The English Traditional Ballad

Theory, Method, and Practice

David Atkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351544801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Ballads are a fascinating subject of study not least because of their endless variety. It is quite remarkable that ballads taken down or recorded from singers separated by centuries in time and by hundreds of kilometres in distance, should be both different and yet recognizably the same. In The English Traditional Ballad, David Atkinson examines the ways in which the body of ballads known in England make reference both to ballads from elsewhere and to other English folk songs. The book outlines current theoretical directions in ballad scholarship: structuralism, traditional referentiality, genre and context, print and oral transmission, and the theory of tradition and revival. These are combined to offer readers a method of approaching the central issue in ballad studies - the creation of meaning(s) out of ballad texts. Atkinson focuses on some of the most interesting problems in ballad studies: the 'wit-combat' in versions of The Unquiet Grave; variable perspectives in comic ballads about marriage; incest as a ballad theme; problems of feminine motivation in ballads like The Outlandish Knight and The Broomfield Hill; murder ballads and murder in other instances of early popular literature. Through discussion of these issues and themes in ballad texts, the book outlines a way of tracing tradition(s) in English balladry, while recognizing that ballad tradition is far from being simply chronological and linear.

Chapter 1

Introduction: accessing ballad tradition

A significant part of the fascination of studying – and listening to and singing – ballads arises directly out of their infinite variety. The fact that ballad stories, words, and tunes taken down or recorded from singers separated by centuries in time, by hundreds if not thousands of kilometres in distance, and maybe by even greater divisions in cultural experience, should be both different and yet recognisably the same, or recognisably the same and yet different, is in itself quite compelling. And since the conditions on each occasion when a ballad is heard or sung, even by the same listener or singer, will never be precisely the same, there is theoretically no upper limit to the number of potentially different manifestations of a ballad that may coexist. This perception is remarkable enough if applied just synchronically, at any one moment in time, let alone diachronically, historically backwards in time, or projected into the future.

One consequence of this embarrassment of riches is the urge to classify, to group like with like and to separate out differences. The simplest and most enduring method of classifying anglophone ballads is that employed by Francis James Child in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, of identifying and differentiating types and versions, drawing on the insight of earlier folklore editors such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, William Motherwell, and in particular the Danish ballad editor Svend Grundtvig. A type, for the present purpose, is a narrative ‘capable of maintaining an independent existence in tradition’ (that is, across time and space), and which can occur in different and varying manifestations, or versions.¹ At a practical, classificatory level, ‘type’ refers to the range of constants that informs and unifies all the actual or potential manifestations or versions. All the versions of a type are considered to be cognate, with the important corollary that there is no single authoritative text. Although the type/version concept is essentially pragmatic and even somewhat circular – a type is established on the basis of its versions, but it is necessary in the first instance to have some notion of the type in order to be able to identify the relevant versions – for anglophone ballads, and for most kinds of anglophone folk song, it appears to describe a genuine and fairly stable phenomenon (although it is most readily applicable where there is some kind of narrative, however vestigial, and there are some important exceptions in the areas of shanties and blues). Not only is the type/version concept a fundamental paradigm in folklore studies, widely applied to folktales and other genres besides folk song, it seems to be founded upon an innate tendency to group like and to distinguish unlike phenomena.² Arguably, the need to classify and categorise is a fairly fundamental characteristic of human intelligence.³

Child’s example has been followed by other scholars seeking to make tractable the endless variety within anglophone balladry. They include G. Malcolm Laws, in American Balladry from British Broadsides and Native American Balladry; Rainer Wehse’s descriptive work on broadside ballads, Schwanklied und Flugblatt in Großbritannien; and, more recently, Steve Roud, whose electronic folk song index is an ongoing endeavour and an essential aid to research.⁴ There have also been various attempts to bring a comparable system of classification to bear on the music of folk songs and ballads, notably Bertrand Bronson’s grouping of ballad tunes into ‘families’ in The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads.⁵ The internal melodic variation that characterises folk songs, however, has meant that tunes are not always amenable to classification using conventional methods of notation, and such systems have met with less general acceptance than those for the verbal texts. In addition, scholars have tried to reach beyond the type/version paradigm to identify a higher-level organisation of some kind among the mass of ballads and folk songs. At a straightforward, empirical and pragmatic, but nonetheless useful, level it is possible to classify ballads by subject matter, by their popularity with singers, or by geographical distribution.⁶ Laws’s classification, for example, groups ballads loosely by subject, and even Child uses the same sort of pattern in places – for instance, grouping together Robin Hood ballads or those associated with episodes from Scottish history. Numerous folk song anthologies group their contents by subjects or themes, by place of collection (English county or American state, for example), and/or, less frequently, by their individual singers.

Evidently there is a kind of coherence to considering alongside one another romantic and tragic ballads, magical and marvellous ballads, and so on. However, it is probably fair to say that the only sustained attempt to place these categories on a more systematic footing, relating certain ballad types together under the umbrella of a shared higher-level organisation, has been David Buchan’s application of the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp’s concept of ‘tale role’ to the ballads.⁷ Just as Propp identified and elaborated a set of constants that describe and classify all the variable narrative actions in the one hundred different Russian fairy tales he analysed – thirty-one ‘functions’ that always occur in a fixed order, providing the structural ‘grammar’ for all the tales – so he identified (without elaborating to the same degree) a similar set of constants to classify all the variable characters that perform these functions – seven different tale roles, each with its own ‘sphere of action’ comprising one or more functions.⁸ Propp maintained that the tales can be classified or defined (firstly) in terms of the proper sequence of functions but also (secondarily, because tale roles are themselves defined in terms of functions) according to the tale role schema.⁹

‘Tale role’, as Buchan then applied the concept to the ballads, is defined as ‘the interactive function served by a character in a narrative’.¹⁰ In practice it is an abstraction that is given concrete expression through character, and this ability to abstract the character structure of a ballad into a small number of interactive functions (typically between two and four) provides a convenient method of grouping together ballads in which even quite different characters can fulfil the same narrative function:

Propp’s concept of tale role reveals an important component in ballad morphology that has been largely unrecognized. His bilevel perspective on tale role and character provides a basic tool for ballad taxonomy that could prove to have an essential usefulness. Analysis of the tale role can give much sharper definition to conventional classification through general narrative content by revealing a crucial element in the subgeneric groupings of types and illustrating correspondences and divergences between individual types. Just as the tale role schemas can classify the material into subgenres and show up the borderline hybrids, so the character patterns can order types within the subgenres, besides indicating the relationships between types in different subgeneric groupings. It would, in all likelihood, be possible to construct a complete taxonomic system for British balladry using the tale role schemas as the system’s skeleton.¹¹

In a whole series of articles Buchan went on to analyse and classify recurrent tale role patterns in various categories or subgenres of ballads including romantic, tragic, religious, wit-combat, revenant, otherworld, witch, marvellous creature, and comic ballads, as well as various hybrid types. Tale role analysis provides a methodology that is both elegant and readily understood, and brings a degree of rigour to ballad taxonomy. The tale role concept, Buchan claimed, serves to reveal that the ballad genre is essentially about relationships and not just actions.¹² Moreover, through its power to distinguish constants from variables, it lends itself as a tool of cultural analysis, for the constants ‘disclose the cultural concerns and cultural statements that inform this long-lived genre’, enabling ‘the correlation, diachronically as well as synchronically, of the ballads with their cultural context’.¹³

In practice Buchan demonstrated the power of tale role analysis in elucidating, for example, the continuity of supernatural and secular versions and types of wit-combat ballads, and the affinities of wit-combat and revenant ballads. The tale role methodology has the capacity to distinguish instances where revenants, marvellous creatures, witches, and similar characters are central figures in the functioning of ballads from some of their more incidental and transient supernatural motifs. Tale role analysis of the entire corpus of supernatural ballad types has also made it possible to draw some conclusions about their general functions in culture, providing information to maintain a belief system and to furnish models for behaviour in dangerous relationships while at the same time opening a window on to counterparts in the world of human relationships.

The tale role method is, however, open to a number of criticisms. Perhaps the most telling of these is that the various aspects of Proppian morphological analysis, ‘functions’ and tale roles alike, which have repeatedly been taken as describing a kind of ‘generative grammar’ for oral narratives, are merely abstractions made from the material to hand and do not represent a set of deep structural rules for an entire genre at all. In fact, Buchan seems to have been aware of this and repeatedly refers to tale role as an ‘abstract concept’,¹⁴ although the charge that the methodology is essentially empirical and therefore self-fulfilling, foregrounding those aspects of ballads with which the researcher is most concerned, can still carry some weight. Again, tale role analysis may appear unnecessarily prescriptive in that it does not always seem to take account of the full range of variation within a ballad type, overlooking unusual textual features that do not fit into the schema. Likewise there may be a certain rigidity in the equivalence between character and tale role, the latter being an insufficiently organic category to contain the former.

Another possible objection is that the search for common ground may emphasise features that are actually somewhat peripheral to an individual type or version (an example mi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s preface
• 1 Introduction: accessing ballad tradition
• 2 The lover’s tasks in ‘The Unquiet Grave’
• 3 Comic ballads and married life
• 4 Incest and ‘Edward’
• 5 Motivation, gender, and talking birds
• 6 Magical corpses and the discovery of murder
• 7 An English ballad tradition?
• Bibliography
• Discography
• Index of ballads and songs
• General index