirve el dinero Si estoy como prisionero Dentro de esta gran nacién Cuando me acuerdo hasta lloro Y aunque la jaula sea de oro No deja de ser prisién

Of what use is money to me If | am like a prisoner

Y me puedan deportar

Within this great nation

When I recall I even cry ‘And even if the cage is made of gold It does not cease being a prison

Confrontation with the United States, in the form of the border and an

immigration official, resurfaces in “Los Hijos de Heméndez,”

a song with an

uncommon prologue: a military roll call in which a soldier named Hern4ndez is identified as being missing in action. A transition leads to the actual song wherein the narrator explains the ire he felt after hearing at a border entrance an official mutter offensive remarks against Mexicans. The song chastizes the official for holding prejudicial views toward Mexicans, for ignoring their contributions to society as well as their military sacrifices on behalf of the United States. The narrator points to the case of his U.S.-bom children who entered the armed forces, served courageously, and lost their lives or remain missing in action. “Los Hijos de Hemandez” concludes with the repentance and apology of the border official. Perhaps it is this willingness to humanize “the Other” by seeking dialogue, promoting reason, and desiring to convince by persuasion the representative of the State that leads Enrique Franco and Los Tigres del Norte to present the apparently assimilationist ethnic identity of “El Suefio de Bolivar.” In addition, the real and fictive maturity of the musicians and the composer, the growth of U.S.-bom children, and the accompanying need to establish roots to promote their education and social development influence the evolution of their perspective from temporary to permanent residence in the United States. As indicated earlier, however, Franco has expressed a desire to retum to live in Mexico. In this respect his view more closely resembles the desire of the father figure in “Jaula de Oro,” the song upon which Los Tigres based the first film they starred in and co-produced. In fact, Franco declares “Jaula de Oro” to be the most important song he produced with Los Tigres del Norte. It represented the first time he was able to produce a record according to his own style rather than that of the record

Tigers in a Gold Cage

337

company's owner. Moreover, the subject matter continues to be of concem to him. He expresses dismay at the dismal future awaiting barrio youth, particularly those who enter the cholo subculture. He also finds it difficult to accept the loss of a Mexican identity by the U.S.-bom generations. He finds among many of them an ‘exaggerated interest in repudiating their Mexican heritage in order to assimilate, leading them to behave more americano than the americanos themselves. Thus, it does not surprise Franco that most Mexican immigrants wish to leave the gold cage and return to Mexico.’

In a strikingly different manner, the desire to return to the homeland is also a central theme of “Cuba.” The exposure of the group to Central American immigration, as expressed in “Tres Veces Mojado,” undergoes a dramatic evolution with this latest song that adopts an extremist perspective not shared by the Mexican government or Televisa, its political ally and the conglomerate which owns Fonovisa, Los Tigres’ present record company. Both the Mexican government and Televisa maintain ties with the Fidel Castro regime and are currently involved in promoting Mexican investment in the island. The song may best be regarded as a concession to the Cuban exile community, which holds great influence in the Spanish-language mass media of the United States as well as in the Latino entertainment industry throughout the nation. In the meantime, newer and younger groups in the United States and Mexico contribute to the transformation of the Mexican immigrant music market. Several of these grupos modemos and norterios are producing songs that range from traditional to innovative. Among the songs that regenerate established themes are Grupo Innovacién's “Alto Precio” and “Tierra al Norte” by Lalo y Sus Descalzos. At present, Mexican rock music is experiencing an interesting boom period,

spearheaded by new urban working class bands such as Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio. Maldita Vecindad crosses musical boundaries, expresses social outrage directly, and also denounces and censures injustice in well-crafted songs. Among their works is the landmark “Mojado,” a denunciation of the exploitation and repression of immigrant workers. The song provides an account of an immigrant forced to leave Mexico for economic reasons and highlights his wife's constemation upon learning of his subsequent death in the United States. "Mojado” repudiates the dehumanization of Mexicans by the existing conditions in both countries in an elegantly disturbing and refreshing style. Conclusion To many immigrants, including Los Tigres del Norte and Enrique Franco, Mexico

is nota place to be forgotten or left behind with the passage of time. Rather, Mexico is an integral part of their lives while in Silicon Valley. For many, Mexico is also the place where they may realize themselves as full human beings. This feat cannot be accomplished in Silicon Valley, where they are merely Mexican immigrant workers, not citizens or recognized artists.

Whether complete human fulfillment and happiness can be found in Mexico by the retuming migrants is an altogether different question that deserves attention. While the movie version of “La Jaula de Oro” ends with the retum ofa migrant to the homeland and the last scene is that of a border sign signalling his arrival to Mexico, the camera also ignores the vehicles and pedestrians travelling in the

Notes

A shorter Spanish language version of this paper has been published in Nexos (Nov. 1993) in Mexico. ™Five men, five brothers, five noble Mexicans. For you, Los Tigres de! Norte!”

*Two other local concerts by Los Tigres witnessed by the author in the summer of 1990 and 1992 were also intended to conclude with this fragment of “La Jaula de Oro.” 4A summer 1992 concert suffered the same fate. 5Fortune Magazine, advertising supplement, “Fortune San Jose,” in Service 500 edition, June 5, 1989. “Interview with Enrique Franco, March 18, 1992 in San Jose, California.

“Interview with Enrique Franco, March 18, 1992. “Interview with Enrique Franco, November 24, 1993 in San Jose, California References Cited

Bimbaum, Larry and Debbie Nathan. 1989. “Border Lines,” San Jose Metro, January 5-11. Castells, Manuel. 1987. The Real Crisis of Silicon Valley: The Economic Limits of Social Conservatism.” Manuscript (March, 1987). ‘Gamio, Manuel. 1971. Mexican Immigration to the United States: A Study of Human Migration and Adjustment. New York: Dover Publications.

EE 2.22.2... ee

opposite direction, leaving behinda nation that fails to provide them with acceptable living standards. ‘The songs of Los Tigres del Norte suggest the importance of recognizing Mexican migration asa process that consists of permanent and cyclical migrants, and of acknowledging that many Mexican immigrants want, need, and benefit from the maintenance of ties with the homeland. This binational reality has yet to be formally acknowledged by the Mexican and U.S. govemments, which continue to formulate migration-related policies without the participation of the binational migrants. In this respect, the binational space created by the migrants can be considered an attempt to deal more effectively with the distinct economic, cultural, and political difficulties they encounter in each of the two nations. In effect, the existence ofa transnational consciousness among migrants, and their operation in a space that transcends international barriers, challenges the notions of nationhood, citizenship, and democracy which prevail in Mexico and the United States.

BUBB

Ballads and Boundaries

ana

338

339 ROGER

DEV.

RENWICK

Ballad Finds and the New Sensibility In its second issue of 1987, the Journal of Folklore Research published an article by Roger D. Abrabams called “Child Ballads in the West Indies.” Tbe author of this paper was one of two specialist readers when this essay was submitted in manuscript in 1986. He pointed out in bis reader's report that the article's author had misidentified the ballad and that it was notaversion

Of Child 81 buta version of a far rarer item: Child 82, “The Bonny Birdy,” foundonlyonce before, in 1783, by Robert Jamieson in the repertoire of Mrs. Brown of Falkland, The article, however, appeared in the Journal in 1987

with the claim intact that the Vincentian cante-fable was a “version” of

Child 81. A footnote rejected the suggestion that it wasa version of Child 82

on the grounds that the use of the name “Matty Glow”in the Vincentian texts

‘for the interloping male seems to argue against such an attribution. This ‘Paper proposes that the claim of Child 82 to be the ancestor of the cante-fable “Matty Glow and Garoleen” is far superiorto the claim of Child 81, and that @ major and important folklorist evinced a manifest lack of judgment by extrapolating explanations from the domain of cultural context rather than constructing a theory that the data best support. In fall 1986 I received a manuscript for peer evaluation from the Journal of

Folklore Research on some Caribbean versions of British medieval or Child Ballads (Child 1965).' The essay split neatly into two halves, the first devoted to theory, the second to analysis. in the first half the author reflected at length on two Bakhtinian-

influenced notions: one was creolization, characterized in the essay as the merging of disparate cultural styles, while the other was the importance of the marketplace for folklore performances, this locale characterized as a kind of setting less homogeneous and more permeable than the “folk community” of conventional depiction, the expressive productions of its habituees more open to non-indigenous influence as well as more polyphonous in that several distinct voices and agendas might vie simultaneously for center stage. The mission of the essay's second half was to apply these two key concepts of creolization and — permit me a neologism — “marketization” to versions of traditional ballads of the Child type the author had collected from working-class African Caribbean singers in the islands of St. Vincent and Nevis, both once part of the former colonial territory known as the British West Indies. Six texts were given as illustration: one of “Bonny Barbara Allan” (Child 84),

one of “Our Goodman” (Child 274), one of “Maid Freed from the Gallows" (Child 95), and three of the same cante fable we can call “Matty Glow and Garoleen” that

340

Ballads and Boundaries

the author claimed to be versions of Child 81, “Little Musgrave and Lady Bamard.” The British ballad of “Little Musgrave” tells a fairly consistent tale in its English, Scottish, Canadian, and American manifestations: while her husband's away, Lady Barnard initiates a love tryst in her own bedroom with Musgrave. A pageboy slips off to carry the news of his wife's infidelity to Lord Barnard, who musters his men, rushes home, and bursts in on the lovers, eventually killing both. The Vincentian cante-fable, likewise, tells of a wife who enjoys a lover when her husband's work takes him away to another island. The household pet, a parrot, then undergoes the lengthy journey to apprise its master of the adulterous affair. Man and bird journey home, where the husband kills the adulterers. The manuscript's author— who, despite the usual attempt at anonymity on the journal editor's part, was apparently Roger D. Abrahams — specified the Caribbean cante-fable’s differences from its British ancestor, differences resulting from the twofold processes of creolization and marketization. I quote from the eventual published form of the essay, but the passage is not materially different in the two versions: ‘The story shifts in both form and focus. In the British and American ballad renditions of this story, the action focuses on the headstrong seduction by Lady Barnard of Mattie Groves, [on] her pageboy, and lon}..... the subsequent discovery of the miscreants in bed by her husband....The agency of this discovery is Lord Barnard’s “little servant boy” who plays an incidental part in the action....In the Vincentian rendering, the relationship between the two lovers is subordinated, while that of the message carrier is greatly expanded. In the form of a message-singing parrot, this figure actually instigates the action....In the the case of the Vincentian story, the parrot enters into the action only to stir things up. He makes embarrassing private matters public by singing about them (Abrahams 1987:120). These differences, Abrahams surmised, “nicely illustrate the pro African forms are adapted to the West Indian aesthetic.”

by which non-

All of this seems fair enough, but I was uneasy about the identification of the

Vincentian song-story as a direct descendant of

Child 81. Why? Initially, because I

knew that “Little Musgrave” had been collected from British West Indian tradition before (in Jamaica: Martha Warren Beckwith [1924: 470-472] collected two

renditions, one cante-fable, one song only, from William Forbes of St. Elizabeth's parish in the early twenties, while McEdward Leach [1963:

190-191] collected one at

Port Royal in 1957), and those versions are textually quite close to existing British forms. The Vincentian cante-fable displayed little textual resonance with those other Caribbean versions of “Musgrave,” and such great variation in a ballad’s tradition within the same culture area and in the same general time period is rare. A better candidate for kinship, I felt, was the related-but-distinct Child 82, “The Bonny Birdy,” in which a talking bird journeys from home to tell a knight that his lady lies in another man’s arms. Husband and bird return home together, where the lovers are discovered in flagrante andthe male adulterer killed. Atthe most concrete level of comparison, the actual language of the texts, “Matty Glow” exhibits no stronger, nor weaker, links with “Bonny Birdy” than it does with “Little Musgrave,” but this is understandable, since the West Indian product is a cantefable: most of its

Ballad Finds and the New Sensibility

341

text is in prose, only a small portion in the more stable, less varying form of poetry. And even so, the verse parts have all the appearance of ballad formulas and so can't be used convincingly as evidence of close genetic relationship. For example, the master, on receiving the bird's initial report, reacts witha variant of the “You lie, you lie” ballad formula found not only in both “Bonny Bird” and “Little Musgrave” but also elsewhere (e.g., Child 63C, 86A, 106A, 192E). And the most striking sung portion of “Matty Glow,” the verse containing the bird's warning as it approaches the house with the returning husband that If any man, if any man In another man’s home Itis time, it is time For to rise and go home

(Abrahams 1987:

125)

is matched both by “Bonny Birdy's” “For he that's in bed wi anither man's wife/Has never long time to stay and “Little Musgrave”s “He that's in bed wi anither man’s wife/Tis time he was awa” (Child 81G). As for the textual similarity between the names “Matty Glow” and “Matty. Groves” — often the adulterer’s name in American

versions of Child 81 — that matter I shall take up shortly ‘What about a second level of comparison, that of story told? In this area similarity between “Matty Glow” and “Bonny Birdy” becomes sharper, as does the difference between “Matty Glow” and “Little Musgrave.” Most obvious is the matter of dramatis personae: the witness/messenger is a talking bird in Child 82 and in the Caribbean cante-fable, a human pageboy in all versions of “Musgrave.” Of course, talking birds are common in both British Isles and British Caribbean folklore,’ so to this motif we

must add a further similarity: there are only two main characters in both “Matty Glow”

and “Bonny Birdy,” while “Musgrave” contains four characters with extensive

speaking and acting roles — not only the husband and the messenger, but also the two lovers. Similar is the comparison of setting: two settings — away from home, where the bird seeks and eventually meets his master, and at home, where the lovers sport, where the bird wams the man to leave, and where the husband commits his murder — dominate “Matty Glow” and “Bonny Birdy,” while “Musgrave” is more

complex, featuring prominently the playhouse or church where the lovers plan their assignation in addition to other locales. Even more striking is the economy of action shared by “Matty Glow” and “Bonny Birdy” that contrasts with “Musgrave.” Child 81

habitually draws out its many scenes — of the initial collusion between the lovers, of the confrontation between husband and cuckolder, later between husband and wife. David Buchan sees these two kinds of narrative construction as distinct ways of telling a story; he does not see one as developing historically from the other. “Bonny Birdy" Buchan calls a “dramatic ballad”: this type

tend(s) to have a small number of tightly integrated scenes including ‘one pronounced climactic scene, while the long narrative ballads tend to be in three Acts with some Acts incorporating a number of scenes, and to maintain a general balance among these scenes and Acts......1n short, the dramatic ballads tend to have a simple climbing construction, while the narrative ballads tends to have a more level, complicated construction (Buchan 1972;138).

Ballads and Boundaries

‘The West Indian cantefable of “Matty Glow,” along with “Bonny Birdy,” quite clearly belongs to the “dramatic” end of the hypothetical spectrum, “Little Musgrave” just as clearly to the narrative end. As for the more abstract level of theme, here “Matty Glow” moves yet closer to. “Bonny Birdy” and still further from “Little Musgrave.” "Musgrave's" theme is clearly one of gender politics: who is empowered to control a woman's behavior, it asks, her husband or the woman herself? Lord Bamard seems to consider his wife just another material possession — even at times just a means of production — as evidenced both by his words to the pageboy-messenger “Is my castle burnt,’ he said, “Or is my tower tane?

Or is my lady lighter yet, Of a daughter or son?” (Child H)

and, later, by his question to Musgrave: “How do you love my soft pillow? Or how do you love my sheets? Or how do you love my fair lady,

That lies in your arms and sleeps?” (Child H)

Lady Barnard, on the other hand, displays her independence not only by taking the initiative in bringing a lover to bed in the first place but by responding to the lord's question to her that parallels his just-quoted question to Musgrave. Although perfectly aware that her life depends on her answer, having just witnessed her lover chopped up for giving the wrong reply, she is uncowed and unpersuaded from absolute honesty

EEEEE ERBE EEE EE

342

But better I love little Sir Grove, where he lies,

‘Than you and all your kin.” (Child 811)

“Matty Glow’s” theme is quite different: it is centered in the related concepts of sacrifice, obligation, and betrayal. Employment is scarce in rural Caribbean villages, and many

workin

iss West Indian husbands are forced to leave home to find

work. Such a sacrifice on the part of the husband creates an obligation on the part of the wife to be faithful, among other things, but the wife in the cante-fable betrays that bond. The very same triad of themes informs “Bonny Birdy”: the knighthusband has been forced to leave home on his quest (he couches this sacrifice in strangely moder sentiments: “O what needs I toil night and day/My fair body to kill”), thus creating an obligation on his wife's part to suffer her own version of his. ordeal by refusing lovers, an obligation she, like the Vincentian wife, fails to fulfill. Convinced, then, that Abrahams had misidentified his text, I included this information in my report to the editor of Journal of Folklore Research, feeling not alittle pleased at having helped a colleague avoid drawing conclusions from faulty data (for of course if “Matty Glow and Garoleen” and “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” were not direct kin then arguments about Vincentian variations stemming

EERE

Full well I love your chin

BEEBE

“Pull well I love your cherry cheeks,

Ballad Finds and the New Sensibility

343

from creolization, marketization, and the imposition of an African Caribbean world view were suspect, since they weren't variations and they weren't particularly West Indian). I might add that I was even more pleased to have “discovered,” as it were, a new Child ballad in tradition on this side of the Aantic, especially one so rare as “Bonny Birdy,” which had been collected only once before, by Robert Jamieson from none other than Anna Brown of Falkland in 1783. Not too many years ago such a discovery would probably have occasioned a journal note. Indeed, D.K. Wilgus published such a piece in the Journal of American Folklore, titled “A New ‘Child’ from North Carolina” (Wilgus 1970: 353-354). And the various Child ballad “checklists” — the first one published as early as 1914 (Smith 1914) —attestto, in Wilgus's words, “the zeal of American scholars in tracking down anything remotely related to the sacred 305” (Wilgus 1959). I myself had a hand in the most recent editionof Tristram Potter Coffin's British Traditional Ballad in North America, which functions as a bibliography, a guide to story variation, and a checklist all in one, and I can testify to the excitement a new Child ballad “find” generated, both in the original collector and in later cataloguers like myself (Coffin 1977). However, since as we all know enthusiasm for such finds has waned considerably in recent years, I wasn't so naive as to expect in due course a note in

some prominent folklore periodical on “Child 82 in the West Indies” following my report, I did, though, expect my questioning of “Matty Glow and Garoleen's” ancestry to be taken seriously and the author to revise his existing analysis of the ‘West Indian text substantially, so I was surprised when the essay was published in Journal of Folklore Research the following year to find the discussion in its second half virtually unchanged from the manuscript version. It is true that a footnote had been added, saying that “a reader of this paper......suggested that.....the stories here are closer to the very rare ‘Bonny Birdy’ than to ‘Little Musgrave,” but the note went on to reject that ascription, and to reject it on the sole grounds that “the use of the name ‘Matty Glow’ in the Vincentian texts for the interloping male seems to argue against such an attribution” (Abrahams 1987: 133). I found this rationale weak, even faulty. First of all, change of names is just about the most pervasive kind of textual variation in the oral tradition of folksong; names, whether of people or places, are simply highly unstable. For instance, in American tradition, Child 4, Child 7, Child 12, Child 74, Child 206, and Child 243 all in one version or another identify their protagonistas “Sweet William,” Child 77 and Child 110 as “Sweet Willie”; both Queen Jane of Child 170 and the Brown Girl of Child 295 are called “Queen Sally” (Coffin 1977); indeed, in two British versions of Child 83 (E, F) the husband of the woman Child Maurice fancies is called “Lord Bamard”! I would hardly consider these names evidence of direct familial links among the several ballads. And second, in his footnote Abrahams erred in identifying the lover as “Matty Glow” and thus implicitly analogizing him with the lover of the American Lady Barnard, “Matty Groves,” for in all three Vincentian texts, “Matty Glow” is actually the wife's name; the lover's

name is “Garoleen.” So even if the phonetic similarity between “Matty Groves” and “Matty Glow" had indicated a genetic link, the significance of that connection would have been weakened considerably by the fact that the characters are quite different.’ Thad further reason to be puzzled at the essay’s published form: after all, the author — as I had inferred — was Roger D. Abrahams. As is well known, Abrahams is one

of our

foremost

American

folklorists,

and

his qualifications

to write

authoritatively about folksong and about Caribbean ethnology are of the highest

order; even more apposite to the present case, Abrahams himself has had occasion to assist what Alan Dundes calls “folkloristically naive” anthropologists with comparative identification of text-types (Sherzer 1979: 153). Yet not only was he reluctant to take seriously his reader’s comments, he was willing to advance a careless, unconvincing, and — it must be faced — even “folkloristically naive” rationale for doing so. Indeed, his footnote suggests that the point about textual

kinship and the required comparative analysis it entailed held little interest for him.

But shouldn't it have been of interest, even within the terms of Abrahams’ own Bakhtinian “discourse”? For if the “Matty Glow and Garoleen” cante-fable is not

descended from “Little Musgrave” but from “Bonny Birdy,” then where's the adaptation to the special circumstances of twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean St. Vincent of creole culture and market economy? All the supposed West Indianisms of “Matty Glow,” such as the messenger’s elevation to main protagonist, the making

of private matters public, the absence of husbands due to labor conditions, and so on, are already prominent in the Scottish ballad. Or might we say, perhaps, that the Scottish version can be explained by the same theoretical principles — dispersion

eee

Ballads and Boundaries

ee

344

by throwing the false lover into the sea, where he drowns. Isabel then mounts her horse and sneaks back home before her absence can be discovered, only to be

confronted by the household's pet bird, a parrot, which threatens to tell her father about her escapade. She bribes the creature to keep silent. As we know from Nygard’s Heer Halewijn study, this parrot episode is, in the European traditions of Child 4, peculiarto Britain, and subsequently to North America; evidently ithad been added by English singers to versions that crossed the Channel from France, versions which, as in most of the European traditions, end with the chastened girl's retum

home (Nygard 1958). It seems to me that Abrahams’ characterization of “Matty Glow's” Caribbean. variation from its assumed British ancestor, “Little Musgrave,” is strikingly like the British “Lady Isabel”s variation from its French ancestor: the role “of the message carrier is greatly expanded,” the parrot “enters into the action only to stir things up,” the creature “makes embarrassing private matters public by

BEBE

off with a lover who tums out to have murder, not romance on his mind. She escapes

HE

kind of tensional syncretism? Might it be fruitful for us to think of “Bonny Birdy” as ‘Abrahams does of “Matty Glow”: as a Scots adaptation of the English “Little Musgrave” that’s been “creolized” in the syncretic Anglo-Celtic culture of Scotland? In other words, might we claim that Scotland is to England as St. Vincent is to Great Britain? At first encounter, a not unintriguing homology; let’s pursue some logical extensions of it by looking at that widely-known talking parrot-witness ballad, Child 4, “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight.” Recall that in this song the heroine steals her father's horses and money to run

ee

from the center, increasing heterogeneity, emerging market economy, and a special

similarity leads us to a logical extension of our earlier homology: just as St. Vincent is to Great Britain, so Scotland is to England, and so England is to France. Once again

a somewhat intriguing notion — that, as far as the Child ballad is concemed, British-

Caribbean, Anglo-Celtic, and Anglo-Norman syncretisms may have something in common; but I can'thelp feeling that the concepts of “creolization” and “marketization” are beginning to show a certain blandness, at least in regard to their applicability to Child ballads, for ifthey can be stretched so far then their analytical and explanatory power weakens considerably, as indeed does the significance of any notion of Caribbean specificity represented in the “Matty Glow and Garoleen” song-tale.

BEEBE

singing about them,” and “in the main, his messages are unmotivated.” So this

Ballad Finds and the New Sensibility

345,

This weakness will be even more clearly exposed if we take a version of “Lady

Isabel” that Abrahams did not use in his article (even though he himself collected

itin Nevis in the 1960s) and follow its logical ramifications for our growing homology

(Abrahams 1968: 94-95). On textual and historical evidence there is litle doubt that this Caribbean version is descended from the English “outlandish knight” strain of

the ballad, in which the ending episode of the girl/parrot/father interaction is ubiquitous. It seems, however, that the formative mind behind this West Indian

version (perhaps the mind of one Charles Walters, whom local singers credited with the song’s actual making ) saw fit to drop the parrot episode from the British sourceversion and substitute its own: on her safe arrival home, Lady Isabel drops on her knees and thanks God for her narrow escape. In other words,

here we have

happening textually exactly the reverse of what Abrahams described in the case of “Matty Glow”: a British ballad, which in its British tradition prominently featured a “tale-telling parrot” seeking to “make private matters public” by tatlling in an unmotivated “stirring up” of “things,” is altered in West Indian tradition to expurgate all those features and to add a moralistic conclusion that one usually associates with

a pious, bourgeois, Anglo world view. Wouldn't we therefore have to say that the British ballad, creolized from the French, was then decreolized in the Caribbean, since strictly speaking the Nevis version's story more closely resembles the French continental version than it does the English ones? And once again logic leads us to extend our homology one more step: just as St.

ent is to Great Britain, and

Scotland is to England, and England is to France, so is Great Britain to Nevis! We've reached the point, in other words, of circular reasoning, of the tautology that the Caribbean is to Great Britain as Great Britain is to the Caribbean. ‘WhenI first read the manuscript version of “Child Ballads in the West Indies,”

I must admit that I felt strongly what in this paper I've only hinted at: I felt that the author, in his eagemess to explore ramifications of the creole culture and market economy concepts, had missed what was actually a more interesting aspect of his

folklore data — that he had discovered a ballad-like text ofa song several centuries

old and hitherto collected from oral tradition only once, two hundred years before and on the other side of the Atlantic. But I did not include that opinion in my report, assuming that my preference was personal and subjective, and willing to grant

another's point of view and taste as to what was more worthy of emphasis. I stuck,

therefore, to what the facts strongly indicated so that the author could adjust his theory accordingly. I was following a principle I've always taken for granted: that the best folklorists — the Abrahamses — are those who unite data and theory, text

and context, most insightfully and most convincingly. In my experience, what the best folklorists don’t usually do is to slight and even deny the integrity of one in order to privilege the other, especially when the one slighted, the textual, is the very folklore presumably being explained; to do so is to exhibit not personal preference

or taste or even selectivity, but intellectual imperialism. The “new” sensibility to

which I think Abrahams fell victim here so privileges explanatory constructs from the domain of cultural context that texts become

little more than chimera

to

manipulate in championing a theory. I myself hold to the “old” sensibility that chooses, or modifies, or even constructs a theory which the data best support. Truth to tell, the real topics of Abrahams’ essay were the cultural processes of creolization and marketization, not, as claimed, “Child Ballads in the West Indies,” and so on topic alone I can't help but wonder whether the Journal of Folklore Research was the most

appropriate venue for its publication.

346

Ballads and Boundaries Notes

"Thanks to Elliott Oring and Gary Smith for their sympathetic readings of the paper in its earlier form and for their suggested improvements. 2For examples in British ballads, see Child 4, 63(C), 68, 82, 114 (F, H), 254A; in British West Indian cante-fables, see Jekyll 1966: No. Ill, XXX; Beckwith 1924 (b): Nos. 71, 73b; Roberts 1925: 154-155; Parsons 1918:

No. 113 (Child 274).

For talking birds in post-colonial

Jamaican tales (most entirely in prose) see Dance 1985: Nos. 22, 57C, 75, 111, 146, and 157. +L might also add that the name Matty Groves, which Abrahams considered the source

of Matty Glow, appears only in American tradition, never in British. While American culture certainly diffused to the colonial Caribbean (especially through such channels as whaling and merchant shipping), British West Indian song traditions were more likely to have been influenced by British Isles song traditions than by American ones. References Cited

Abrahams, Roger D. 1968. Charles Walters — West Indian Autolycus. Western Folklore 27: 7795. 1987. Child Ballads in the West Indies: Familiar Fabulations, Creole Performances. Journal of Folklore Research 24: 107-134. Beckwith, Martha Warren. 1924a. The English Ballad in Jamaica: A Note upon the Origin of the Ballad Form. Publications of the Modern Language Association 39: 455-483. 1924b, Jamaica Anansi Stories. American Folk-Lore Soctety Memotrs Vol. 17. New York: American Folk-Lore Society Buchan, David. 1972, The Ballad and the Folk. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Child, Francis James. 1882-98. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. Reprint ed. New York:

Dover, 1965.

Coffin, Tristram Potter. 1977. The British Tradistonal Ballad in North America. Rev. ed. with a Supplement by Roger deV. Renwick. Publications of the American Folklore Society, Bibliographical and Special Series. Austin: University of Texas Press. Dance, Daryl C. 1985. Folklore from Contemporary Jamatcans. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Jekyll, Walter. 1907. Jamatcan Song and Story. Reprint ed. New York: Dover, 1966.

Leach, MacEdward. 1963. What Shall We Do with “Little Matty Groves"? Journal of American Folklore 76:189-194. Nygard, Holger Olof. 1958. The Ballad of “Heer Halewtjn,” Its Forms and Variations in Western Europe. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Parsons, Elsie Clews. 1918. Folk-Tales of Andros Island, Babamas. Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society Vol. 13. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and New York: The American FolkLore Society. Robens, Helen H. 1925. A Study of Folk Song Variants Based on Field Work in Jamaica, Journal of American Folk-Lore 38:149-216. Sherzer, Joel. 1979. Strategies in Text and Context: Cuna kaa kwento. Journal of American Folklore 92:145-163. ‘Smith, Reed. 1914. The Traditional Ballad in the South. Journal of American Folk-Lore 27: 55-60. ‘Wilgus, D.K. 1959. Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 1970. A New “Child” from North Carolina. Journal of American Folklore 83: 353-354.

347 JOSEPH

M.

P.

DONATELLI

“To Hear with Eyes”: Orality, Print Culture, and the Textuality of Ballads The reception of the ballad during the eighteenth century was directed byan elitist culture that was committed to the medium of the printed book and the

transmission of stable literary texts. Recent scholarship by Natascha Wirzbach, Tessa Watt, and Helena Weintraub offers an opportunity for a more exact description of these broadsides as “print objects” that directly influenced the most important eighteenth-century editions of ballads. This paper considers ways in which the ballad is constructed as a ‘print object” by the publishers of broadsides, and subsequently by the editors who looked to these broadsides as models. It especially tries to demonstrate that these printed formats contribute to the conception of the ballad as a subliterary genre.

Since my background is in literary studies, I have had occasion to remark that the fundamental category “text” was destabilized at an early date in ballad studies. During a period that conceived of texts as architectural structures, William Motherwell, having heard the voices of Agnes Lyle and other singers, declared in his preface to the Minstrelsy’ that the “stones” of his cathedral kept shifting around (1827: xi). Percy Grainger, who was placed at another media cusp with his phonograph recordings (Yates 1982), developed specialized transcription techniques to deal with a poverty of graphemic representation which has more recently

been addressed by Paul Zumthor and James Porter (Porter 1976; Zumthor 1990). It

is also worth recalling that the earliest contextualist interrogations of the text were mounted during a time when the iconic and autonomous textual model of New Criticism held sway, a model that regarded “text” as the exclusive site for the production of meaning. In 1945, when Bertrand Bronson asked what Anna Brown “carried in her memory" rather than a text, he framed his answer in terms of a chemical metaphor, describing a ballad as “a fluid entity soluble in the mind to be concretely realized at will in words and music” (1961: 71). It need hardly be said how far the pendulum has swung away from the text and towards performance and context in what has often been cast as a binary opposition. In connection with a steady stream of media and performance studies, orality, and with it the orality of the ballad, has become highly theorized, whereas textuality has received relatively little attention. In recently published work, references to “text” continue to occur in near-formulaic combinations with adjectives such as “frozen” or “fixed,” the latter possibly carrying the idea of “neutered” in relation to the

Ballads and Boundaries

perceived fecundity of oral traditions. A range of other expressions, including “dead

bones" and “textual cenotaph,” convey unfortunate funereal ideas that Albert B.

eee

348

Friedman once noted when discussing the stigma associated with “memorial

‘Oneof the most promising lines of inquiry, pursued by Roger Chartier, Elizabeth S. Eisenstein Robert Darnton, and Jerome J. McGann has been the realization of the materiality, if not physicality, of textual communication (Chartier 1987; Damton. 1990: 107-187; Eisenstein 1979; McGann 1991). Texts, far from being fossilized or disembodied, exist as specific cultural products which are as highly constructed and.

socialized as folklorists have shown orality to be. As McGann observes, “every text enters the world under determinate sociohistorical conditions, and while these

conditions may and should be variously defined and imagined, they establish a

horizon against which the life-histories of different texts can play themselves out” (1991: 9). In this essay, I shall consider two different sets of print-objects which represent textualizations' of the ballad in England in an attempt to suggest the ways in which these texts belong to communication systems where complex relations obtain between “orality” and “print.” My primary concem will be with the broadsides which were printed in such great numbers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in London. To demonstrate that not all textualizations are alike, 1 shall briefly contrast the very different construction of these materials in three important eighteenth-century ballad anthologies, Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany (17231737), the anonymously edited A Collection of Old Ballads (1723-25), and Thomas

Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (the first edition of which was published in 1765). My method follows the lines of Roger Chartier’s analysis of print culture, in which a specific set of print-objects are interrogated in an attempt to understand the ways in which the physical format affects the organization and delivery of information, and the range of economic and social practices associated with that object are identified. The ballad, because of the multiplicity of its media forms and

textual incamations, seems particularly suited to a method which seeks, as Chartier has said, “to reconstruct the limits that typographical procedures imposed on free appropriation of texts” (1989: 9).

‘The ballads printed on broadsides constitute a huge inventory of “print-objects,” with estimates of original circulation during our period running as high as several million, yet the broadside has remained peripheral to the study of traditional ballads since a relatively small proportion of folksongs are preserved on broadsides, and even these few represent but a fraction of the more than several thousand broadsides

EE

positions, among them theories of reader-response, dialogism, and intertextuality.

EEEE

come-lately to discoveries about text made some time ago by folklorists, the notion of any text as “fixed” has been challenged vigorously from a number of theorized

E282

transmission” (1983: 231; see also Friedman 1961). Yet in literary studies, a Johnny-

that have survived: Itis only recently that the broadside has been seen as something other than a function of the traditional ballad. The prejudices of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ballad collectors and editors (including F. J. Child) operated

powerfully against the broadside, aided and abetted, perhaps, by the equally low estimation of the broadside by literary scholars. Building on the legacy of Hyder E.

Rollins (who, despite his prolific editorial and critical work, still felt obliged to offer apologies for the broadside le.g., 1919: 265-281), the studies of Natascha Wurzbach

SEHR

and Tessa Watt have begun to break down the monolithic category “broadside” by subjecting a selection from this vast body of texts to rigorous analysis (Watt 1991;

“To Hear with Eyes”

349

‘Wiirzbach 1990). Another significant contribution has been the recent publication of Helen Weinstein's descriptive catalogue of the broadsides preserved in the

collection of Samuel Pepys (now published in a facsimile edition [Day 1989), a

project that is all the more valuable because there have hitherto been no standard bibliographic rules for the description of ephemera. In an article that sought to explain why the songs which circulated on broadside sheets came to be called “ballads,” Friedman (1958) described these cheaply printed broadsides as casting about for subjects in the early sixteenth century. It would be difficult to catalogue the extraordinary diversity of these broadsides, on which were printed political verse, price lists, ferry schedules, proclamations, handbills, and formal epitaphs.> Yet of all these subjects, the broadsides became almost exclusively identified with popular songs. Why this print object should become a gathering place for such songsis a intriguing question that does not admit a ready answer, yet a closer look at the broadsidesas a print-objects will suggest, I think, that the broadside trade in ballads arose from a set of discursive practices analogous to those which have been posited to account for the oral transmission of song during this period. ‘We should not expect to find, however, a transcription of oral performance on the broadside, for orality must be invoked and constructed differently in a printed medium. If we do not look for direct correspondences, what had once been characterized as mutual opposition may now be understood as the institutionalization and translation of the discursive practice of singing narrative songs in a different medium, though I would characterize this, in light of the fluidity of orality and print during this period (Cressy 1980:13-18), as a mutual exchange rather than as a oneway street leading from tradition to print, or from print to tradition. We would no more expect the literacy of a novel to be realized in film than we would expect the broadside to render “faithfully” the linguistic and structural patterns which belong

to an oral, interpersonal communication. However, the effect of media translation on. particular ballad is neither predictable nor uniform. For example, Flemming G. Andersen has demonstrated that a broadside version of “Lord Thomas and Fair Annet” (Child 76D) in the Pepys collection preserves oral-formulaic language as well as narrative patterns typical of traditional ballads (for the facsimile, see Day 1989: Ill, 316), whereas the broadside version of the ballad entitled “The Unfortunate Forrester,” collected among the Roxburghe ballads, more typically demonstrates the effect of translation into the print medium (Andersen 1982). However, before we can draw preliminary conclusions about why the broadside text of a traditional ballad differs from another, an investigation of the discursive practices of broadsides must be conducted more widely, extending well beyond the relatively few that record traditional ballads. ‘What, then, do we find on the broadside? It is anything but a “fixed” text. ‘Wirzbach has argued compellingly that modern readers of broadsides, with their cultural habits of silent reading, have failed to hear the oral performance that was

inscribed into the text of broadsides, to be realized in the communicative exchange between the ballad-vendor and the audience: “The balladmonger is vis-a-vis the audience in the performance situation, and the special conditions surrounding this confrontation, including the sale of the ballads, are taken into account by the author in his textual construction” (1990:30). I think itis possible to extend these claims even further, and to understand the sheet itself and the inscriptions on it as metonymic references to orality and performance that do not depend exclusively upon this

or else the song peruse” (Chappell and Ebsworth 1966: II, 367). The woodcuts, with

their frontal aspect on a two-dimensional plane define the positionality of the viewer in relation to the sheet, most strikingly exemplified by woodcut illustrating the broadside, “A Fooles Bolt is soone shot” (Rollins 316-322; Day II,178-79) in which the jester aims his bow directly at the implied viewer.’ Moreover, broadside texts inscribe audience-roles of viewer, reader, listener, and singer. The conventional call for attention at the beginning of the broadside, often directed to a specific group, constructs these roles based on a model of interpersonal aural communication: for example, “Good People all pray lend an eare/to this my Song” (Rollins 1927:32), and “Come hither yongmen and giue eare” (Rollins 1922: 250). However, the opening lines of “A pretty new Ditty: Or, A Young Lasses Resolution” show that this inscription of the oraV/aural may be identified closely with technologies of writing and printing: “Young maids, and young men,/I pray you give eare,/And with hand and pen/Ile plainly declare” (Chappell and Ebsworth 1966: II, 290). Wurzbach has observed that

2 22

moment of communicative exchange, though there is little question that the highly socialized practice of selling and singing on the streets provides an enduring cultural context for the broadside (Rollins 1924: 306-27; Wiirzbach 1990). ‘We have underestimated, I think, the physicality of the broadside and its strategies for evoking personal presence. As a mixed media object, the broadside involved the eyes, ears, voice, and hands, a pattem of consumption which is recorded both in its visual format and its explicit references to the handling, reading, and viewing of this print object. The title of a ballad, such as “A Pleasant new Ballad you here may behold/How the Devill, though subtle was gul'd by a Scold,” often calls attention to the broadside as a physical artifact to be viewed as well as heard, a multimedia experience further reinforced in its opening lines: “Give eare, my loving countrey-men,/that still desire newes,/Nor passe not while you heare it sung,/

2 2

Ballads and Boundaries

8 2 2

350

eee aa

44), but the projection ofa shared locus of textuality which exists at once within and beyond the edges of the broadside need not be conceived of exclusively asa physical situation. Borrowinga term from digital technology, we might say that the broadside and its language create a “virtual” space (see Benedikt 1991) which is capable of invoking both the oral and the written, thereby enabling the audience, as William Shakespeare put it in Sonnet 23, “To hear with eyes.” The very features of language that have served to mark and distinguish broadsides from traditional ballads, such as first-person intrusions and explicit narrative commentary, whether heard or read, may be seen as strategies, specific to the print medium, to create voice and a sense of personal presence. Despite the identification of the broadside with a “new-fangledness” in opposition to traditional subjects and styles, the broadside is a highly regulated artifact in its range of subject, matter, layout, structure, and language. The visual field defined by the broadsheet adheres to a narrowly defined Gestalt, whose constituent elements are the title, woodcut, columnar text (demarcated with sidepieces, borders, and rules), and a combination of black-letter and roman type (Weinstein 1992: sxcviii-lii). The typesetting also attests to a high degree of patterning, Roman and italicized type is reserved for certain positions and functions, among them the title, the publisher's imprint, and specialized information within the text, such as proper names or refrains (Weinstein 1991: xviii-xix). Within the textual space defined by the borders of the broadsheet, the broadsides present highly patterned narratives, cued by verbal

ee

these calls for attention create “a reception area for performance” in the street (1990:

“To Hear with Eyes”

351

markers which create both linear and annular pattems, the latter by opening and closing sections which are sometimes defined visually as a first and second part. In this artifact, rhetorical strategies and spatial layout of the printed page, dictated to some extent by the printer's forme (Gaskell 1972: 78-80), are closely allied. While one will meet with mixed success in trying to find the formulas associated with traditional ballads, the limited lexical register of broadsides bespeaks a high degree of regulation which might also be considered formulaic, with expressions usually arranging themselves according to structural narrative functions (e.g., opening and closing stanzas) as well as subject categories, such as the diction of the criminal confession. In an analysis of the “last farewells” of serious criminals, J. A. Sharpe has argued that these texts are “essentially stylized both in their form and sentiments” (1983: 74). If a recent psycholinguistic study conducted by Wanda T. Wallace and

David C. Rubin (1991) is correct in identifying a set of unspoken rules of constraints as the enabling factor in the oral transmission of a ballad, might we not consider that the tendency toward a highly regulated language and format also manifests itself, in a different way, in the broadside? ‘There are also a number of ways that the broadside belongs to “tradition” rather than serving to extinguish it* The use of black-letter brings the broadside into relation with a diverse set of ptint-objects that maintained this archaic typeface, notably almanacs, law books, and Bibles. The cultural status and value of blackletter type during this period remains an intriguing question, but the persistent use of it by publishers and printers, may represent an attempt to inscribe tradition upon the broadsides, for, as Rudolf Hirsch has noted, this typeface seems to have catered primarily to “tradition-bound” clientele (1967: 114-116). Yet another form of tradition is the negligible variation once the text and design of the printer's forme had been set, a transmission which might extend over several generations since typefaces, woodcuts, and ballad-stock were handed down, either through bequest or commercial transaction (Thomson 1974, :chapter 2). On the other hand, the broadsides showed themselves capable of a sort of “creative re-creation” as favorites, such as “Adam Bell,” “The Duchess of Suffolk” and “Jane Shore”, were re-set and published again, while other ballads, most notably Martin Parker's ballads, gave rise to series of answer-ballads which both repeated and varied the words of the original song, (Wiirzbach 1989: 95-97). ‘The social uses of the broadside are complex, covering a much wider range of activities than merely serving as reading or singing texts. One thinks of the ballads posted not only in public venues, but in private houses as wall decorations (Watt 1991:178-216), or of the contemporary use of a Bible which no one in the family

could read as an amulet or heirloom (Cressy 1980: 50). The studies of Brian Stock (1983), David Cressy (1980), and Margaret Spufford (1981) have indicated that the experience of textuality extended well beyond the ranks of the literate, and that the skill of literacy was neither uniform nor class-specific. R. S. Thomson (1974) has suggested that the broadside sheet circulated well beyond the confines of London. In yet another interface of oral and printed, Thomson indicates that these well-wom routes of distribution (which were themselves printed as maps) appear to coincide with the stomping grounds of nineteenth-century ballad collectors, most notably Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp (see map in Thomson 1974: 274-275). Another range of social relations results from the fact that the broadsheets, as all paper, were manufactured out of cloth-stuffs, mostly linen and rags (Febvre and

This production from cloth makes sense out of the

distribution of the item by chapmen adornments for personal use (Spufford Packe,/To know of Maydes what tis they which the “Fardle,” or pack, is opened

who dealt primarily in cloth-stuffs and 1984:90-92). In “The Pedler opening of his lacke,” the broadside serves as a table upon and these goods are itemized and laid out

(Rollins 1922:116-120; Day I, 238-239). The ballad as a “ware,” which found its place

among a set of domestic items rather than as a literary text, raises questions about the account of the activity of “ballet-making” as a crassly exploitative commercial enterprise encroaching upon traditional cultural activity. The close identification

with the body may also have been reinforced by the use of ephemera as toilet-paper, a practice which assuredly contributed to its very low rate of survival (Spufford 1981: 48-49). Whether this complex of clothing, body, and text extends or not to the preoccupation with women’s clothing and personal objects (e.g., combs) in ballads is, I think, a question worth raising. Not all textualizations, are however, alike. | would like to cite as a case in point the textualization of the ballad in eighteenth-century editions, though even within

this set of print-objects we can distinguish different projects. Of the three editions, Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany stands closer to broadside pattems of circulation, as seen by Ramsay's original publication of these songs as single leaves and pamphlets (Friedman 1961a: 140-141; MacLaine 1985: 123-124).

Even when

Ramsay eventually published the collection as four volumes , this anthology, which met with enormous success, retained its connection with the performance of song, and Friedman observes that the paucity of surviving editions and issues may be explained by the fact that copies “were literally read to death” (1961a:144; see also MacLaine 1985: 124-128).

Though the “horizon of expectations” of A Collection of

Old Ballads and Reliques of Ancient English Poetry were defined largely by the

broadsides that we have been discussing, the construction of these texts reflects, as has often been remarked, a fundamental shift in the socio-economic status and cultural expectations of their audience. The broadsideitself had, of course, remained

neither “fixed” nor “frozen.” Among a number of fates, these print-objects had been

trimmed and bound with leather — and kicked upstairs, as Dave Harker has

suggested — by gentleman antiquarians such as John Selden, Anthony Woods, and Samuel Pepys (Harker 1985). In the Reliques, Percy trumpeted his use of the Pepys

eee

(Weinstein 1991: xcxi-00ci).

ee

Martin 1990: 29-44). As the cheapest of print objects, this paper showed its fibre

eee

Ballads and Boundaries

eee

352

wished to distance his collection from the “Parcel of Old Ballads” which continued to be circulated and sung in the streets (Brooks 1977:108-109; Harker 1985: 28).’

In A Collection and the Reliques, the editors “fixed” their ballads all right by recontextualizing them into the medium of three volumes (A Collection in duodecimo, the Reliques in octavo), a format that entailed the suppression rather than inscription of orality. The prefaces and conduct of these works are addressed to an audience with highly developed notions of a “fixed text” that had been formed by the publication of eighteenth-century scholarship and of novels, print objects which

contributed to habits of silent reading, in the same format. The editor of A Collection

of Old Ballads assured his readers on the title page that his ballads had been “Corrected from the best and most Ancient COPIES Extant” (1723-25: I, sig. Air). He established the literary value of these texts by tracing the heritage of ballad-writers

eee

secreted away his annotated catalogue of the William Dicey’s ballad stock since he

ee

collection (1966: I, 9-10), which was on loan to him for an extended period, but he

“To Hear with Eyes”

353

to “the very Prince of Poets, old Homer” and other classical poets (I, iii-v). This association is visually inscribed in the engraving that served as a frontispiece for the first volume (see Fig. 1). In a library setting, the statuary busts of these ancient “Ballad-Writers” are displayed on secure pedestals, thereby establishing at the very outset the stability, fixity, and gravity of literary tradition.) Through elaborate strategies of editorial method and typographical design (Percy’s correspondence

reveals that he fussed about such matters9), these textualizations succeed in

projecting single, authoritative text. The apparatus of antiquarian anthologies, with its prefaces to individual pieces and editorial asides, exerts a vice-like grip on the orality inscribed in “Sir Patrick Spence” or “Edward.”

With its high degree of definition, the printed eighteenth-century page is, as Marshall McLuhan once put it, a “hot” medium which expresses itself in the direction of explicit and unequivocal signification (McLuhan 1964: 155-62). Visual cues on

the printed page project this fixity: these include elaborately engraved capitals and

borders of architectural inspiration, archaic orthography, graphemic affectations (accents and such), as well as the use of ellipses to convey the idea of textual fragmentation. When Mrs. Brown consulted her copy of the Reliques, she showed

that, as has been suggested, she had this textual world at hand (Andersen and Pettitt

1979: 8-10).

‘The walls that separated orality and textuality, in what Ruth Finnegan has termed

“Great Divide” theories, have been crumbling as we have come to realize how

heavily implicated voice and text are in a European cultural context. This move would not have been possible without the emergence of pattems of oral composition and transmission from under the shadows of a narrowly defined textuality that was not the condition of all texts, but rather a highly socialized construction found primarily, though not exclusively, in antiquarian and scholarly writing and publishing. The development of theories of textuality that are of a sophistication commensurate with theories of orality will contribute to our understanding of the reasons why

the ballad occupies its unique historical position at the crossroads of so many media

forms. If the text is not “the” thing, as D. K. Wilgus claimed (1973), it is nevertheless

“a” thing — oras we heard the other day, “not no thing"—as such it requiresa “thingcentered” approach.

A

“3

COLLECTION

:

OF-OLD

BALLADS ted red Corfrom the beft and moft Ancient Cortes Extant. WITH

Ballads and Boundaries

| INTRODUCTIONS Histoxicat, Critica, or Humoxous. Nlufrated withCorPan PLATES.

(Fig. 1)

354

A Collection of Old Ballads, 3rd edition (London:

J. Roberts, 1727), Vol. |, title and frontispiece.

Reproduced courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

“To Hear with Eyes”

355

Notes

For an articulation of the concept of textualization, as opposed to text or textuality, see For estimates of circulation (calculated on inferences based upon the Registers of the Company of Stationers), Watt 1991:11, 42-50. Of the 305 ballads in F. J. Child's edition, Andersen counts 78 that appeared as broadsides; of these, 55 preserve the earliest recorded version of the ballad (Andersen 1982: 44). +See, for example, the broadsides preserved in the Huth Collection in the British Library, the collection of the Society for Antiquaries in London, and the Britwell collection of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Lemon’s (1866) catalogue of the collection of the Society of Antiquaries may be consulted for an idea of the different materials printed on broadsides; Livingston's catalogue (1991) provides an index of the kinds of verse printed on Engler 1991.

broadsides during the sixteenth century.

“Recent work in discourse analysis, for instance, has recognized the complex relation between the spoken and the written: see, for example, the essays in Tannen 1982. *For further discussion of this ballad, see Wurzbach 1990: 44-45. “On the problematic senses of “tradition,” see Handler and Linnekin 1984 and the essays collected in Pedersen and Andersen 1985. "The catalogue is reprinted in Thomson, Appendix C. Percy's annotated copy of this catalogue is held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, under the shelf mark 258.c.109. "The editor deliberately draws the reader's attention to this frontispiece in his preface: “It would be endless, to prove that the several Poets whose Bustos I have put in my Frontispiece, were Ballad Writers . . .” (1723-25: I, v). *See Percy's correspondence with Shenstone in Brooks 1977: 96-98, 119-121, 136-138; see also Davis 1989: 91-92, 108-113.

References Cited

Andersen, Flemming G. 1982. From Tradition to Print: Ballads on Broadsides. In Tbe Ballad as Narrative, ed. Flemming G. Andersen, Otto Holzapfel, and Thomas Pettitt, pp. 39-57. Odense: Odense University Press. and Thomas Pettit. 1979. Mrs. Brown of Falkland: A Singer of Tales? journal ‘of American Folklore 92:1-24 Bronson, Bertrand H. 1969. Mrs. Brown and the Ballads. In Tbe Ballad as Song, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson, pp. 64-78. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califomia Press. Brooks, Cleanth, ed. 1977. The Correspondence of Thomas Percyand William Sbenstone, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ‘A Collection of Old Ballads, 1723-25. 3 vols. London:J. Roberts. Chappell, W. and J. W. Ebsworth, eds. 1966 [1869-99]. The Raxburghe Ballads. 9 vols. New York: AMS Press. Chartier, Roger. 1987. The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1991. General Introduction: Print Culture. In The Culture of Print, ed. Roger Chartier, pp. 1-10. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original: Les usages de I'imprimé, Paris 1987.) Cressy, David. 1980. Literacy and Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darnton, Robert. 1990. The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Davis, Bertram H. 1989. Thomas Percy: A Scholar-Clertc tn the Age of Jobnson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

ee ee eee

Day, W.G. 1989. The Pepys Ballad Collection Facsimile. 5 vols. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1989. Eisenstein, Elizabeth S. 1979. The Printing Press as Agent of Change. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engler, Balz. 1991. Textualization. In Literary Pragmatics , ed. Roger Sell, pp. 179-89. London and New York: Routledge. Febvre, Lucien and Henri-jean Martin. 1990. Tbe Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. ‘Translated by David Gerard. London and New York: Verso. (Original: L’Apparition du Livre, Paris 1958.) Friedman, Albert B. 1958. The Late Mediaeval Ballade and the Origin of Broadside Balladry. Medium AEvum 27: 95-110. 1961a. The Ballad Tradition . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1961b. The Formulaic Improvisation Theory of Ballad Tradition — A Counterstatement. Journal of American Folklore 74: 113-115. 1983. The Oral-Formulaic Theory of Balladry — A Re-Rebuttal. In The Ballad ‘Image, ed. James Porter, pp. 215-240. Los Angeles: Center for the Comparative Study of Folklore & Mythology. Gaskell, Philip. 1972. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Handler, Richard and Jocelyn Linnekin. 1984. Traditional, Genuine or Spurious. Journal of American Folklore 97: 273-290. Harker, Dave. 1985 Fakelore: Tbe Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hirsch, Rudolf. 1967. Printing, Selling, and Reading 1450-1550. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.. Lemon, Robert. 1866. Catalogue of a Collection of Printed Broadsides in the Possession of the Society of Antiquaries in London. London: The Society of Antiquaries. Livingston, Carole Rose. 1991. British Broadside Ballads of the Sixteenth Century. New York: Garland. MacLaine, Allan H. 1985. Allan Ramsay. Boston: Twayne Publishers. McGann, Jerome J. 1991. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet. Motherwell, William. 1827. Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern. Glasgow: J. Wylie. Pedersen, Rita and Flemming G. Andersen eds. 1985. Tbe Concept of Tradition in Ballad Research, Odense: Odense University Press. Percy, Thomas. 1966 [1886]. Reliques of Ancient Enghsh Poetry, ed. Henry B. Wheatley. 3 vols. New York: Dover Publications. Porter, James. 1976. Jeannie Robertson's My Son David : A Conceptual Performance Model. Journal of American Folklore 89: 7-26. Rollins, Hyder E. 1919. The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad. Publications of the Modern Language Association 34: 258-339. ed. 1922. A Pepystan Garland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ed. 1927. The Pack of Autolycus. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Sharpe, J.A. 1983. The Presentation of the Criminal in the Seventeenth-Century Broadside Ballad. In Images et representations de la fustice du XVIe au XIXe stecle, ed. G. Lamoine, pp. 71-87. Toulouse: Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail. Spufford, Margaret. 1981. Small Books and Pleasant Histories . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1984, The Great Reclotbing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century. London: The Hambledown Press. Stock, Brian. 1983. The Implications of Literacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ‘Tannen, Deborah, ed. 1982. Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Oraltty and Literacy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Company. ‘Thomson, R. S. 1974. The Development of the Broadside Ballad Trade and Its Influence upon the Transmission of English Folksongs. Ph.D. dissertation. Cambridge University.

teeter

Ballads and Boundaries

nee

356

“To Hear with Eyes”

357

Wallace, Wanda T. and David C. Rubin. 1988. “The Wreck of the Old 97": A real event remembered in song. In Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, ed. Ulric Nasser and Eugene Winograd, pp. 283-310. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Want, Tessa. 1991. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘Weinstein, Helen. 1992. Catalogue of the Pepys library at Magdalene College Cambridge. Ballads: Catalogue. Volume Il, part i. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer. Wilgus, D. K. 1973. "The Text is the Thing". Journal of American Folklore 86: 241-252. ‘Wurzbach, Natascha. 1990. The Rise of the Broadside Ballad in England 1550-1650. Translated by Gayna Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original: Die Englische Strassenballade 1550-1650, Munich 1986.) Yates, Michael. 1982. Percy Grainger and the Impact of the Phonograph. Folk Music Journal 4: 265-275. Zumthor, Paul. 1990. Oral Poetry: An Introduction.

Translated by Kathryn Murphy-Judy.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original: Introduction a la poéste orale, Paris 1983.)

ROSE

Unacknowledged Legislation: Dialect,

Ballads, and the Question of Transmission Dialect and the transmission of ballads influence each other in a variety of ways. Since balladry is an oral art, each singing of a ballad ought rightly to be seen as a specialized kind of speech. William Labou bas shown bow speakers modify their idiolects according to social context, and this paper makes a similar argument in respect of aesthetic context. Insofar as ballads are transmitted memorially and stable speech acts infuse their carniers with archaisms and geograpbic variants not otherwise available, they can over time themselves contribute to the formation of regional dialects. This last phenomenon is difficult to distinguish from the effects of geograpbic and ‘commercial isolation that are themselves causes of the retention of ballad singing, but the paper suggests that some conclusions can be drawn. The rangeof the intelligible depends on context. Each of us speaks what he calls a language, but this is always an approximation. My idiolect is not congruent with yours, and even in conversation misprisions may arise. Some English speakers speak French, some French speakers German. Generally we exclude these abilities from their idiolects because they are conscious of speaking what they would call another

language. But if they are of dual parentage, this may not be the case; if they happen to live in rural Louisiana or, say, Alsace, it may be even less so: a message might be

sent from Lisbon to Seoul, travelling house to house without the need of an

interpreter. A range of idiolects at the limits of what we find intelligible we hear as

ee 2222.2. ee 2

NATHAN

eee

358

more intelligible than I do now living in Massachusetts: acclimates; and so, more slowly, does the tongue. Even unstable phenomenon: William Labov has shown how idiolects according to the social context (1966), and I'd like the aesthetic context of ballads.

the ear, that is to say, an idiolect, then, is an speakers modify their to argue the same about

Traditional balladry, wherever found, operates within a specialized diction. Kirsti Kekdldinen notes “the ‘poetic licence’ of archaic usage” prevalent in Child's

collection (1983). “Poetic licence” may be a misleading term, and Kekdldinen has

good reason for distancing it with quotation marks. There is, it seems to me, a great difference between,

say, Spenser's

archaisms

or Milton's

inversions and

the

language of ballads. One way of describing that language is as a set of formulaic systems. Because ballad “commonplaces” are formulaic, and ballads are transmitted

=a anna

a dialect. A friend from Alloa, in central Scotland, finds me more easily intelligible than I find him, thanks in part to Hollywood; when I lived in Scotland I found him

Unacknowledged Legislation

359

orally, some, following James Jones’s early articles, have attempted to fit ballads to the oral-formulaic theories of Parry and Lord. David Buchan’s The Ballad and the Folk (1972) is the best and most comprehensive statement of this position. My own experience and the claims of those I've interviewed lead me to view balladry as a primarily memorial tradition rather than one of recreative composition. But the formulas remain, in ballads as in speech, a way of appropriating rhetorical contexts: my friend from Alloa, wanting to leave one pub for another, suggested we go on to “pastures new.” A formula, that, not a quotation — in a separate conversation mentioned Milton's name: he had, he said, “never heard of the man.” “Pastures new” is pant of his potiolect, so to speak, the language of drinking. Flemming Andersen argues convincingly that ballad formulas likewise draw meaning from context, and fulfill a foreshadowing “supra-narrative” function that depends not upon symbol or myth, but upon the experience of other ballads (1985), Ballads, then, are held in place linguistically in several ways: by memory, by form, by narrative structure, and by formulas. This stability is under constant stress as a ballad moves across boundaries of time, geography, gender, class, age and all the factors (from what kind of beer we drink to whether or not we've read Milton) that go to build idiolects. The friction between these two forces strikes fire in both directions in ways difficult to quantify. For the most part, what follows is meant to be suggestive, not definitive. Many factors other than the linguistic are at work: Christine Cartwright, for example, has analyzed the effect of changing social circumstances on ballad versions (1981). Ballads change across dialects, to be sure, and we'll be looking at some examples of that. But | also want to argue that idiolect (and in certain ways an entire dialect) can change under the influence of ballads. This means a couple of things. If the language ofa ballad being sung differs from the singer's usual language, must we not modify our description of his idiolect? For singing, it seems to me, is as

legitimate and full-fledged a linguistic activity as any other, whether casual conversation or reading words from a list, as dialectologists sometimes ask

informants to do. In this sense I would agree with John McDowell, who asks us to

think of the stylized forms of folklore as “commemorative” speech, and therefore one register of a speaker's idiolect (1992). (“Idiolect” is sometimes used narrowly to designate any one of a given speaker's registers of this sort; sometimes broadly as a range subsuming all of the speaker's registers, his entire linguistic repertoire. I lean towards the broad sense and try to use “register” or “style” for the narrow sense.) In what ways, then, does the language of ballads differ from that of ordinary speech? Many scholars have taken passing note of some of the characteristic differences. David Buchan, in assessing this difference in the case of Mrs Brown, points out that she wrote letters in standard English and postulates a division of consciousness between English for writing and Scots for speech and singing. But we don't know enough about how she spoke. True, any educated Scot of the time, unless consciously participating in the move to revive the “auld Scots tongue,” would have been likely to write standard English even while speaking broad Scots. This is analogous to the case of Swiss-German, which is the standard spoken language of most of Switzerland. Schweizerdeutsch is not, however, used in writing, even of the most informal kind, where it is supplanted by High German. But whether Mrs Brown spoke English or Scots or both according to context, the language of her ballads cannot have matched that of her speech. As Buchan admits, “Her language is a kind

of Kunstsprache,

for it is no one dialect, but composite. Basically Northem Scots,

it subsumes words from Mid Scots and English.” Buchan gives examples of forms appearing in her ballads: gy)ang, gae, go; more, mair; good, gweed; twae, twa. In addition, he says, “Many words are written in English when the context makes it obvious they were pronounced in Scots” (1972:150-151). Bertrand Bronson, likewise, claims that Mrs Brown, in revising her manuscript, changed dialectal to standard forms (1969: 67-68). “But,” Holger Olaf Nygard says, reviewing the evidence, “I find dialectal words introduced in the Tytler variants where they were not present before” (1977: 75-76). It would seem, then, that her versions were in flux,

but whether toward or away from particular dialectal forms is impossible to determine from these snapshots. If we knew more about the milieu of her everyday idiolect, we could say more clearly what kind of linguistic pressure her ballad

memory was under. Fortunately there are cases where the operation of dialect pressure is visible in a ballad version itself, and I'll be dealing with those later. For

now, let's just say that Mrs Brown's ballad language is neither fish nor fowl, without hypothesizing the evolutionary scale. Nor is this phenomenon in any way peculiar to Mrs Brown. William McCarthy, in his excellent study of the ballads of Agnes Lyle, observes that she, too, “draws on more than one dialect for rhymes, rhyming away with day, for instance, and awa with braw” (1990:158). I'd suggest that to a large degree such variation depends upon the ballad’s proximate provenance, the singers it has passed through. As early as 1908, Francis Gummere cited an American version of “The Hangman’s Tree,” “still sung, with traces of Yorkshire dialect” (1908: 450).

“Additions and Corrections” as 95L. It’s dialect since it had come to Virginia from more remarkable because the Yorkshire the rhymes, but throughout. One might

This had been printed in Child's

a particularly remarkable case of frozen Yorkshire 150 years previously. Itis all the pronunciations are preserved not only in speculate that this is due in part to the

structure of this particular ballad, which has the same run of formulas, and therefore

the same vocabulary, repeated for each of the four persons that are seen coming. Usually rhyme words will retain the dialect of origin longer than the rest ofa ballad. A text of “Child Maurice,” collected by Motherwell in Barrhead, was learned decades earlier in Banffshire, and David Murison points out that the final stanza

2 2222.222. oe 2

Ballads and Boundaries

ee

360

“betrays the North-East provenance of the ballad” in its rhyme (1978: 61).

Southwest versions of the same time, as printed in Child (variants C, F & G)

(1985:318ff.). Linguistically, though, despite the three unities of time, place and action, these versions are somewhat disparate. I'd draw attention to two verses in particular: the letter reading formula and the horse mounting formula. Mrs Thomson, in the letter reading formula, thymes joy and eye, which is standard English. (The vowel there is interesting — we know from Pope’s couplets that this was a full rhyme 100 years previously, the Great Vowel Shift not having finished with that diphthong until quite late. 1 don’t know whether that pronunciation may have lingered in

Bae

I'd like to look ina little more detail at Child 99, “Johnie Scot.” I choose this ballad

because Flemming Andersen uses it to demonstrate the narrative consistency of

ballad conservatism.) Similarly, Mrs Thomson's mounting stanza rhymes bebold and gold, again standard English. Agnes Laird, on the other hand, uses same and een for the letter reading formula, and Agnes Lyle uses ee and me, both Scots forms. Likewise, Agnes Laird uses rode and goud for the mounting formula. Agnes Lyle

—as

Scotland, as it still does in parts of Ireland, or whether this is another instance of

Unacknowledged Legislation

361

uses a different formula entirely. Turning to Child's other texts, we find that ee rather

than eye is standard in all the letter reading stanzas of that form (Campbell gives eye but it’s rhymed with be, so I'd assume Scots pronunciation), but gold rather than goud. Bronson’s text 6, from Peterhead, also uses ee. The American versions are another story, and I'll come back to them.

Hamish Henderson has admirably summarized many of the features of Scots

ballad diction and its tendency to supersede the regional idiolects of the singers (1992: 51-77). And in a field recording of Jeannie Robertson on Peter Kennedy's Folksongs of Britain—The Child Ballads, she can be heard relating how as a child she learned to speak “Mary Hamilton” in the Perthshire accent she heard it in, which

she proceeds to demonstrate (1961: side A, band 7).

But ballad language can conserve forms of provenance across much wider

dialect boundaries. When I recorded Belle Stewart's singing in 1988, something I said about Ireland reminded her ofa summer she'd spent travelling there with her family

many decades before, and of the songs she'd leamt, several of which she proceeded

to sing. Though the accent (that is to say the allophones, which are the most ingrained part of any idiolect) was Scots, the lexical forms and diction were

consistently Irish, as she had leamed them. But when she sang Scots ballads like “The Bonnie Hoose o Airlie” and “The Twa Brothers,” the Scots forms naturally retumed.

(private tape, 1988).

Similarly, I've heard Lizzie Higgins sing, amid Scots standards like “Alison Cross” and “The Cruel Mither,” a litte lyric about a flower girl, probably of Victorian

provenance, in standard English diction (private tape, 1988). Even in migrating to America, many ballads conserve at leat for a time Scots forms. A version of “Robin Hood's Death” (Child 120) collected in Virginia in 1913 gives, like Ritson’s text, Kirkly as the place name (rather than Churchlees as in Percy's text), and also (unlike either) gives the simple noun kirk as one of the things Robin Hood never bumed (Bronson 1959-72).

A version of Mary Hamilton from Virginia, 1932, leamed from an Englishman (from Bristol) contains the following rhymes: hair/sair; she/ee; dee/sea — all obviously Scots (Bronson 1959-72).

Ballads even turn up sung by people who don't know the language. In reference to Mrs Brown's primary source, Mrs Lillias Farquharson, Hamish Henderson says (1973: 29),

here we have a tradition of Lowland balladry which had found its way

into the haunts of the Gaelic-speaking Aberdeenshire highlanders. (If anyone finds this.....unlikely, it is only necessary to point to the regions of the Irish Gaeltacht such as the Aran Islands and the Dingle Peninsula, which.....have yielded beautiful versions of Anglo-Irish

folk song.....the songs are a lingua franca which actually precedes the incoming language.)

Other folk genres display similar tendencies to create their own special registers of diction. The dialectologist Raven McDavid writes, “a cautious informant may hesitate to admit as his own a folk grammatical form.....that he actually uses. On one of my earliest field trips, an old gentleman in the South Carolina mountains labeled as the usage of ‘ignorant folks....." grammatical forms which he regularly used in his

362

Ballads and Boundaries

own anecdotes...” (1979:169) So we can see that various registers within one idiolect may be almost wholly incognizant of each other, which is strong evidence that the forms appertaining to commemorative speech, in McDowell's terms, are in their own realm fully naturalized. ‘And as Peter Trudgill shows in his book on dialect, what I've been describing is not peculiar to folk traditions. Speaking of pop singers, he says that “singers of this form of music employ different accents when singing from when they are speaking, and that deviations from their spoken accents are of a particular and relatively constrained type” (1983:141). The deviations he describes seem to reflect American importation and the influence of Elvis Presley. He explains, “it is appropriate to sound like an American when performing in what is predominantly an American activity...” (1983:144). Local provenance and thematic adaptation have linguistic effects: noting the decline in non-prevocalic /*/ (an American feature) in later Beatles songs, he says “the later songs, now written entirely by themselves, show an increase in more obviously British themes and locales” (1983:153). If, as I've suggested, the register of ballad language is an integral part of a singer's idiolect, what effect does ballad singing have on speech’ If the boundaries between dialects are fluid, how much more fluid the boundaries between registers ofa single idiolect. If it is true, as Hamish Henderson says, that the “folk-singer does not sing in the same way in which he speaks” (1992:54), it would also, I think, be every collector's testimony that ballad singers do not speak in quite the same way nonsingers do. Their idiolects are enriched by their singing. This is particularly so immediately before and after singing sessions. My own experience as an American in Ireland and Scotland is that singers, sensitive to my different dialect, will simplify and standardize their own speech in first talking to me, but that after a few songs the dialect becomes stronger, and leavened with archaisms and unusual locutions beyond even the ordinary dialect of the region. AlthoughI know of no formal studies of this, others have reported similar impressions. W. Edson Richmond translates the great Norwegian ballad hunter Moltke Moe thus: “I have frequently had the occasion to be convinced about how completely different the Norwegian dialects become when the informant gets permission to sing” (1977: 62). Ballad language contributes to the idiolect of a singer, then, both as a register in its own right and as an influence on other registers. This is perhaps not surprising,

but is there a cumulative effect of balladry in the regional dialects of communities with long traditions of ballad singing? This is a tricky question to answer. Certainly some of the most distinctive dialects of English are found in just such areas, and one might postulate that insofar as ballads are transmitted memorially and as stable speech acts infuse their bearers with archaisms and geographic variants not otherwise available, they can over time themselves contribute to the formation of regional dialects. But itis difficult to distinguish this hypothetical phenomenon from the effects of geographic and commercial isolation that have historically themselves been causes of the retention of ballad singing. David Murison makes the argument convincingly, in regard to the dialect of Northeast Scotland, by pointing out many words in Scots ballads — in general use in Northeast dialect — that are (and were) ofa primarily literary Middle English provenance (1978). It would appear, then, that some vocabulary moved from a literary register to ballad language and from there into the speech of the Northeast. When the Dictionary of American Regional English is completed, asit soon will be, we will have the tools necessary to begin comparing vocabulary distribution in areas like Appalachia to the distribution of ballad types.

Unacknowledged Legislation

363

So far we've looked at the conservatism of ballad language and the dialectal effects that can create. But of course the huge continuum of language affects ballads much more than the other way around. When a ballad is transmitted from a singer of one dialect to a singer of another, the new dialect will inevitably intrude into the ballad, disrupting what I see as a primarily memorial process of transmission. As I indicated earlier, there are always many factors that can go to change a ballad, from memory lapse to societal differences to a change of tune. But linguistic difference is one of the few factors that we can see direct traces of, even catch in the act, as it were. ‘The pull of the changing language, the flowof idiolects with which ballads come in contact will test the limits of even the strongest memorial transmission. Even within Scots tradition, the amalgamate Kunstsprache of ballads is at least a little unstable. For instance, in John Strachan's version of “Glenlogie” (on The Folk Songs of Britain ) you'll hear the line “Who is that young man and faur does he bide?” (Kennedy 1961: side B, band 1) — a standard English form side by side with a form from Strachan’s native Aberdeenshire. However, in the Scots tradition, who, wha and

fa or where, whaur and faur are all unlikely to sound jarring. But when a Scots ballad migrates to America, the problems multiply. While we've seen that many singers will retain linguistic features that reflect the ballad’s origin, this is limited both by the boundaries of intelligibility and by the individual singer's ability to reproduce the dialect. A 1917 New York City version of “The Bonnie Hoose 0 Airlie” (Bronson 1959-72) clearly attempts to preserve the linguistic setting appropriate

to the

historical setting, and I'd say in passing that historical ballads are more likely to be fixed dialectally than, say, ballads of love; and comic ballads are even less likely to preserve forms from other dialects, but instead need to approximate speech more closely. (The American versions of “Our Goodman’ [Child 274) in Bronson [195972) are all completely without lexical relics from their ultimate British ancestors.) As Herschel Gower characterizes this New York version of “The Bonnie Hoose 0 Airlie,” “a few Scottish words colour the diction and help to round out the rhyme...” (1976:139), and he calls it “transitional,” saying, “It is neither standard English nor very convincing Scots in diction..." (1976: 140). The second half of the ballad, indeed, seems very much as Gower describes it, but the first several stanzas are much more consistently Scots in diction, and in fact quite similar to a version I've heard Belle Stewart sing (private tape, 1988). Sometimes words become unintelligible in dialect transition. Two of Bronson's versions of “The Bonny Earl of Murray” are instructive here (1959-72). Number 4, recorded in New York in 1906 and leamed from a Scot, is entirely Scots in its lexicon.

Number 6, recorded in upper New York State in 1959, also leamed from a Scot, shows clear difficulties. Since, as Sandy Ives has remarked, the text of this ballad is unusually stable (Ives 1995), we can identify these difficulties precisely. Where we would expect “soundin” we get “stumblin” — a rather different image and though perhaps appropriate to a man who's been stabbed it's surely not what the lady is looking for. In the address to Huntly the singer says, “wherefore be dead” — in another context we might think that line had just been syntactically garbled; but here we know the line should be “wherefore did ye sae" and the singer has just done the best he could with the sounds he heard. Similarly, “he moucht hae been a king” has become “he must have been a king” which is syntactically fine but would leave us groping narratively if we didn’t know the Scots form behind it

‘When dialectal change is powerful enough to break a rhyme, the fun really

begins.

Here I think we have a model for what John Niles calls “recurrent thaw”

(1986: 92), whereby a primarily memorial tradition at times reforms and renews itself formulaically under a variety of pressures. The first step in any thaw is the cracking of the ice, and many a good ballad bears the scars of dialect divergence. Returning to Bronson’s American texts of “Johnie Scot,” we find that most of them have lost

the mounting formula. None seems to have descended from the bebold-gold rhyme ‘we saw in most of the Scots versions. One from Kentucky in 1917 rhymes road with ‘gold, not exact in its new dialect, and another, also from Kentucky 1917, rhymes (or fails to rhyme) seen and gold. The letter-reading formula is less easily dispensed with, and the Scots form ee does not survive well on American soil. A New Brunswick version, 1928, solves the problem with be and see; and a New Hampshire version

Eee

Ballads and Boundaries

EEE

364

recorded in 1942 rhymes be and lady. One version, again from New Brunswick,

and learned from the singer's Scottish great-grandfather, tries desperately to hold its

And the next two lines that he looked at The salt tears blinded his eyes (bis) ‘We can see what's happened here. Ee has changed inevitably to eyes, but the singer,

not content to dispense with rhyme, has added to the brew the assonance of sweet,

giving a hypermetric stanza of six lines. Several of the American versions have settled on a more permanent solution by moving smile to rhyming position. Although smile is sometimes found in place of the more frequent Jaugb in British letter-reading formulas, I believe it is only in ‘American ballads that smile is used as a rhyme for this formula. And naturally when I say this is a “solution” to the problem, I don't necessarily mean that the solution was invented for this particular ballad, but simply that it had spread throughout ‘American balladry as a way to construct the letter-reading formula. Finally, I'd like to consider a phrase from Child 200, “The Gypsy Laddie,” or, as it has been in this country, “The Gypsy Davy,” “The Gypsum Daisy,” “The Gyps of David,” or even “Harrison Brady.” Most British versions contain somewhere, usually in a series of questions and answers about what the lady is willing to give up, the phrase “old” or “own wedded lord", or sometimes “new wedded lord” — “old”

signifying the age of the man, “new” the age of the marriage. Many American versions preserve this, but more change it any ofa number of ways. Part of the problem may

stem from the word “lord” which, though common enough in American ballads, like

castles and kings and fair London Town and other things we don't actually have here but that appear in our ballads, is sometimes in this ballad changed to “love.” Even more commonis to replace “wedded lord” with “landlord,” which doesn't make very good sense but at least denotes a personage in the American purview — ‘old

EE

He was as happy as a bird upon a tree,

BEBE

Now the king he wrote young John a letter, And sent it to him so sweet. O, the first two lines that he looked at

Eee

original form. Let me quote the whole stanza:

landlord,” “own landlord,” and “new landlord” all appear in Bronson. Bronson 55, of “bride” in the previous stanza of that particular version. Even more strange are

texts 6 and 83, both from Virginia, though 40 years apart, which give “Ingram lord”

am

a text he took from Sharp, gives “own wedding pride,” probably under the influence

Unacknowledged Legislation

365

and “engrim lord" — the former capitalized and the latter with brackets and a

question mark. This may actually make a certain sense — “ingram” is recorded in some English dialects as a form of “ignorant.” But notice we've now seen a number of substitutions for “wedded” — “Ingram,” “land “ and “wedding,” all involving nasal consonants — m's and n‘s. Why all this variation? “Wedded” should work fine in

American versions. One clue may be Bronson’s text 24, which gives “own wooden lord.” This is an apt and clever characterization, a product of that “thaw,” but

definitely a product, a reconstruction. I'm guessing it's derived from a past participle of the form “wedden,” which would be confusing where “wedded” wouldn't. That would explain all those nasals in the other substitutions. This would be a rare form,

as “wed” is not a verb for whose past participle dental and nasal forms competed — the dental ending goes back to Anglo-Saxon. It would therefore be a back-

formation on the analogy of words like “sodden” and “bidden.” I haven't had time

to look into this, buta record of this form in a particular area at a particular time would give us a good guess about the provenance of one family, at any rate, of American versions of Child 200. T've ended ona rather microscopic tangent, but my point, indeed, is that dialectal variation, though only one of many factors contributing to ballad change, is the one with which we can in fact make the most detailed conjectures about the actual

process of transmission, and it can therefore serve as a model and a testing ground for theories about formulaic variation.

References Cited

Andersen, Flemming G. 1985. Commonplace and Creativity: The Role of Formulatc Diction in Anglo-Scotttsh Traditional Balladry. Odense: Odense University Press. Bronson, Bertrand. 1959-72. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. 4 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —____. 1969. The Ballad as Song. Berkeley: University of Califomia Press. Buchan, David. 1972. The Ballad and the Folk. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ‘Cartwright, Christine A. 1981. Black Jack Davy: Cultural Values and Change in Scots and ‘American Balladry. Lore and Language 3: 153-188. Child, Francis James. 1882-98. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. Reprint ed. New York: Dover Publications, 1965. Gower, Herschel. 1976. The Scottish Element in Traditional Ballads Collected in America. In Ballad Studies, ed. Emily B. Lyle, pp. 117-151. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Gummere, Francis B. 1908. Ballads. In The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. I, chapter xvi. New York: Putnam. Henderson, Hamish. 1973. The Oral Tradition. Scottish International Review 6: 27-32. . 1992. Altas MacAlias: Writings on Songs, Folk and Literature, Edinburgh: Polygon. Ives, Sandy. 1995. ‘The Bonny Earl of Murray": The Intersections of Folklore and History. In Ballads and Boundaries, pp. 135-141. Kekildinen, Kirsti. 1983. Aspects of Style and Language in Child's Collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Annales Academize Scientiarum Fennicae; Dissertationes Humanorum Litterarum 37. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Kennedy, Peter. 1961. The Folksongs of Britain, vol. 5: The Child Ballads 2. [One LP record} London: Topic Records. Labov, William. 1966. The Soctal Stratification of English in New York City. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Ballads and Boundaries

McCarthy, William B. 1990. The Ballad Matrix: Personality, Milieu, and the Oral Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McDavid, Raven L,, Jt. 1979. Dialects in Culture: Essays in General Dialectology. Alabama: University of Alabama Press. McDowell, John H. 1992. Folklore as Commemorative Discourse. Journal of American Folklore 105: 403-423. ‘Murison, David. 1978. The Language of the Ballads. Scottish Literary Journal, Supplement6: 54-64.

Niles, John D. 1986, Context and Loss in Scottish Tradition. Western Folklore 45: 83-106. Nygard, Holger Olaf. 1977. Mrs. Brown's Recollected Ballads. In Ballads and Ballad Research, ed. Patricia Conroy, pp. 68-87. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Richmond, W. Edson. 1977. Rhyme, Reason and Re-creation. In Ballads and Ballad Research, ed. Patricia Conroy, pp. 58-67. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Trudgill, Peter. 1983. On Dialect. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

aeRO

366

367 OTTO

HOLZAPFEL

Beyond the Boundaries: The Concept of European Folk Ballads Today The unity claimed for European folk ballads may not only be a factor of their distinctive languages or of the language-areas in which ballads flourished. Folk ballads are not merely translations from different languages. In the eyes of former researchers, common tradition meanta common text, an Urtext. The possibility of translations of whole texts was hardly discussed, and the arguments remained on the level of motif and theme as the constituent elements of balladry. We may still agree on the unity of the ballad as agenre, but focussing on compiling indices, for example, isolates the plot from otber aspects such as style. We still have many unsolved problems stemming from the widespread diffusion of ballads even in the relatively narrow world ofthe Germanic languages. We should look, rather, at the folk ballad not asa relic with a virtually forgotten meaning, but as a tradition alive in tts proper time and relevant for the individual singer. The Swedish folklorist Dag Strémbick wrote, in the preface to the well-known 1967 anthology of European folk ballads, that scholars at that time agreed on one fundamental principle: to a great extent European folk balladry forms a unity and must be considered a cultural whole in relation to Europe (Seeman et al. 1967: vii). This ballad anthology and, for example, a 1963 volume of folktales, both published under the auspices of the Council of Europe, were unfortunately not succeeded by equally instructive collections devoted to other lyric or narrative genres. So far there have been similar problems regarding the question of a European index of folk balladry. The real difficulties seem to occur by going into detail, but I think we have to ty to solve the problems within the framework of generally acknowledged concepts. ‘The European anthology was based particularly on the wide-ranging consensus of the ballad as a genre present in almost all European languages, Eastern and ‘Wester, including Northem America, and this was an approach advocated by Erich Seemann (1888-1966), at that ime director of the German Folksong Archives (Deutsches Volksliedarchiv) in Freiburg. Dating from 1914, and founded by John Meier (1864-1953), these archives for nearly the past eighty years have provided generations of scholars with new and ever-evolving concepts and material for ballad research (Meier et al. 1935ff.; cf. Holzapfel 1989). Ballad research in Freiburg was and is conceived of asa problem with international dimensions. I can only focus on

368

Ballads and Boundaries

some aspects of German, English, and Scandinavian folk balladry. But it seems obvious to me that the unity claimed for European folk ballads may not only be a factor of their distinctive languages. European folk ballads are not merely translations from different native languages. ‘We may have the notion of a possible common cultural background, but common tradition, which meant in the eyes of past research a common text (Urtext), which typically was postulated in this German term. Yet the possibility of mere translations of whole texts has hardly been discussed; the arguments stayed on the level of motif and theme as the constituent elements of balladry. We still agree, I think, upon the unity of the folk ballad as a genre, at least as it manifests itself in several Germanic language areas, including the Child ballad tradition in the United States. But to verify this coherence, we can examine primarily the themes and the motives of the songs in their different languages. Bearing this in mind, comparative folk ballad indices have been planned for years. And surely indices for the national tradition of one ballad area will be helpful. And we will finish our German edition with the tenth volume, in preparation (to be published in about 1995), with such an index too. But these endeavors necessarily isolate the phenomenon of the narrative plot from other aspects, for example stylistic elements. Following our usual practice in comparative studies, we are accustomed to analyze the songs with their themes and motives as parallels, or, as we might say, as versions of fundamentally the same idea and perhaps originally the same ballad type. But do we really use the terms “type” and “motif” in the same way as in other worldwide comparative systems, for example the system of types for fairy tales or the Motif Index of Folk Literature? Do several versions of a ballad type in different languages just tell more or less a similar “story,” the same type of a dramatic conflict, despite the different and individually shaped dramatis personae and individual motives? Or do we really think of a European ballad “type” as the genetically coherent family of migrating variants in different languages, originating in the same poetic

performance in one “original” expression? No, with this last consequence of balladicDarwinism surely no-one would agree. But we still have a lot of unsolved problems stemming from the widespread diffusion or dissemination of ballads even in the relatively narrow world of the Germanic languages: English, Dutch, Flemish, German, and the Scandinavian languages, to note just those representedin the 1967 anthology. And if European folk ballads basically are the result of translations, what then has really been translated and transmitted across language borders? 1am for the moment not concemed with such issues such as the obvious distribution of ballads by European or English-speaking immigrants to the United States. But I am keeping in mind that the creation ofa distinctly American balladry,

such as that documented by Bertrand H. Bronson (1959-72), seems to a great extent to be a stylistic phenomenon, not simply the continuation of traditional units from the Child ballads in England and Scotland. I mention also the native American ballads as analyzed by D.K. Wilgus (1959), and I want to emphasize this point: when including a distinctly native American balladry, we surely think about the folk ballad as a European genre as reflected in stylistic unity, not as a genetic whole. I am not concemed here with the obvious inequity in the chronologies of the European ballad tradition as a folk genre, the different ways in which the populations of different countries appreciated the ballad, or the relatively widespread, total decline of the tradition in our time.

Beyond the Boundaries

369

‘What I find interesting is the diffusion, right across the cultural and linguistic borders, between different ethnic groups. Erich Seemann spoke of different “ballad provinces” (Seeman et al. 1967: xiii). The most prominent province, within the rich tradition rooted in medieval culture and literature, is that of the Nordic countries, with the 838 ballad types given in the index (Jonsson et al. 1978) and in several editions, partly finished (the Danish), partly ongoing (the Swedish), partly planned (the Norwegian). Here I do not intend to enter into the controversial and muchdiscussed problem of the “medieval” origin of many of these narrative songs (Holzapfel 1978), and consequently the exclusive indexing.of only the older part of Nordic balladry (as with Child for the English and Scottish) while manifesting mostly a deplorable indifference towards more modern narrative songs of recent centuries. ‘We recognize that the documentation of 838 different ballad-types by the year 1500 () must be evidence of a vast, rich, and vivid tradition. According to the classic edition of 1853 by the Danish scholar, Svend Grundtvig, which also established the norm for Francis James Child, we can account for 539 Danish ballad types and 230 Swedish types. We know ofan exchange of ballads from the very beginning between

those two areas of the same East Nordic language group. But in many cases it is

impossible to determine which has been the donor and which the recipient of the exchange ‘When Norway was politically under royal Danish domination for centuries, this naturally provided the basis for spreading Danish or Eastem Nordic ballads to Norway and into Westem Nordic areas. In the period following the invention of printing, many songs were spread there in the form of broadsheets without any problem of translation. On the other hand, the approximately 200 individual Norwegian ballad types also have strong roots in Westem Nordic saga and Eddic

literature. The Faroe Islands and Iceland belong to this Westem Nordic area, where the regional ballad tradition, for political reasons, shows the same double face of Old Norse heroic tradition and late medieval Danish, the latter with its more chivalric tradition. I need only mention the problem of extremely long texts with clear refrains from the Faroe Istands, suitable for ballad dancing, which can last for several hours. Inall these cases we may presume that the translocation of a ballad variant (and, for that matter, the phenomenon of variation itself) was possible on the primary level of the singers and musicians themselves, who lived more or less amid heterogeneous dialects within multicultural language areas, but basically under the same linguistic communication conditions.

There was no fundamental linguistic border, and the

diffusion of balladry occurred, one could say, on the first level of elementary singing activities, namely the performance itself. I know that it would not be opportune to discuss more extensively what I mean by this, because we really know very little about the conditions of such a diffusion: traveling musicians, migrant populations, visiting a market in another town, marriage abroad, and so on. Any of these conditions might bring a change in, or addition to, a traditional and individual song repertory.

When Swedes settled in Finland they took with them their ballads, which contrasted with the Finnish Kalevala-meter songs. The ballad repertory in Iceland, too, met with quite a different genre in the rimur. What subsequently developed as a “ballad” within these areas, as far as we know and can document, is still to be distinguished as an import, and we know more or less the date of this import. As Vésteinn Olason remarks, “there is no evidence that enables us to trace the Icelandic

fourteenth century. In Finnish folk poetry, too, Kalevala songs are quite different

from the imported new-style ballads with stanzas and rhyme; they emerge, as we lean from Anneli Asplund, as late as in a period after the seventeenth century, and they imitate Swedish models (Holzapfel 1978: 51). In contrast, we have epic song types in Finnish whose themes can only be regarded as indigenously Finnish because models of them exist in the vicinity, and, moreover, it seems extremely difficult to deduce an earlier common basis with the Estonians, for example, which has, however, to be assumed (Holzapfel 1978: 56). This leads us to new problems. Until now we have only dealt with what I call the first and basic level of ballad dissemination within the same language area and with similar conditions for performance. When leaving the Nordic countries, we have to consider linguistic boundaries as an additional problem. For the phenomenon of presumably identical ballad plots, there may be two possible solutions: first the fact of translation, and second the hypothesis ofa common prototype. This second solution, as evident in

1909a, 1909b, 1946, 1948; cf. Holzapfel 1975) but even within his detailed studies

we find no general theory about Scottish and Norwegian ballad relationships. It is evident, after all, that the facts, insofaras we know them, show the possibility of very

mei

mana

has more or less been discredited in contemporary German

research. Nowadays, we do not believe in the archetype as the starting point of variation, but we understand the stability and variability of ballad texts (and of melodies, t00).as main conditions in the processes of transmission and tradition. This seems to be self-evident, but it will be necessary to return to this point later in my argument. We still face the problem of translation, which has to be explained more thoroughly. But this problem is further complicated by questions related to the dating of an oral tradition. ‘We can combine this problem by taking a look at the next most important ballad province, which, according to Erich Seemann, comprises Great Britain as well as the United States and Canada. Ballads of Norther England and those of Scotland have been found in manuscripts and on broadsides since the middle of the fifteenth century (Child himself, however, included only one, “Judas”, no. 23, as older). The Robin Hood rhyme may belong to the late fourteenth century, but David Buchan correctly questions whether these “rhymes of Robin Hood” really are ballads (Holzapfel 1978: 101). Scottish texts were recorded after 1630, but for 1549 several songs corresponding to Child ballads were listed: the “Battle of Otterbum’, the “Hunting of the Cheviot,” and so on, reflecting the Border conflict of 1388. ‘As to the so-called “medieval” material of the Nordic ballads, I note the problem of fixing the date of a tradition, which is an ongoing process. On the basis of existing data it should be obvious why I do not wish to discuss the relationship between British and French balladry, and the famous case of the French “carole.” The suggestion of early, reconstructed links is, as the idea of Urform, open to hypotheses from all directions. David Buchan notes, in the case of “Lord Thomas and Fair Janet” (Child 73; Danish DgF 210), that “Grundtvig thought its origin Danish, Gerould thought its origin British, and Doncieux thought it French, which perhaps tells us more about the ethnocentricity of ballad scholars than about ‘Lord Thomas” (Holzapfel 1978: 104). Around the beginning of our century, and later, the Norwegian Knut Liestal wrote about “Scottish and Norwegian ballads” (Liestal

er

the term Urform,

HHH

ballad farther back than, at best, 1450" (Olason 1978: 74). The rimur, on the other hand, seems fully developed in manuscripts dating from as early as the late

aE

Ballads and Boundaries

—

370

Beyond the Boundaries

371

highly complex pattemsin ballad migration. Today we cannot be satisfied with Erich Seemann’s remark that “many ballad plots are common to British and other ballads: about 90 themes are found both in Britain and in Scandinavia, about 20 both in Britain and France” (Seeman 1967: xv). This leads us to a new chapter on German balladry We have sources and documents conceming German folk ballads from as early as the sixteenth century, but here the problem of dating arises from a different set of questions. The examples of both Lorraine in France as an old, German-speaking, so-called relic-area, and isolated linguistic pockets of German settlers in Eastern Europe have caused scholars to think about their ballad traditions as established long ago and long-standing. But with the famous linguistic “island” of Gottschee in Slovenia, we had to leam that it was not as isolated as we assumed and that there was no evidence that the German settlers who had arrived as early as the fourteenth century maintained their ballads as an unalterable cultural heritage. Stability of legacy on one side, variability and interethnic influence on the other? No, the case of Gottschee especially shows the great importance of interethnic contact. The Gottschee ballads (Brednich and Suppan 1969-84), with their two-line stanzas and their typical formulas, seem at least as influenced by South Slavic heroic poetry as by “genuine” German sources..In this case, as far as we know, there was no translation. The song texts, many of their themes, and their language are German, but the style was influenced considerably across the strong linguistic boundary

between German- and Slavic-speaking peoples. What then makesa ballad, if not the style? Can we speak about a “translation” of style, or do we have to say “influence,” which is a term just as poorly defined. What does it mean if we state that “many plots are common”

to this or that tradition?

One way out of this obvious dilemma may be to attempt a more precise identification of the facts of crossing the borderline. We may try to analyze every single ballad type with its international parallels according to at least four possible

steps: first, source and result of an obvious translation; second, the treatment of a

foreign source; third, the relationship of several motives or themes; and finally, the unspecified “parallel” of a similar theme, though with obviously independent texts (cf. my short treatment of German and Scandinavian ballad types in Holzapfel 1976). The first step would exemplify the continuation of the same line of tradition, whereas the last would imply no coherence on the level of transmission. But in all cases up to the present we speak primarily in vague terms about “parallels” or “European ballad motives” or whatever else we happen to call it. This task does not seem to provide an easy answer: we have to discuss every single ballad with its sources and individual tradition, and even afterwards there may be no facts from which to generalize. In reality, ballad transmission across linguistic and cultural boundaries is only as specific as all possible translations, on one hand, and paraphrases, on the other. There is no romantic “ballad-wandering” from mouth to mouth, and, indeed, this is not the level we have to examine in order to find any cultural unity for a European ballad genre. Erich Seemann's aim with the European folk ballad edition of 1967 was to document parallels of the same narrative type in different linguistic areas. It was his notion that those ballad parallels which could be identified were due to genetic coherence, that is, they were related through a common tradition at an older stage of ballad transmission. Erich Seemann's specific comments on German ballads in

372

Ballads and Boundaries

volume 4 of Deutsche Volkslieder mit ibren Melodien: Balladen (Meier et al. 1935ff.) show how he tried to establish a close connection between German ballad types and the Slavic tradition. Moreover, when I take into account that these comments were

written partly before 1945 and in the first years after World War Il, this was a ‘courageous political position which has to be highly respected. Yet it has not been possible to solve the problem of the “missing link,” that is the time and conditions of translation. In most cases we know nothing about the possible transfer from ballads in one language to those in another. As to “ballad wandering” in early times, my guess is that it is a phantom wanderer. Similarly, ballad research for generations has tried to get closer to the hypothetical point of origin, the Urform. This too, I believe, was a hunt fora phantom that we inherited together with Goethe's notion of a vanishing tradition. We should

look, instead, at the folk ballad not as a relic with a virtually forgotten meaning, but asa tradition alive in its proper time and relevant for the individual singer. It is David

Buchan's book, The Ballad and the Folk (1972), among others, in which we recognize the convincing effort to establish a ballad tradition within the limits of a

clear cultural context that is contemporary with the ballad documents. Natascha Wiirzbach's study, Anfange und gattungstypische Ausformung der englischen

Strafenballade 1550-1650 (1981), attempts in a similar way to establish the facts

of the cultural context for a genre in real performances, not in some impossible “prehistory.” ‘When I started to prepare the commentary for Deutsche Volksiederno. 155 “Graf und Nonne” (“The Count and the Nun”), volume 8, edited in 1988, I realized how

this ballad had its living existence and “meaning” in the late eighteenth century. This is a case in which we need to tum our primary concem with dating upside-down:

we have to look for documents prior to the eighteenth century, yes, but we likewise have to ask how young this ballad is, and why it is still sung in Hungary among German-speaking communities there in, as recorded, 1976, 1983, 1984 and 1985.

There was, I believe, a strong opposition in traditional ballad research to analysis on the level of a contemporary context, one that had to be broken down. And in volume 9, 1992, we have the case of DVidr no. 158 “Die Jiidin” (“The Jewish Maiden"), where moral standards are outlined for intermarriage between Jews and

Christians in a traditional German and Jewish society, not for the past, but for the contemporary nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (cf. my commentary together

with Philip V. Bohman). And this ballad, with the Turkish parallels provided by Ali Osman éztiirk, even challenges our concept of “European” balladry in general (ztiirk 1991, although there was one Turkish destan published in Seeman et al. 1967).

‘When we, today, prepare the final volume 10 of our ballad edition, to be edited probably in 1995, we have, among others, to face the case of a ballad, “Der Eifersiichtige Knabe" (“The Jealous Boy”), which seems to break down another

boundary, that is our condemnation of a ballad text as “Kitsch.” Looking back at

DVidr no. 1, “Das jiingere Hildebrandslied” (“The Younger Song about Hildebrand”), edited in 1935, nearly 60 years ago, this is a considerable change in the ideology of our ballad research. But these last remarks are only to document that there are other boundaries between ballads and ourselves than those noted between ballads in

different languages.

Beyond the Boundaries

373

References Cited

Brednich, Rolf W. and Wolfgang Suppan 1969-84. Gottscbeer Volksiieder. 3 vols. Mainz: Schott Bronson, Bertrand H. 1959-72. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. 4 vols. Princeton, N): Princeton University Press. Holzapfel, Otto. 1975. BibHograpbie zur mittelalterlichen skandinavischen Volksballade Turku, Finland: Nordic Institute of Folklore (NIF Publications, 4). 1976. Folkevise und Volksballade. Miinchen: Fink (Motive, 6). . 1989. Das Deutsche Volksledarchtu Fretburg |. Br. Bern: Peter Lang, 1989 (Studien zur Volkstiedforschung, 3).

ed. 1978. The European Medieval Ballad: A Symposium. Odense: Odense University Press. Jonsson, Bengt R. et al. eds. 1978. The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad, Oslo-

Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv. 1: 37-51. . 1909b. Samanhengen millom dei engelske og dei norderlendske folkevisome.

Liestol, Knut. 1909a. Dei tvo systar. Maal og Minne

‘Syn 0g Segn 15: 106-121. .

1946. Scottish and Norwegian Ballads

(Studia Norvegica 1/3). Oslo:

‘Aschehoug. . 1948. Den skotske ballade Sir Patrick Spens. ARV 4: 28-49. Meier, John et al. eds. 1935. Deutsche Volkslieder mit thren Melodien: Balladen. Berlin; Freiburgi. Br.-Lahr: Walter de Gruyter, DVA - Druckhaus Kaufmann (vol. IX, 1992). Olason, Vésteinn. 1978. The Icelandic Ballad as a Medieval Genre. In The European Medieval Ballad: A Sympostum, ed. otto Holzapfel, pp. 67-74. Odense: Odense University Press. Oztitk, Ali O. 1991. Eine trkische Parallele zur “Schénen Judin"? Jabrbuch far VolksHtedforscbung, vol. 36: 98-105 Seemann, Erich, Dag Stromback, and Bengt R. Jonsson eds. 1967. European Folk Ballads. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger. ‘Wilgus, D.K. 1959. Anglo-American Folksong Scbolarsbip Since 1898. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

374 SIGRID

RIEUWERTS

Boundaries of Cultural Experience in Ballads: Singer and Scholar This short account of the encounter between ballad singer and ballad scholar points out that great sensitivity is neededon both sides. The natural habitat of the ballad can rarely be captured in a special performance for the scholar. As soon as interest is shoum in a singer or certain types of song, the

situation is changed and its innocence is lost. If meaning resides in the total

context, however, it is important for the scholar to attempt to catch the richness of the aestbetic experience.

No story can better illustrate the relationship between singers and scholars than that of James Hoge's mother performing “Auld Maitland” for Sir Walter Scott. The scholar Scott had been “wandering about in the wilds of Liddesdale and Ettrick Forest, in search of additional material for the Border Minstrelsy" as he says in his letter to Ellis of April 20, 1801 (Lockhart 1893: 91), and yet he could not boast of any great success. A couple of months later, he was all the more delighted to receive from the Ettrick Shepherd a number of old ballads taken down from recitation. One of the ballads, however, a perfect and complete copy of “Auld Maitland,” Scott immediately suspected of being a modem forgery, especially since it was “only

known to a few people upon the sequestered banks of the Ettrick” (Scott 1968, 1: 232). For if authentic, it would have had to be declared as one of the oldest and best preserved specimens of Scottish ballad poetry. In order to allay his suspicions, Scott, in the company of William Laidlaw, went to Hogg's mother Margaret Laidlaw.

The following is Hogg’s very illuminating

recollection of the encounter between singer and scholar:

‘They alighted and remained in our cottage for a space better than an hour, and my mother chanted the ballad of Old Maitlan’ to them, with which Mr, Scott was highly delighted, [.. .] I remember he asked her if she thought it had ever been printed; and her answer was, “Oo, na, na, sir, it was never printed i’ the world, for my brothers an’ me learned it frae auld Andrew Moor, an’ he leamed it, and’ mony mare, frae auld Baby Mettlin, that was housekeeper to the first laird o° Tushilaw.” “Then that must be a very auld story, indeed, Margaret,” said he. “Ay, it is that! Itis an auld story! But mair nor that, except George Warton and James Steward, there was never ane 0’ my sangs

prentit till ye prentit them yoursell, an' ye hae spoilt them a'thegither.

Boundaries of Cultural Experience in Ballads

375

They war made for singing, an’ no for reading; and they're nouther spelled nor right setten down.” “Heh - heh - heh! Take ye that, Mr. Scott,” said Laidlaw. Mr. Scott answered by a hearty laugh, and the recital ofa verse, but I have forgot what it was, and my mother gave hima rap on the knee with her open hand, and said “Itis true enough, for a’ that” (Hogg 1852: xcvii), Anda little later Hogg was asked by Mr. Scott's liveryman, “Are ye the chiel that maks the auld ballads and sings them?" “I said I fancied I was he that he meant, though Thad never made ony very auld ballads” (Hogg 1852: xcviii). This short encounter between singer and scholar exemplifies their two very different types of discourse. The singer on the one hand lets the scholar participate in an aesthetic experience. The scholar on the other, involves the singer in a critical assessment of song and performance. The subtext in this instance is the looming suspicion of ballad forgery. Margaret Laidlaw’s part in this singer-scholar interaction is inadequately recorded, and although it is not clear what and how much she performed of the 65 verses of Auld Maitland, we know that she chanted rather than sang the ballad to Scott with great animation. Scott in his role as ballad editor and scholar asks some critical questions, mainly concerning the authenticity of the ballad. Although his first question is the standard question of every field-collector i.e., whether she has seen the ballad in print, Margaret Laidlaw quite rightly understands this as questioning her status as a traditional singer: “Oo, na, na, sir, it was never

printed i’ the world” is her reply and her brother, auld Andrew Moor and auld Baby Mettin are cited as her traditional sources. Scott translated this into a “blind man, who died at the advanced age of ninety, and is said to have been possessed of much traditionary knowledge.” and William Laidlaw even credited a serving girl and Hogg’s grandfather with the transmission process. Whatever the tuth, Margaret

Laidlaw established her authority as a traditional singer in Scott's eyes. In naming a whole chain of oral, traditional singers she vouchsafed at the same time for the old age of the story. The authenticity of the ballad is thereby established and Scott was pleased to accept it into his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and to spend many hours in the library illustrating the story. His verdict: “This ballad, notwithstanding its present appearance, has a claim to a very high antiquity. It has been preserved by tradition; and is, perhaps, the most authentic instance of a long and very old poem, exclusively thus preserved” (Scott 1968, 1: 232). In this enounter, the singer in tum questions the authority of the scholar. The ballads are not meant for reading, but for singing, Margaret Laidlaw claims and accuses Scott of spoiling them altogether by transferring them from the oral to the printed medium. Scott does not answer her charge — after all, it was her own son who wrote down the songs — but it has often been felt by singers and scholars alike that she put her finger on one of the key problems of singer-scholar interaction. This experience, however, cannot be reduced to a “male collector” taking something away from a “female singer,” as some would have us believe. It should be borne in mind that Margaret Laidlaw was singing “Auld Maitland,” along ballad full of brutal scenes of attack and defence during a siege, and I would very much doubt that she identified with the song. Furthermore, Scott may have been satisfied with Auld Maitland’s claim to a very high antiquity, but its authenticity has been hotly disputed ever since. For all we know of Hogg, it would have been surprising if he had no

376

Ballads and Boundaries

part in editing, or even writing the ballad. after he had seen Scott's collection:

Take, for example, his own admission

On the appearance of “The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” I was much dissatisfied with the imitations of the ancient ballads contained in it, and immediately set about imitating the ancient ballads myself, - selecting a number of traditionary stories, and put them in metre, by chanting them to certain old tunes. In these I was more successful than in any thing I had hitherto tried, although they were still but rude pieces of composition (Hogg 1852: xxix). It is obvious that “Auld Maitland” could not have been orally transmitted for centuries (see Aytoun 1858, 2: 1-14), and although Child very reluctantly made room for it in his Englisb and Scottish Ballads, he emphatically excludes the ballad from his definitive ballad collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, since he regards Auld Maitland as “a modem imitation or, if not that, a comparatively recent composition” (Child 1857-59, 6: 220).

‘As we have seen with Sir Walter Scott and Margaret Laidlaw, there is often a subtext to the encounter between singer and scholar and great sensitivity is needed on both sides. As field-collectors know, the natural habitat of the ballad can rarely be captured in a special performance for the scholar, and field-collecting becomes more artificial and useless the more the singer is aware of it. By finding the very thing the scholar is looking for, he is about to destroy it, because as soon as an interest is shown in a certain singer or certain types of songs, the situation is changed and its innocence is lost. On the other hand, many illusions scholars might have about singers and their songs might equally be lost. It may become clear by listening to singers and their experiences that some nicely developed theories are no longer relevant. If meaning resides in the total context, it is important to make at least an

attempt to catch the richness of the aesthetic experience. If we as scholars want to. include the experience of those we study, we should follow Child’s advice: “One should work all winter and sing all summer.” References Cited

Aytoun, William Edmonstoune. 1858. The Ballads of Scotland. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Child, Francis James, ed. 1857-59. English and Scottish Ballads. 8 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

(Hogg, James). 1852. Songs and Ballads by The Bttrick Shepberd. Glasgow: Blackie Lockhar, J. G. 1893. The Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, New Popular Edition. London: Black Scott, Sir Walter. 1968. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. T.F. Henderson. 4 vols. Detroit: Singing Tree Press.

377

23rd International Ballad Conference Participants

Flemming G. Andersen Centre for the Study of Vernacular Literature in the Middle Ages Odense Universitet Campusvej 55 Odense, Denmark Shirley Arora Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese University of Califomia, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024 Robert D. Bethke Dept. of English College of Arts & Science 204 Memorial Hall University of Delaware Newark, Delaware 19716

Mary Ellen Brown Folklore Institute Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 Inéz Cardozo-Freeman Comparative Studies in the Humanities Ohio State University Newark, OH 43055 Tom Cheesman Dept. of German University College of Swansea Singleton Park Swansea SA2 8PP Wales

John Cohan 2729 Ellison Drive Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Eydun Andreassen

Dept. of Faroese Language, Literature & Lore,

University of the Faroes Faroe Islands

Richard Barnes Dept. of English Pomona College

140 W. 6th Street Claremont, CA 91711

Robert Bridges Dept. of Ethnomusicology Schoenberg Hall Univ. of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024

John Burbery College of the Sequoias 915 S. Mooney

Visalia, CA 93277

Anne Canfriez Musée Instrumental de Bruxelles 17 Petit-Sablon 7000 Brussels Belgium Paula Powers Coe 1322 N. Beverly Glen Los Angeles, CA 90077 Judith R. Cohen

751 Euclid Ave.

Toronto, Ontario M6G 2V3 ‘Canada

378

Ballads and Boundaries

Norman Cohen

633 Crestmoore Place Venice, CA 90291

Patricia Conroy Scandinavian Dept. 318 Raitt Hall University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 Virginia Dahnke-Bedolla 34150 Selva Road, #180 Dana Point, CA 92629

Luisa Del Giudice 662 Loring Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90024 Sheila Douglas Merlinwood 12 Mansfield Road Scone, Perth

Scotland

Giuseppina Colicci Dept. of Ethnomusicology Univ. of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024 Anne J. Cruz Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese Univ. of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92717 Blanche DeChene 1629 Selby Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90024 Joseph M.P. Donatelli Dept. of English University of Manitoba ‘Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2 Canada Dianne Dugaw Dept. of English University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403-1286

David C. Engle 3008 Temperance

Georgiana Galateanu-Farnoaga 401 Circle Drive West Los Angeles, CA 90024

Frances J. Fisher

Manuel da Costa Fontes Dept. of Spanish Kent State University Kent, OH 44242-0001

Clovis, CA 93612

11 Mosswood Road

Berkeley, CA 94704

Albert B. Friedman Hollywood, CA 90068

Sean T. Galvin P.O. Box 40-1659

Sara S. Garcia Division of Counseling Psychology

Paulette Gershen

2310 San Marco

& Education

Santa Clara University Santa Clara, CA 95053 Archie Green

224 Caselli Ave. San Francisco, CA 94114

Brooklyn, NY 11240-1659

5456 Noble Ave. Van Nuys, CA 91411 Satu Grinthal Viipurinkatu 25, A18 00520 Helsinki Finland

List of Participants

Mexico

Betty and David Herman 12041 Marine St. Los Angeles, CA 90066

Maria Herrera-Sobek Dept. of Spanish & Por Univ. of California, Irvinetuguese Irvine, CA 92717

Otto Holzapfel

7800 Freiburg

Germany

Alan Jabbour American Folklife Center Library of Congress Washington, DC 20540 Sharon King 1714 Westgate Ave Los Angeles, CA 900, 25#3 Gwendolyn Lytle Pomona College 240 N. College Ave. Claremont, CA 91711

John H. McDowell Folklore Institute Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405

Noemi Marin 12021 Wilshire Blvd, #450 Los Angeles, CA 9002 5

James Massengale Scandinavian Section Dept. of Germanic Lan ges Univ. of California, Los gua Los Angeles, CA 90024 Angeles

Michael Heisiey 2320 32nd Street Santa Monica, CA 90405

Janet Herman

Folklore & Mythology Program Univ. of California, Los Los Angeles, CA 90024 Angeles

Etsuko Hirata 9232 Airdrome Street Los Angeles, CA 90035

Edward Ives

Northeast Folklore

South Stevens Hall University of Maine at Orono

Orono, ME 04469 Michael Owen

Jon

Folklore & Mythologyes Program Univ. of Califomia, Los Los Angeles, CA 90024 Angeles

Enrique Lamadrid Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese University of New Mex Albugerque, NM 87131 ico

William Bernard McCarthy Penn State College Place DuBois, PA 15801 Elsie and Joseph M 2354 Lambert Drive

Pasadena, CA 91107

Jesiis Martinez

Dept. of Political Scienc Santa Clara University e Santa Clara, CA 95053 Herminia Mefiez

3426 Wade St. Los Angeles, CA 90066

a“

Beatriz Mariscal Hay El Colégio de México Camino al Ajusco 20 México DF 01000

379

380

Ballads and Boundaries

John Minton English & Linguistics Indiana University, Purdue University at Fort Wayne Fort Wayne, IN 46805-1499 James Moreira Dept. of Folklore Memorial University St. John’s, Newfoundland Canada

John D. Niles Dept. of English Univ. of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720

Toru Mitsui Kanazawa University College of Liberal Arts 1-1 Marunouchi Kanazawa, Ishikawa 920

Japan

Sara G. Muller-Chernoff 1301 Wamer Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90024 Gloria Orozco Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese 5310 Rolfe Hall Univ. of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024

Samuel Will Parnes 1124 Summit Drive

Geneva Phillips Dept. of English Univ. of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024

Gerald Porter Unmakaregatan 19 65100 Vasa

James Porter Dept. of Ethnomusicology Univ. of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024

Amanda Powell Dept. of Romance Languages University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403

Colin Quigiey

Juan Carlos Ramirez

Roger deV. Renwick Dept. of English

Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Finland

Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese

Univ. of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024

Dept. of Dance Univ. of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024 Univ. of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712-1164

Sigrid Rieuwerts 8 Damerham Close Canterbury, Kent CT2 7)B England

Enrique Rodriguez-Cepeda

Margaret W. Romani 1610 Comstock Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90024

Nathan Rose Dept. of English & American Literature & Language Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138

Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese

Univ. of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024

List of Participants Neil V. Rosenberg Dept. of Folklore Memorial University St. John’s, Newfoundland A1C $87 Canada

Judith Seeger 2308 Blaine Drive Chevy Chase, MD 20815

Tracey Sands 2624 4th Ave. North, #101 Seattle, WA 98200

Spiro Shituni Dept. of Ethnomusicology Univ. of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024

Ellen Sinatra Dept. of Ethnomusicology Univ. of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024

Alyne and Laurence Sinclair

Helga Stein Roemer-Pelizaeum Museum

Marge Steiner Evermann Apts. 109 Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47406

Am Steine 1-2

D-3200 Freiburg, Germany Holly Tannen College of the Redwoods 1211 Del Mar Drive

Fort Bragg, CA 95437 Shannon Thornton

Folklore & Mythology Univ. of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90024 Stefaan Top Seminarie voor Volkskunde Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Blide Inkomststraat 21 3000 Leuven Belgium Maria Teresa Venegas Loyola Marymount University Modem Languages Department Loyola Blvd. at West 80th St Los Angeles, CA 90045

926 E. Mariposa Ave.

El Segundo, CA 90245-3113

William Thomas 13750 Erwin St.

Van Nuys, CA 91401

Barre Toelken 1140 East 50th South Logan, UT 84321 Lester M. Tint 10673 Casanes Ave. Downey, CA 90241 Ana Valenciano Instituto Universitario Interfacultativo Seminario Menéndez Pidal Universidad Complutense de Madrid Menéndez Pidal 5 28036 Madrid, Spain

Ruth H. Webber 2992 Shasta Road Berkeley, CA 94708

381

382

Ballads and Boundaries

Sabine Wienker-Piepho Keplerstr. 24 D-3400 Gottingen Germany

Erich Wimmer Institut fir deutsche Philologie

Natascha Wiirzbach Englisches Seminar Universitat zu Kéln Albertus-Magnus-Platz 5000 Cologne Germany

8700 Wiirzburg Germany

Universitat Wirzburg Volkskundliche Abteilung Am Hubland

Bernice Zamora P.O. Box 1048

Santa Clara, CA 95052