Presiding: Anna Atkinson
Department of English
Vancouver Island University
In her compelling 2006 essay, "The Ballad's Progress," Mary Ellen Brown laments "the ballad's current invisibility in the curriculum." There are many reasons for this disappearance, including a shift away from genre studies, the stigma of folkloric literature, the debates about the historic origins of the ballad, and the elusiveness of the very term: "ballad." We might also add a certain degree of what might be called "ballad fatigue." The fatigue owes a little something, quite ironically to the remarkable Francis James Child, whose 5-volume work, "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads," revived contemporary interest in ballads while also immersing readers in over one thousand pages of repetitive detail.
Despite renewed interest and schoolarship, the ballad still remains invisible and still deserved the attention we accord to similar genres. Undergraduate and graduates alike (to say nothing of faculty) can make sense of Virginia Woolf's Judith Shakespeare, but remained stymied by her invocation of the "Four Mary's" who -- along with Judith--.have no legacy of their own. The ambitious purpose of this session is to restore content to the ballad and to explain the ongoing legacies of meaning in the ballad form. Our objective is not merely to restore the ballad as an historical artifact, but rather to acknowledge that it is a form that continues to thrive in narrative structures, whether in song, in fiction, in poetry, or the cinema.
Keeping Margaret Ferguson's Presidential Theme in mind, it is also worth noting that the ballad was an important mnemonic device that was used both among the literate and illiterate. The purposes of the ballad were many, but in almost every case they combined word, rhyme, and meaning in a convenient for retention, repetition and dissemination. As Mary Ellen Brown suggests in another essay "popular ballads to be authentic and true are held in memory."
"The Logic of the Ballad: An Introduction" Alan Rauch
Professor of English, UNC Charlotte
Scholarship in the long eighteenth century may make an occasional nod to the ballad-in the works of Percy, Scott, Hogg, and others, but the enduring life of the ballad is taken less seriously than it ought to be. Embedded within Romantic, Victorian, and modern texts are references to ballads and broadsides ranging from "Barbara Allen" to the "Boy and the Mantle," and, in Virginia Woolf, "The Four Marys." Not only are these specific references lost on most readers, the significance of the folk and ballad tradition is almost always overlooked in the classroom. That tradition is becoming more important for our understanding of culture as scholars have come to consider issues of textual history, of memory, of narrative trajectory, and finally, of the role of literate texts in non-literate communities.
We have lost our appreciation of the value of the "ballad" as a medium for other forms of
popular literature such as the novel and lyric poetry. Part of this loss includes a lack of
appreciation for the form, content, and structure of the ballad itself. Riddling ballads, so
critical in the shaping of modern thought and contemporary narrative, are almost entirely
forgotten as a genre. (Except perhaps for John Belushi's violent response to "I Gave my Love a Cherry" in "Animal House".) Nevertheless, students and readers alike have not only been shaped by these ballads, but appreciate them in a renewed way when they begin to appreciate the structure, function, and cultural resonance of these song..
To begin this session, I will take a very quick look at "Riddles Wisely Expounded" sometimes called "Jennifer Gentle," which was catalogued as Ballad #1 in Child's great survey. I will consider its structure and address its utility a way to teach not only the ballad, but how to use the ballad to teach literature.
"Re-singing History: Greensleeves Broadside Ballads from late Elizabethan to Restoration England" Patricia Fumerton
Professor and Director English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)
University of California - Santa Barbara
This talk explores why the tune Greensleeves became one of the most popular tunes in the Elizabethan period as well as of the anti-Interregnum period. The question is: how is that a broadside ballad expressive of forlorn courtly love (first registered in the Stationers' Company in the 1580s) became transformed into the voice of vicious, often scatological, political attacks against Cromwell and celebrations of the Restoration of monarchy? What makes the tune and context of Greensleeves so adaptable?
"Orality, Authenticity, and the Historiography of the Everyday: The Ballad in Victorian Scholarship and Print Culture" Dr. Yuri Cowan
Associate Professor
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
Mary Ellen Brown in her important 2006 article "The Ballads' Progress," which considers the cultural status of the ballad from its first appearance as an object of literary importance on up to the present day, argues that the "collective framing narratives [which] might be called the literary history of the popular ballad" need to be re-assessed. Given that the primary venue in which Victorian readers experienced the ballad was that of the genteel print anthology, it is clear that the idea of the ballad as an oral performance is chief among such framing narratives. Partly because the place of performance was often envisioned by Victorian editors, scholars, and popular readers of the ballad as being in the home or at work (such anthologies, for instance, generally included a frontispiece showing a singer in a domestic setting, often in a rural setting which was viewed as conservative and thus closer to the folkways of the pre-industrial past) Victorian scholarship felt that the ballads could reveal something about the everyday lives of past men and women. This historiography of the everyday played out not only in an understanding of the roles of song and entertainment in everyday life, but also in the matter of the ballads, which was thought to reveal a rough but honest morality (in Samuel Carter Hall's 1842 collection) as well as many of the customs, usages, and material culture surrounding marriage, death, conflict, and friendship. Drawing on the example of scholars and editors such as Hall, Francis James Child, John Hales, and Frederick Furnivall, this paper will show how, textually and historically, the Victorians saw the ballads as revealing the everyday life of the past: not as an orderly evolution to a modern best of all possible worlds, but as a halting series of interesting byways followed, creative experiments abandoned, and shared successes passed on. Victorian scholars certainly came to the study of such moments from the view of the past that we see in Brown's evocation of "the homogeneous folk society of early antiquarian dreams." But they also recognized the vicissitudes of history and the textual variations that pulled the ballad canon away from being a unified celebration of a homogeneous national past. Moreover, just as the texts of the ballads were multiple witnesses to the popular culture of the past, not well reducible to a single canon comprising the best versions of each narrative, so the bibliographical record shows that the nineteenth-century ballad editors contributed most to our understanding of the history of popular culture when they imagined historical everyday life as being made up of diverse performative moments, and harnessed the era's considerable print resources to preserve the ballad corpus in all its profusion, with all its flaws and inconsistencies intact.
"Voices from the Street: Broadside Ballads and the Pleasures of Voice"
Taryn Hakala
University of California, Merced
"Few of the residents of london," henry mayhew tells readers in London Labour and the London Poor, "but chiefly those in the quieter streets--have not been aroused, and most frequently in the evening, by a hurly-burly on each side of the street" (i: 221). in noisy 1850s london, this "hurly-burly" could be any number of things: cabs, omnibuses, construction, demolition, organ grinders, ballad-sellers. mayhew describes the latter with relish: the "mob" or "school" of running patterers who announce at great volume the "murders," "fires," and other alarming subjects they have for sale in the form of penny broadsides, for "the greater the noise they make, the better is the chance of a sale" (i: 222). "an attentive listening," mayhew reminds his readers, "will not lead any one to an accurate knowledge of what the clamour is about" (i: 221). no amount of pricking up one's ears, it would seem, would allow the listener to parse the hubbub; only the words "murder," "horrible," "barbarous," "mysterious," and "former crimes" could be "caught by the ear," mayhew explains, "there was no announcement of anything like 'particulars'" (i: 222). the patterers might enunciate the name of a famous criminal or "any new or pretended fact" but only enough to pique the public's interest (i: 222). simultaneously strident and obscure, these ballad-sellers' patter echoes the contradictions that they sell: news so new that they can beat the newspapers but also news that is "pretended," "fictitious," and "fake." one of mayhew's informants says it best when he claims, "for herly and correct hinformation, we can beat the sun-aye, or the moon either, for the matter of that" (i: 224). for these ballad-sellers and their audiences, the oral is more valuable than the written. the patterers transform text into aural pleasure for their listeners; their presentation of the papers upstages the papers themselves. this paper examines how mayhew represents the ballad-sellers' speech in written form. it explores how mayhew captures and celebrates the pleasures of voice on the page. much scholarship on victorian literature assumes that working-class writers and audiences were influenced by and emulated the middle classes. this paper reveals the influence of ballads on middle-class culture and literary forms.
