The Ballad

Alan Bold

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781032031491
• eBook ISBN: 9781315389745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1979, this work presents the history of the ballad, including its origin, style, content and preservation. It explores how ballads have adapted and changed over time, particularly with the rise of mass literacy and printing and the decline in the oral tradition, and in doing so, demonstrates the versatility of the genre.

With separate indexes for names and ballad titles, this book will be a valuable resource to those studying English ballads and early modern and modern poetry.

1

Origin of the ballads

I have often been afraid of dying before 1879 ended. I want to live long enough to put the world in possession of all the English ballads, and find it frequently necessary to say to myself that this is the only matter of essential importance.

(Francis James Child, letter of 24 January 1880 to Sven Grundtvig)

What is a ballad? It is one of the minor tragedies of literature that the man best equipped to answer that question did not live to do so. Professor Francis James Child, whose five-volume epic of scholarship The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98) contains the definitive ballad canon, died in Boston on 11 September 1896 at the age of seventy-one. He had spent the greatest years of his scholastic life collecting material for his monumental anthology and at his death he had completed the work — with the significant omission of his proposed General Introduction. Among Child’s papers were the beginnings of the draft of the Introduction:

In the moderate compass of less than five vol[ume]s there has now been gathered everything in the Eng[lish] language that by the most liberal interpretation could be called a popular ballad, and all the known versions of such.

(Child MSS, Harvard Library, Vol. XVI, p. 132)

What Child had done was to collect and annotate 305 ballads with around 1000 versions. His claims to completeness were sound. Since his death, avid collectors have tried to add to the Child canon — with items like ‘Still Growing’, ‘Corpus Christi’, ‘Bruton Town’—but only one piece has been accepted everywhere as a genuine popular ballad: ‘The Bitter Withy’, which Frank Sidgwick contributed to Notes and Queries, 29 July 1905.

A fastidious scholar, Child chose his words with care. The definite article in his title is a deliberate assertion of finality; the epithet ‘popular’ contains the key to the whole collection. Child was interested only in ballads that were produced or possessed by the people: broadside ballads were, he felt, a low form of artistic composition, though he reluctantly used broadside texts of popular ballads; ballad imitations he found absurd. The popular ballad was an oral phenomenon, a narrative song that had been preserved on the lips of unlettered people. His editorial method followed the principles of Sven Grundtvig whose great Danmarks gamle Folkeviser (the first volume of which was published in Copenhagen in 1853) assembled the Danish ballads. Like Grundtvig, Child ascribed a number to each ballad and a letter to each version of that ballad; all the popular ballads cited in this book are classified according to the Child code. Hence the first item in Child’s collection is ‘Riddles Wisely Expounded’ (1A) while the final item is ‘The Outlaw Murray’ (305C). Quotations from Child on any particular ballad are excerpted from his headnotes to that ballad.

The modern reader has lived so long with ballads as a permanent feature of every library that it requires an imaginative leap to conceive of a time when the ballads had no fixed texts and were simply and fondly remembered by those who enjoyed singing them. Critics have constructed such a massive academic apparatus around these beautiful songs that there are times when the direct power of the ballads is obscured. When topics like modality and musical morphology are being debated, it is salutary to remember that many of the songs under critical scrutiny were sung, not by sophisticated musical performers, but by milkmaids and nurses and ploughmen. When the structural minutia of the ballads is being clinically dissected it is essential to recall that actual ballads preceded the impressive theories and not vice versa. In other words the ideal approach to the ballads is first to let them speak for themselves and only then to arrive at schemata which make a total grasp of the subject possible. It is arguable that the commentators on balladry have — through their collective critical efforts — overshadowed, not illuminated, the brilliance of the original product.

When the ballads floated around in the oral atmosphere inhaled by non-literate but naturally gifted folk, they were ignored by historians and literary critics. When they began to be dragged from this natural environment there was an unnatural curiosity as to the origins of this particular species of singing poetry. The style was so obviously finished and perfected that the speculators got to work with their obfuscatory powers. Ballad theorists have been quick to rush in where common sense fears to tread, and an acrimonious debate has arisen over the beginnings of balladry. In Germany Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), committed to a national renaissance, insisted on the spontaneous folk origin of ballads. The Volkslieder (or, as he preferred, Nationallieder) were expressions of the pure voice of the people.

Once upon a time, too, there was Jakob Grimm (1785-1863) — whose picture hung in Child’s study — and he held that popular poetry and fairy tales were collectively composed by the folk: das Volk dichtet. This notion that the folk make the poetry has come to be known as the communalist theory. We are asked to believe that a primitive community spontaneously made poetry together, much as they might cooperate to make a fire. Outside Germany this conjecture became a matter of dogmatic literary warfare. Francis B. Gummere’s books took the communalist premiss to a fanciful conclusion. He postulated the existence of a primitive throng concentrating their attention on an event of local significance and making a marvellous song and dance out of it. In his introduction to his one-volume reduction of Child, George L. Kittredge positively embraced the notion:

Different members of the throng, one after another, may chant his verse, composed on the spur of the moment, and the sum of these various contributions makes a song. This is communal composition, though each verse, taken by itself, is the work of an individual. A song made in this way is no man’s property and has no individual author. The folk is its author, … the history of balladry, if we could follow it back in a straight line without interruptions, would lead us to very simple conditions of society, to the singing and dancing throng, to a period of communal composition.

(English and Scottish Popular Ballads, pp. xix and xxii)

It is significant that neither Gummere nor Kittredge could claim that any extant ballad was produced in this way. Their speculations were confined to an archetypal ballad; their theories were based on illuminations received inside the library. Neither of them had any experience of primitive societies; neither of them had any personal insight into the creative process. They were basically stating what they felt ought to be the case, for it was imperative, they believed, to explain away the ballad phenomenon. Cecil Sharp, on the other hand, when he published English Folk Song: Some Conclusions in 1907, had spent some four years collecting some 1 500 folksongs (mainly from Somerset) and his opinions had the benefit of first-hand experience in the field. Sharp realized that any ballad must first be the work of an individual but that the community had an important secondary role to play. His statement is probably the most lucid and compelling summary of the communalist-individualist debate:

Every line, every word of [a] ballad sprang in the first instance from the head of some individual, reciter, minstrel, or peasant; just as every note, every phrase of a folk tune proceeded originally from the mouth of a solitary singer. Corporate action has originated nothing and can originate nothing. Communal composition is unthinkable. The community plays a part, it is true, but it is at a later stage, after and not before the individual has done his work and manufactured the material. Its part is then to weigh, sift, and select from the mass of individual suggestions those which most accurately express the popular taste and the popular ideal; to reject the rest; and then, when more variations are produced, to repeat the process once more, and again once more. The process goes on unceasingly while the ballad lives; or until it gets into print when, of course, its process is checked, so far as educated singers are concerned.

(English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, p. 41)

So — the individual is creative, the performer is re-creative, the folk are a selective audience. Sharp, who initiated the folksong revival in England and reminded the critics that a ballad is not a ballad unless it has a tune, ended much confusion with that statement.

Once we have accepted the individual composition and subsequent folk possession of a ballad, there is the question of the antiquity of the phenomenon. ‘Judas’ (13), which exists in a thirteenth-century manuscript, is the oldest English ballad preserved in writing. However, as the whole weight of scholarship has supported the oral nature of balladry, the existence of manuscripts or printed texts is not conclusive. A ballad may have been orally transmitted for years before being written down or printed. We can only say that the ballad seems to be a medieval invention which had oral currency up to the eighteenth century, when the collectors began to preserve these popular treasures. Then, as Edwin Muir put it in his ‘Complaint of the Dying Peasantry’:

The singing and the harping fled

Into the silent library.

By the nineteenth century new popular ballads had ceased to be composed orally, though variants of ballad stories proliferated. By then the folk had been industrialized, mass literacy had been introduced, and primary oral composition was a thing of the past. The folk did not lose their creative impetus; they simply transferred it to the printed word.

It was the literary men who made the ballad a prestigious enough article to be granted the status of hard covers in the course of time. It was a slow process. Eminent Elizabethans like Shakespeare (see Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale) and Jonson (see Nightingale in Bartholomew Fair) had no high opinion of ballads or ballad-mongers. Then Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apologie for Poetrie (1595), expressed his enthusiasm, albeit apologetically, for The Hunting of the Cheviot’ (162A):

Certainly I must confess my own barbarousness. I never heard the olde song of Percy and Duglas that I found not my heart mooved more then with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blinde crouder, with no rougher voyce then rude stile: which, being so evill apparrelled in the dust and cobwebbes of that uncivill age, what would it worke trymmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar!

That was the first influential tribute to the emotional power of the ballads. The growing awareness of the ballads, particularly ‘Chevy Chase’ (162B) which is a broadside version of ‘The Hunting of the Cheviot’ (162A), among the literati is attested in Matthew Prior’s ‘Satyr on the Poets’ (1687) where he says:

By Verse you’l starve; John Saul cou’d never live,

Unless the Bell-Man made the Poet thrive:

Go rather, in some little Shed by Pauls,

Sell Chivy Chase, and Baxter’s Salve for Souls.

Here we have the contrast between the isolated art-poet and the mass appeal of the ballads.

It was in the heyday of neoclassicism that the ballads found their first real champion. In 1711—the year of Pope’s Essay on Criticism—Joseph Addison, arbiter of taste, devoted two Spectator papers (Nos 70 and 74) to a discussion of ‘Chevy Chase’ (162B) and a further paper (No. 85) to ‘The Two Children in the Wood’, ‘one of the darling songs of the common people’. Addison argued that ‘an Heroic poem should be founded upon some important precept of Morality’. This principle, which undeniably applied to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, was also seen in ‘Chevy Chase’ (162B) which, Addison reminded readers of the Spectator, was ‘the favourite Ballad of the people of England’. Addison compared the death of Turnus in the Aeneid with the death of Earl Douglas:

Who never sayd more words than these:

Fight on, my merry men all!

For why, my life is att an end,

Lord Pearcy sees my fall.

Convinced a poem should be distinguished by stylistic and thematic clarity, Addison argued that the nobility of ‘Chevy Chase’ (162B) was a matter of ‘majestic simplicity’. The ballad’s classical power was more rewarding than the pretentious artifice of ‘gothic’ (i.e. Metaphysical) poetry. Far from despising the popularity of the ballad, Addison saw this as evidence of its quality, for it had stood the test of time and repeated hearings: ‘an ordinary song or ballad, that is the delight of the common people, cannot fail to please all such readers as are not unqualified for the entertainment by their affectation or ignorance …’ Although Addison’s eulogy on ‘Chevy Chase’ (162B) was held to be an intellectual aberration by such critics as John Dennis, the fact that a brilliant man of letters had endorsed the ballad had vast repercussions. Addison had isolated the quality of simplicity and this would determine much of the subsequent appreciation of the ballads. A neat couplet from Dr John Armstrong’s Taste: An Epistle to a Young Critic (1753) facetiously acknowledged the shift in sensibility caused by Addison:

But thanks to Heav’n and Addison’s good grace

Now ev’ry fop is charm’d with Chevy Chase.

A scholar who was decidedly charmed by Addison’s arguments was Thomas Percy (1721-1811), Bishop of Dromore from 1782. Although he has often been vilified for his dubious editorial methods, Percy remains the man who instigated the modern interest in ballads and, with it, the Romantic revival. The picturesque story of Percy’s discovery of a seventeenth-century folio has a nice symbolic touch. Percy found some maids using sheets from the manuscript to light fires; as he explained in a note inside the cover of his folio:

This very curious Old Manuscript in its present mutilated state, but unbound and sadly torn, … I rescued from destruction, and begged at the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Origin of the ballads
• 2 Style of the ballads
• 3 Content of the ballads
• 4 The broadside ballads
• 5 Survival of the ballads
• Bibliography
• Index of ballad titles
• Index of names