About the Commonest British Ballads
by Bertrand H. Bronson
Journal of the International Folk Music Council, Vol. 9 (1957), pp. 22-27
ABOUT THE COMMONEST BRITISH BALLADS
by
BERTRAND H. BRONSON (University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.)
To talk briefly about the commonest ballads in the British-American tradition, it is necessary to make some initial limitations that for many may rob the subject of historical interest. The great bulk of the evidence that shows the ballads to be common is relatively contemporary evidence. We cannot know which ballads were massively current in past ages, since scattered records alone remain to testify to their having been generally known and sung. But for the present century there is factual evidence of widespread dissemination in the multiplicity of variants gathered by many collectors. It follows that we cannot generalise from the inherent appeal of the best of the earlier texts. For it is obvious that out of these narratives has been dropped and lost much that once made them powerful and effective stories. Time has stolen from them the elements of the supernatural, much of the colour of scene and sensitiveness of phrase, the right ordering of incident, dramatic suspense, sometimes even the logical relations of the persons concerned. We have, however, no right to assume that because the songs are still popular they are piously remembered today for the sake of what they formerly contained. The contemporary singers, we must believe, are seldom antiquaries: they like and sing the songs for what they are now-the only state, however dilapidated, in which for the true folksinger they exist.
From the evidence, it frequently appears that the element of narrative suspense means next to nothing to these singers. There may in fact be something radically inimical to suspense in the lyrical conception of balladry itself. Our first example, "Barbara Allan," which leads all the rest in popularity, seems at any rate never to have possessed this ingredient. Barbara's belated remorse may perhaps provide a modicum of surprise. But in almost none of the current variants does her lover put up so much resistance as to offer a word to account for the apparent affront with which she sometimes charges him. More often than not, her charge of neglect is also dropped, and her callousness left unexplained. To judge by the briefer variants, the elements with most power of survival in the song, after the seasonal setting of the opening, are the summons to the death-bed, Barbara's languid compliance with it, and the upspringing and intertwining of the symbolic plants from the graves. The quality of gnarled old apple trees was what the American poet Carl Sandburg found in this song. But truly, its popularity from the days of Pepys onward to the present, in face of its undistinguished and unexciting content, its portrayal of unresisting surrender to untoward fortune, is, if we take the song as a fundamental expression of the spirit of the English-speaking people, a phenomenon so strange and mysterious as to deserve prolonged meditation. No love-triangle; no struggle; no complications; no hope; no courage; nothing but passive acceptance: result, the universal favourite!
But the contrast between this "wise passiveness" and the violence of the next most popular ballad in the British tradition is extreme. "Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor" shows no disposition to shy from explosive situation or melodramatic consequence. The delicate beauty of characterisation and phrase of the older Scottish version has given way in the surviving tradition to headlong provocation of the worst that ungovernable passion can wreak upon its victims. The three principals are almost equally responsible for the ensuing tragedy. Fair Eleanor comes to the wedding only to taunt the bride for her lack of beauty; Lord Thomas shamefully humiliates his bride both by word and act; the bride stabs her rival as instinctively as a cornered animal would kill its enemy; Lord Thomas retaliates with such brutal frenzy as to dishonour the corpse by kicking (or throwing) the severed head against the wall; and then with equal precipitancy stabs himself to make an end of all three. These people are Elizabethan in their lack of emotional restraint. Their story, at least, hangs together better than usual in the folk memory. Its essential parts are seldom lost or confused. The breakneck pace of the narrative is slowed only by the two pauses for maternal advice-wrongly followed by Lord Thomas, wrongly disregarded by Fair Eleanor. The rush of event suffers no real interruption; the temporal sequence is unbroken and straightforward. Here again there is little suspense and little surprise. But it is difficult to find any common ground between this narrative and the other. How could the same people be almost equally fond of these two songs?
"Lord Randal" holds a position of virtually equal security in the folk memory. Here, too, is a story of murderous passion, though in the present case we do not know what has led to the fatal act, which is doubtless more deliberate. But the question of motives is none of the ballad's business; and there is little sign that any singer has ever inquired. What we see clearly is that Lord Randal returns home from a love-tryst with an assurance that death is upon him, and that he has been poisoned by his love. The narrative is conducted thenceforward by means of the "legacy" convention; but it would be an unmerited compliment to speak in this case of a "climax of relatives." Which relative comes before which in the distribution of bequests is a matter of complete indifference. The device is not used dramatically, and is only a means of extending the song. The fatal secret is out, at latest, as soon as we learn the nature of Randal's repast in the wildwood. Strictly regarded, the only suspense in the narrative lies in our having to wait through the list of insignificant bequests to learn what is bequeathed to the murderess. Here, one feels, even more than in "Barbara Allan," narrative interest could hardly be more slackly sustained.
The next, and almost equally favourite, ballad in the British-American tradition is one with an enormous range of Continental parallels and a plot of far greater complexity. It is generally, but ineptly, known to English students by Child's title, "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight," but also by a variety of other names, of which the commonest English one is "The Outlandish Knight." The latent ambiguity of "outlandish" is appropriate to its character. From the current tradition the supernatural element has been eliminated, but an unusually large number of narrative elements survive; and the story has a relatively high degree of suspense and surprise as well as incident. It is noteworthy, however, that in the chances of transmission the sequence of events is liable to sad deterioration, and that even the characters may be confounded. In cases where the process of dilapidation has made the worst inroads-and such cases are all too numerous-the natural binding force of the plot has been so ineffectual that almost every incident of the story may be found standing alone as the ballad's sole surviving remnant, in spite of its failure to make sense by itself or even to suggest a total meaning. The interesting thing is that the song has so often continued to be sung after nearly all narrative meaning has departed. This again would suggest that narrative interest was not essential to survival.
Much simpler is the next ballad in the series, "The Gypsy Laddie," or "Gipsy Davie," as it is better known in America. Here is a story essentially romantic, without tragic consequences-at least, in recent tradition. The central parts of this song are generally well preserved, and the tale loses little, where it is remembered at all. Seldom forgotten are the following seven elements: the appearance of the gipsies; the lord's return, to find his lady gone; his command to saddle in haste; his riding hither and thither until he finds the lady among the gipsies; his challenging questions; her defiant answers; the contrast between her former state and her lot henceforward. These make a complete narrative.
Next in line of popularity is "Lord Bateman." Here again we have a simple story rather well preserved in tradition. So consistent is it, in fact, that we must suppose it to have been frequently fortified or refreshed by nineteenth-century broadside printings. What we most often find is the following sequence of incidents. Bateman is seized with a desire to travel to foreign parts; he sails to Turkey, is captured, and put in prison; the jailer's beautiful daughter is interested and liberates him, with a conditional exchange of promises; after a long lapse of time she decides to go in search; arriving at Bateman's palace-gate, she learns from the porter that her love has that day taken a wife; she sends in identifying requests; Bateman impulsively abjures the new alliance and rushes to greet his Turkish love; the bride is dismissed with a consolation prize, over the protests, frequently, of her indignant mother; and Bateman and his love are united forthwith. The ballad has a strong and consistent (and beautiful) melodic tradition.
Similar generalisations may be made of the last ballad to be mentioned in this list of top favourites: the song called by Child "James Harris, or The Daemon Lover," but generally known today as "The House Carpenter." It is especially popular in America, and in fact has seldom been found of late in the British Isles. Again it is to be suspected that print has contributed to its excellent state of preservation. Almost always present are the opening greetings, with a recapitulation of intervening matters (his loyalty in the face of powerful counter-attractions, her marriage to another man); then his enticements to persuade her to forsake her husband and children; her farewells to the latter; her sudden change of heart after putting to sea; his request for an explanation; her longing for her abandoned babes; the sinking of the ship. Like "Bateman," the ballad has a strong and fine melodic tradition.
Casting a backward glance, we may ask if there are any obvious features that might help to explain why these particular songs have clung to memory. In the first place, all are motivated by passionate love, though the emotion itself is not the focus of interest. Neither the joys nor the pains of love are of primary concern, but the practical consequences. Love, in fact, is in these songs an illness from which no one recovers. Two of the heroines are, to be sure, left alive after the seizure, but have been carried away by it into what is for them another world. It has no respect for codes of decent behaviour; it literally paralyses moral conventions. The Carpenter's wife can bid a tender farewell to her little babes, and can bitterly lament her desertion of them, but she could have taken no other course. The gipsy's lady-love is, in the most literal sense, simply spellbound: her former lord, her children, her familiar way of life mean nothing to her any longer. Barbara's lover has no alternative, either: his sickness is fatal, as even she can see: "Young man, I think you're dying." But the disease is infectious; and, after her reckless exposure, her death is equally inevitable. We might say, then, that although the so-called supernatural has disappeared from these old pieces, the natural has acquired supernatural potency. We must believe that this is a significant factor in their longevity.
In the second place, these stories are very easily remembered: indeed, with the possible exception of "Lady Isabel," they are nearly impossible to forget. Character, in large part, is reduced to character-in-action, and action, generally speaking, to action-in-crisis. The narrative stream is single; and only in "Lord Thomas" and "The Gypsy Laddie" are more than two persons vitally involved. Considerable use is made of the conventions of phrasal repetition as an aid to memory; and "Lord Thomas" and "The Gypsy Laddie" employ in striking degree other formulae as well. In the one case, the chime of the double rhyme on the proper name is like a continuous peal of bells; and in the other, the repetitive interlocking of alternative forms of address-"Lord Randal my son" and "My handsome young man"-together with his reiterated and insistent reply have established the stanzaic pattern of the Randal ballad with unforgettable uniformity in whatever language it has been found. Such are some, at least, of the most obvious and external reasons for the enduring popularity of the ballads in question.
But the ballads are songs, not merely spoken narratives; and it remains to inquire very briefly whether the tunes can throw any further light on the question at issue. I shall forgo the temptation to luxuriate in appreciation of the appeal of individual tunes or families of tunes and will confine myself to the statistical analysis of their commonest attributes. My observations are based on an examination of approximately nine hundred variants or, as Dr. Wiora more accurately would denominate them, Anzeichnungen, like and unlike, associated with the verbal texts of these seven ballads. I have not proceeded along the lines of an initial subjective grouping or categorising but have at the outset approached them as an undifferentiated mass. Of these records, it may be interesting to note, only about seventy were collected before 1900; but these are all I have been able to discover by the most diligent search during twenty years. Approximately one third of the total number were recorded in Britain; the other two thirds in America.
I have been led to differentiate between the range of tunes, on the rough distinction of authentic, plagal, and mixed classes, because of demonstrable differences in the melodic habits of these groups that to me are significant. The authentic tunes outnumber the other two groups combined, in a ratio of about five to four. The plagals outnumber the mixed tunes by about three to one. The over-all proportions are, then, 5:3:I. Roughly three-quarters of each of these classes are four-phrase tunes. The incidence of external refrains is therefore obviously low. More striking is the fact that, according to my count, 536 of the total number of tunes are of the "progressive," or non-recurrent, phrasal type, ABCD. Of these four-phrase tunes, almost all, as would be expected, have their finals on the tonic. The melodic modes are predominantly some form of major. To be more specific, more than 50 per cent. of the authentic tunes are Ionian, Mixolydian, or Ionian/Mixolydian hexatonics. More than 50 per cent. of the mixed tunes are either Pentatonic (lacking 4th and 7th), Mixolydian/Dorian hexatonic, or Dorian. More than 75 per cent. of the plagal tunes are Pentatonic (lacking 4th and 7th), or Ionian, or Ionian/Mixolydian hexatonics.
Analysed by metre, nearly half of the authentic tunes show some variety of triple or compound duple time, most frequently 6/8. More than half of the mixed tunes are in some form of duple time, mainly 4/4. Three-quarters of the plagal tunes are in some form of triple time or compound duple, most frequently 3/2, 3/4, or 6/8. It seemed interesting to draw up for each of the three groups a chart (see p. 27) of the frequencies with which the accented notes of the first two phrases fell on the various degrees of the scale. The result would constitute an over-all skeletal image, as far as to the mid-cadence, of this large class of ABCD tunes. If we follow the points of highest numerical frequency through the successive stresses of the phrases pictured, we can observe the favourite notes from which and to which the melody swings in its course. Thus, the authentic tunes show, for the first phrase: V (or III), VIII (or V), V (or III), and a cadence on I; and, for the second phrase: V, VIII, V, and V for the mid-cadence-the last two accents being often a held note. Similarly, the mixed tunes show, first, V, VII, V, and I; and, second, V, VII, V, V. And the plagal tunes, finally, show: first, I, III (or I), I (or II), and lower V (or I); and, second, I (or III), V, III, and V (or II). This, it is well to observe, is not the picture of any particular tune, nor even of an archetypical tune, though all the tunes under analysis are of course latent in the chart as a whole.
In spite of all the bewildering individual variety, therefore, we can discern in the scene as a whole some well-marked favourite paths: a greater liking for tunes in the authentic range, for tunes in the major, with four non-repeating phrases and (more often than not) with a triple beat. They end on the tonic, are likely to have a midcadence on V, and a first-phrase on I. These facts, based on so large a number of melodies, would have considerable weight in themselves. But besides, we must not forget that they have behind them the force, incalculable but overwhelming, of countless unconscious rejections in their favour of other appeals and possibilities. What makes them extraordinarily interesting, it seems to me, is that we are not here following an arbitrarily chosen and sifted group of kindred or similar tunes but the commonest preferences of the commonest melodic type of the ballads most commonly sung throughout the British-American ballad-singing tradition, so far as it has been preserved in accessible records. And this, I cannot but think, has implications aesthetic, musicological, psychological, national, and therefore, ultimately and inevitably, international.
Mr. A. L. LLOYD (London) said that the ballad tunes which Professor Bronson had so carefully compared were of American, English or Scottish provenance. To these must be added the melodies of the Irish versions of "Child" ballads recorded during the last few years, and which only recently had begun to appear in print. While some of the tunes resemble each other though collected in different regions, others show stubborn regional characteristics (for instance, pentatonism is common in the American tunes, and almost entirely lacking in the English). He wondered whether a statistical form-comparison of agglomeration of tunes of three (or even four) different musical dialects was not too widespread and general to be of real use. Might it not be more fruitful to separate the melodies into their national grouping, before attempting such minute analysis?
Dr. O'SULLIVAN (Ireland) wished to pay a tribute to the outstanding work of Professor Bronson in assembling and annotating the tunes for the basic texts in English balladry. He was, however, sceptical about philosophising too much about the contents of the ballads-people loved them, without thinking too much about them.
Professor PINON (Brussels) said that the French folk tale like the American ballad had developed in the direction of greater rationalism and a deeper psychological justification of the heroes' actions, the magic causality being replaced by a concatenation of the actions based on human psychology. Could one discover here a characteristic feature of the development of modern folklore?
Professor BRONSON said that for years we had been looking for what was different and we were now looking for what the different ballads had in common.
Miss KARPELES (London) thought that Professor Bronson had his finger on something that was very important. He had hinted at a line of research which might lead to valuable results if followed by scholars in different countries. It was important for scientific research in folk music to discover what are the elements that make for popularity. When we had discovered that we should have discovered something about the principles of the creation of folk music, although happily the mystery of creation could never be completely unravelled.