Commonplace and Memorization in the Oral Tradition of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads
by James H. Jones
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 74, No. 292 (Apr. - Jun., 1961), pp. 97-112
JAMES H. JONES
Commonplaceand Memorization in the Oral Tradition of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads
BALLAD scholarship has paid insufficient attention to the fact that there are
basically two ballad forms [1] represented by the Child ballads, the couplet form and
the quatrain form, which constitute two different ways of telling a story. Ballad
scholarship has also failed to recognize the significance of, and the evidence for,
the apparent development of the quatrain form out of the couplet form. This essay
is based upon a study of the style of all the Child ballads except the Robin Hood
and Border raid ballads. I have tried to account for the manner in which the two
ballad forms developed and have proposed a new theory of ballad tradition based
upon the conclusions drawn by Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord from their study
of the oral-epic tradition of Yugoslavia. Although I have unfortunately not had
time to relate my study to studies of text-tune relationship and of continental
ballad tradition, I believe that the continental ballads could be studied profitably
in light of the account of oral tradition offered here.
The couplet ballad's preponderant dialogue, incremental repetition and refrain
suggest an origin in dramatic improvisation. Gradually, as the ballad detached
itself from improvised dramatic performance and the singer ceased to have the aid
of actors and chorus, the couplet form developed into a quatrain form characterized
by a complex system of commonplaces that became so pervasive that the singer
could and did improvise ballads by their aid knowing only a story outline.
I.
Clearly, the two basic forms either came into being independently or one
developed from the other. If the latter, there is little doubt that the couplet ballad
is the older. This priority is suggested by Child's arrangement, for, acting upon the
advice of his friend Grundtvig that "not the content but the form, not the story
motive but the strophic and metrical structure must determine the age of the
ballad,"[2] Child put the couplet ballads in the front of his collection. Kittredge
remarked that the refrain was "a characteristic feature of ballad poetry which
gradually ceased to be essential," and Gummere discussed this in great detail,
proposing that the ballads had undergone an "epic process" which had worked
upon "situation" ballads as they gradually detached from the "festal throng."[3
John Henry Boynton investigated the refrain exhaustively and found that the
quatrain ballad (he calls it the "four line strophe") developed from the couplet
form (the "two line strophe with double refrain") through an intermediate stage
in which there was a two-line ballad with variable refrain, and that "such variation,
which could arise only at a time when the refrain was no longer sung in chorus,
but repeated by one person only, shows an effort, even though an unconscious one,
to bring the refrain into closer connection with the rest of the ballad... the first
step toward the development of a four line strophe without refrain."4 Although
Boynton recognized that "the chances of oral tradition are such that we should
expect to meet comparatively few instances of ballad strophes midway arrested in
development," he does point out two such instances of variable refrain in "The
Fair Flower of Northumberland" (9) and in "Sheath and Knife" (16), and notes
that a version of "Earl Brand" (15A) contains both two-line and four-line strophes.
He notes that the A and C versions of "Edward" (13) seem to represent the same
transition, for such lines as "And the truth I have told to thee," "And it wadna rin
for me," and "And a penny wad a bought the tree" "swing free."5 In other words,
these lines had nearly developed from the refrain line to the organic line of the
quatrain form. Regardless of what function one assigns to the refrain, it seems
generally agreed that the refrain is a vestige of a time when a chorus had some part
in the singing, if not the composition, of ballads.
These writers on the ballad refrain have overlooked an important piece of
evidence for the developing tradition of the ballad: quatrain ballads which lack
the refrain are filled with commonplaces whereas couplet ballads having the refrain
have fewer commonplaces. In other words, the quatrain form and the commonplace
developed together as they emerged from the couplet ballad.
That the couplet ballad originated in dramatic improvisation is suggested
by its preponderant dialogue, incremental repetition, and refrain. In the quatrain
ballad, there is less dialogue, less immediately dramatic incremental repetition,
and no refrain. Although the dramatic origin of the couplet ballad is
hypothetical, the hypothesis gains some credibility in the light of Bertha S. Phillpotts'
discussion of the original composition of the Eddic poems, and in the light
of the manner in which the component ballads of the Kalevala are known to have
been performed. Miss Phillpotts infers from the incremental repetition in the
dialogue of the Eddic poems that "this dependence on some already uttered phrase
must certainly go back to a tradition of improvisation," and that "it also seems to
imply a tradition of two or more speakers uttering alternate strophes."6 The style
of the British couplet ballads lends itself to the same inferences. In the following
lines, for instance, the fact that the repeated words occur in the dialogue of a
second speaker suggests both improvisation and dramatic performance:
It's whether will you be a rank robber's wife
Or will you die by my wee penknife?
It's I'll not be a rank robber's wife,
But I'd rather die by your wee penknife. (14)
O got ye this by sea or by land?
Or got ye it off a dead man's hand?
I got not it by sea, I got it by land,
And I got it, madam, out of your own hand. (17)
That ballads have actually been composed in a manner closely analogous is wellknown
from the Kalevala, in which the first singer composes a line and the second
sings a variant:
Many nights he spent in weeping,
Many weeks his tears were flowing.
Is not this greatly different from most of what we find in the seven-stress ballads?
Add to incremental repetition a chorus singing a refrain and thereby giving the
actor more time to arrange his response, and even the folk (who were probably not
the originators of our ballads) could have composed the responses. However, the
folk shared in the performance rather than the composition of these "librettos" by
chanting the refrain. When we note, further, that many of the couplet dialogues
are unintroHuced by narrative lines-Hart's "unassigned speeches"7-can there be
any doubt that these couplet ballads were actually produced in dramatic improvisation?
Detached from the dramatic situation, lacking the advantage of dialogue and
supporting chorus, the ballad made a new demand on the singer's improvising
ability and evolved a new form. First the refrain became variable, then narrative
lines developed-as did the prose-asides in the Edda-as stage directions to
compensate for the loss of actual mimesis, replacing the unassigned speeches which
now had to be assigned, since the characters who spoke them were no longer visible
performers. Instead of a slow, line-by-line improvisation of single situations,
strophic improvisation developed. Since the commonplaces are mainly strophic or
half-strophic (seven-stress or fourteen-stress), they probably developed after the
detachment as the chorus disappeared and the refrain line became part of the
strophe. This development may perhaps be traced in the fact that the last three
stresses of the seven-stress line often only qualify or amplify the idea of the line of
four stresses rather than contribute something new. Increasingly, the epic process
with its "entering wedge of narrative" creates a need for stock lines, and the
number of commonplaces increases to meet this need. Our hypothesis gains support
when we compare the quatrain ballads with the relatively few couplet ballads that
were somehow not part of the development and find germs of seven-stress commonplaces
present in couplet ballads, and find that the two ballad forms comprise two
different ways of telling a story.
It is immediately apparent that there must be fewer commonplaces in couplet
ballads because couplet ballads are usually more dependent upon situation and
dialogue and less narratively complex than quatrain ballads. Consequently, we do
not find the many narrative and synchronistic commonplaces omnipresent in the
later form. Moreover, since dialogue in the couplet ballad takes the form of
"unassigned speeches," the couplet ballad lacks the familiar "Then up and stood"
and "Then up and spake" of the quatrain form. Metrically, the couplet ballads
cannot have the variety of commonplaces in three, four, seven, and fourteen stresses
characteristic of the quatrain form. Consequently, there cannot be that combination
and variation of commonplaces so typical of the second halves of seven-stress and
fourteen-stress commonplaces in the quatrain form.
The lines compared in the following list suggest that the style of the couplet
ballad may be called an "adding" style, for it adds new narrative ideas in the second
rhyming four-stress line; the style of the quatrain ballad, on the other hand, may be
called a "qualifying" style, for it does not add new narrative ideas in the three-stress
line, but merely varies the sense of the four-stress line, thus perhaps giving the
singer a pause for composing his next verse in the same way as do the alternate
lines in the Kalevala. In other words, both styles add new narrative ideas in the
second four-stress line, the refrain of the couplet ballad yielding its function to the
three-stress lines of the quatrain ballad. Perhaps, as the quatrain ballad became
more firmly established, the pause given by the qualifying three-stress line became
less necessary and the three-stress line too began to add new narrative ideas.
The bride came tripping down the stair,
To see whaten a bold begger was there. 17C
Her mother she cam tripping down the stair,
Her steps they were fu slow. 52A, etc.
They hadna pu'ed a flower but ane,
When up started to them a banisht man. 15A
She hadna pu'd a flower, a flower,
A flower but only ane. 39E, etc.
He's tean the first sister by the hand,
And he's turned her round and made her stand. 14A (cf. 10)
He took her by the milk-white hand,
And by the grass-green sleeve. 39D, etc.
A second kind of development took place when both of the four-stress lines were
contracted to form a seven-stress commonplace, as when "What news, what news,
my puir auld man,/What news hae ye got to tell to me" (17) became "What news,
what news, my bonny boy, /What news bring ye to me?" At least one instance of
four four-stress lines contracting to fonn a fourteen-stress commonplace may be
noted:
When bells was rung and mass was sung,
And a' men unto bed was gane,
Gil Brenton and the bonny maid
Intill ae chamber they were laid. 5A
When mass was sung and bells was rung,
And all men bound for bed,
Then Lord Ingram and Lady Maisry,
In one bed they were laid. 66A, etc.
A few commonplaces apparently peculiar to the couplet ballads are: "ride softly on
etc." (5G, 11A), "courted the eldest with golden rings etc." (11D; cf 6A, 10B),
"first of them was clad in red etc." (11G, 20H), "0 is your saddle set awry etc."
(5B, 11B), "sent o'er the fame etc." (5, 6), "had no sooner these words said etc."
(2, 4), "Ye do ye to my father's stable etc." (4C, E, F, 9A,B,C, 15A).
Howsoever the development took place, the couplet and quatrain forms comprise
two different ways of telling a story. Although there are commonplaces in the
couplet form, there are fewer of them and they are used differently than in the
quatrain form; only in the quatrain form do they tend to group themselves in
thematic configurations. The reader can readily observe the difference by comparing
a typical couplet ballad (11, for instance) with a typical quatrain ballad
(65, for instance), or by comparing couplet and quatrain versions of the same
ballad (of No. 7, for instance, where it will be seen that narrative differences,
especially in conclusions, consist in the use of commonplaces in the quatrain
versions). Most of the quatrain ballads reflect the use of a complex and complete
system of commonplaces suitable for the presentation of a variety of narrative
elements (themes). The very number of commonplaces in quatrain ballads indicates
a long development, for, as Parry remarked, "the technique of formulas by
its complexity must be the work not of one man, but many, and of many years."8
II.
Because of their misconception as to the role played by memory in the oral
transmission of such a highly formal genre as the popular ballad, ballad scholars
have misunderstood the nature of oral tradition. We must set aside vague notions
of "communal recreation," and we must reconsider the ballad commonplace in the
light of the conclusions drawn by Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord from their
study of a living tradition of oral-epic singing in Yugoslavia. These men found
that, for the Yugoslavian epic-singer, "transmission is really a phase of composition":
9 the singer hands down not word-for-word songs for his successor to reproduce
according to the accuracy of his memory, but merely the broad outline of
a narrative and a stock of formulas and themes which enables improvisation. That
the singers of the English and Scottish popular ballads, at least until the middle
of the nineteenth century-Child's ballads were mostly collected by that timetransmitted
their ballads in the same way, and that without themes and commonplaces
there could be no oral tradition of the ballads as they appear in Child, I shall
demonstrate by discussing: 1) The Conclusions of Parry and Lord, 2) The Inadequacy
of the Sharp-Gerould Theory of Oral Tradition, 3) The Ballad Commonplace,
4) The Ballad Theme, 5) The Use of Theme and Commonplace in "Johnie
Scot."
1) In trying to account for the style of the Homeric poems, Milman Parry came to
realize that "such a language could be created only by a long tradition of oral
poetry."10 He made trips to Yugoslavia in 1933 and 1934 to study a flourishing
tradition of oral epic in order to obtain "evidence on the basis of which could be
drawn a series of generalities applicable to all oral poetries."11 On the second
trip he was accompanied by Albert B. Lord, who has carried on Parry's work in
"defining the characteristics of oral style"'2 since Parry's death in 1935. Parry and
Lord found that the transmission of oral epic is not a process of memorization.
No singer could memorize a song of six hundred or more lines after hearing it sung
only once and then sing his own version of it the next day, but the epic-singer can
do just this by learning the "plan" of the song and improvising his own version
with the aid of formulas and themes. The formula, defined by Parry as "a group
of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express
a given essential idea,"13 has been classified by Parry and Lord in various types, two
of which are the noun-adjective combination (e.g., "cow-eyed," "rosy-fingered
dawn," "silver-footed Thetis") and the whole line (e.g., "When appeared the
early-born rosy-fingered dawn," "And straightway he spoke winged words"). The
formula may be used or not used, but not varied. The theme, on the other hand,
which Professor Lord defines as "a recurrent element of narration or description,"
"a subject-unit, a group of ideas, regularly employed by a singer, not merely in any
given poem, but in the poetry as a whole,"14 may vary. "The themes," Professor
Lord continues, "function in building songs in much the same way in which the
formulas function in building lines. The formulaic content of a theme is variable,
depending on the wishes of the singer to lengthen or shorten his song."15
2) Before examining the use in the British ballads of conventions similar to the
formulas and themes of oral epic, the generally accepted Sharp-Gerould theory of
oral tradition and the usual view of the ballad commonplace must be reconsidered.
Rebelling against the mysticism of the "communalists," Sharp and Gerould fell
into a mysticism of their own: admitting that all oral ballad versions are equally
authentic, they conceived a vague process of "communal recreation" as accounting
for variation. Although Sharp rejects the proposition that "variants are merely
incorrect renderings of some original," he contradicts himself when he remarks
that "the folksong must have had a beginning and that beginning must have been
the work of an individual poet."16 Sharp's famous definition of oral tradition as
"the method... not merely... by which the folksong lives... but by which it
grows and by which it is created,"17 and his inference from variations that "in these
minute differences lie the germs of development,... the changes made by individual
singers are akin to the 'sports' in the flower or animal world, which, if
perpetuated, lead to further ideal development, and perhaps, ultimately, to the
birth of new varieties and species"18 reveal another misunderstanding. Thus Sharp
was correct in concluding that oral tradition is "the method... by which the folksong
lives," but mistaken in supposing that it evolves in accordance with some
mysterious inner law toward an "ideal."
When Gerould speaks of "communal recreation," he unfortunately goes on to
remark that "singers must have forgotten musical or verbal phrases, and filled the
gaps as best they could," and that "even Miss Bell Robertson... made some minor
changes in her texts without being conscious of it,"19 which suggests that the singer
learns his ballads by memorizing them. The "communal recreation" theory, in
spite of its protestations, cannot abandon the notion that ballad versions are
variant renderings of a specific text. Perhaps hundreds of years before the Child
ballads were collected, oral tradition began as memorization of specific texts, and
perhaps for a period of years variations resulted from lapses in memory-but little
of this has been true with regard to the ballad variants in the Child collection.
A more immediate explanation for the inadequacy of the Sharp-Gerould theory
is that it is based largely upon study of the American versions of Child ballads
recorded by Sharp and others in the Southern Appalachians when the tradition of
ballad-singing was at the last ditch, rather than when it was still flourishing, in
eighteenth and nineteenth century England and Scotland. In a dying tradition,
memorization must play a role far different from that which it plays in a thriving
tradition.
The romanticism of most ballad discussion (except for that of Gummere, who
realized that we must define the ballad by its structure) has led scholars to compare
versions with regard to their aesthetic worth, to dismiss from their attention
aesthetically ineffective use of conventional material, and hence to misconstrue the
significance of refrain, incremental repetition, and commonplace. Thus Gerould
thought incremental repetition was no more than part of "the always effective
rhetorical device of parallelism in phrase and idea,"20 described the commonplace
as "cheap and wornout doggerel,"21 and remarked that the "commonplaces...
seem to have been used by balladists with as little hesitancy as their boldest and
most striking lines."22 Horace P. Beck thought that "the white ballad, both here
and in Europe, makes liberal use of the ballad cliche to accentuate and add color
to the narrative."23 Albert B. Friedman, in a recent ballad anthology, begins
promisingly: "Perhaps the commonplaces are not completely explained by saying
that they are purposely used, in preference to richer language, in order to help us
keep our mind on the story"; but concludes disappointingly that "they have also
the positive value of contrasting with the eruptive vigor of the story line.'24 In sum,
ballad scholarship has viewed the ballad almost solely from the aesthetic standpoint
and not at all from that of the singer's need.
It was this approach, blinding Gerould to the function of the commonplace,
which constitutes the basic weakness in an otherwise admirably expressed description
of oral tradition. Thus, when Gerould speaks of "a time when a large number
of individuals were so thoroughly affected by a sound tradition of music and verse
that they could compose or adapt ballads,"25 we must make his words meaningful
by demonstrating that the tradition was founded upon composition by theme and
commonplace, in a manner closely analogous to that of Professor Lord's Yugoslavian
epic-singers.
3) Although stock lines and passages serve the same function in ballad and epic,
they are not quite the same in form, because the ballad is short and strophic
whereas the epic is long and stichic. We may define the commonplace as a stock
passage, a kind of formula marked by conventionalized subject-matter and phrasing,
a group of words-which may vary only slightly-comprising three, four, seven,
or fourteen stresses (usually seven or fourteen) used to express a given idea in at
least two different ballads. The use varies from twice to about forty times and
averages about five times. Whereas Kittredge included only thirty-six commonplaces
in his index (V, ESPB), my own rough index lists about one hundred and
fifty.
The way in which the commonplaces, once mastered by a singer, freed him from
the restrictions of memorization and enabled him to compose rather than merely
transmit, may be illustrated by the variation and adaptability of four fourteen-stress
commonplaces used 1) to present the night visit, 2) to link the events of the day to
those of the night, 3) to present the reception of a messenger, and 4) to describe
a look over the castle-wall. The lover's night-visit is nearly always presented in
some variation of:
He is on to Annie's bower-door,
And tirled at the pin:
'O sleep ye, wake ye, my love Annie, 70, 71, 216
Ye'll rise, lat me come in.' 249, 255, 303
Both halves of this fourteen-stress commonplace are seven-stress commonplaces in
their own right and may be used independently of each other with other seven-stress
lines to form other fourteen-stress commonplaces:
When he came to Lady Margaret's bower,
He knocked at the ring,
And who were so ready as her brethren
To rise and let him in. 74B, 73L
Or with the second half:
'O sleep ye, wake ye, Lady Margaret,
Or are ye the bower within?'
'O who is that at my bower door,
Sae weel my name does ken?' 69F, etc.
Further variation is possible, for the "Sleep ye, wake ye" half of the fourteen-stress
commonplace may combine with other lines, and also it may be replaced by the
similar commonplace "Open, open.../Open and let me in." One of the most
familiar fourteen-stress commonplaces is the synchronistic:
When bells was rung and mass was sung,
And all men bound for bed,
Lord Thomas and his new-come bride 62A, 66A, 89A,
To their chamber they were gaed. 196A, 223, 231A, 262
To present different situations, the singer could combine the first seven-stress
commonplace with non-commonplace lines:
The came the spirit of Fair Margaret, 74A (cf 77B, 97B, 269)
And stood at William's feet.
When every lady got hame her son,
The Lady Maisry got none. 155A
In view of the frequent need to send messages, a commonplace to describe the
reception of a messenger was essential to the singer. Usually the singer used a
fourteen-stress commonplace created by combining variant lines with the sevenstress
commonplace:
'What news, what news, my bonny boy,
What news have ye to me?' 87B, etc.
The person delivering the message, of course, need not be the usual "bonny boy,"
but may also be the lover, the lover disguised as beggar or palmer, or almost anyone.
He may be greeted with "What tydinges?" instead of "What news?," and the
three-stress line may be replaced by "And from what country come ye?" The
commonplace was exceptionally versatile, for the rest of the stanza could be filled
out, according to the singer's wish to contract or expand, with a more specific
question, as in "Is Earl Robert in very good health, /And the ladies of yor countrie?"
(87B), or abbreviated with the messenger's immediate response as in "I am come
to ask you to my wedding,/ And that is bad news to theel" (73D, cf 157G, 251).
As a fourth and final example of variation in the fourteen-stress commonplace,
consider the look over the castle-wall which can disclose a variety of happenings:
The queen lukit owre the castle-wa,
Beheld baith dale and down,
And ther she saw Young Waters 26, 94, 221
Cum riding to the town. 252, 257, 262
This commonplace (which is close to the look over the shoulder in such ballads
as "The Douglas Tragedy") is varied to beautiful effect in "The Bonny Earl of
Murray" (181):
Lang will his lady
Look ower the castle down,
Ere she see the Earl of Murray
Come soundin through the town.
Like the fourteen-stress commonplace, the seven-stress commonplace manifests
great variability and adaptability in splitting to combine with other lines. A typical
seven-stress commonplace, the ballad curse, may split into four-stress and threestress
commonplaces which can then combine with other three-stress or four-stress
lines. Thus, the last three stresses of the seven-stress commonplace
'O wae betide you, ill woman, 63C, 69F, 70A, 76A, 114D,
And an ill death may you diel' 192A, 204A, 237,249, etc.
may be used separately:
Her father's kitch-boy heard that,
An ill death may he die! 65A, 175
Or the first four stresses may be used separately:
Wae be to thee, Huntly,
And wherefore did ye sae... 181
If we define the general situation as the theme of angry words, we may note that the
ballad-singer has yet another seven-stress commonplace to present it:
'O hold your tongue, my daughter Mary,
Let a' your folly be.' 42A, 47A, 91C, etc.
And this seven-stress commonplace also may become a four-stress commonplace:
'0 haud your tongue, my gay lady,
Take nae sic care o' me.' 42A, 47A, 91C, etc.
Or it may combine with a three-stress commonplace from the ballad curse:
'Haud your tongue, ye auld-faced knight,
Some ill death may ye die.' 39A
Still another seven-stress commonplace may present the angry-words theme:
'Ye lee, ye lee, ye ill woman, 63A, 58G, 71,
Sae loud as I hear ye lee.' 82, 86, 161
The adaptability of the seven-stress commonplace could be further illustrated by
examination of the ways in which singers have varied the last three stresses of such
seven-stress commonplaces as "Lady Margaret sits in her bower-door,/ Sewing her
silken seam," "She turned her right and round about,/ And the comb fell from her
hand," "Where will I get a bonny boy/ Would fain win hose and shoon?," "When
he came before the King,/ He fell down on his knee," etc.
The commonplaces examined in these pages represent only a sampling of the
stock lines that, in Alexander Keith's words, "cast their tangles and tendrils across
the path of every explorer of tradition who seeks to discover the true and original
forms of the ballads."26 That commonplaces belonged not to the ballads but to the
singers is suggested by the fact that they are not always used in all versions of the
same ballad or in similar situations in other ballads. They were not so much a part
of "the integral mechanism of the ballad"27 as they were a part of the basic method
of the singer. They were not lines which singers reproduced inexactly because of
faulty memory, but lines which they intentionally varied. Like the epic formulas,
they enabled the singer to improvise a song by filling in a story outline. As Keith
and others have implied, it is probably vain to search for the original forms of the
ballads, because, in a sense, there are no original forms: Ballads are a way of singing
dramatic stories, a way which could not exist without the commonplace. Transmission
and composition must have been identical (as Lord demonstrated with
regard to oral epic) when the ballad tradition was thriving.
The aesthetic significance of the commonplaces is that they freed the singer from
memorization. Variation in the use of commonplaces rarely affects the story, but
sometimes decides the excellence of a given version by affecting its whole tone.
Dependence upon the commonplace also seems at least partly responsible for some
of the ballad's essential characteristics, such as "leaping and lingering."
4) Although there is a basic similarity in the use of theme and formula by balladsingers
and epic-singers-both proceed by units, using what Parry called unperiodic
enjambment and Josephine Miles calls clausal structure,28 rather than by running
thought on from line to line-there is also an important difference resulting from
the fact that the epic is stichic whereas the ballad is strophic. That is, since the epic
is unrhymed, the epic-singer can develop his theme by adding line to line so long
as his stock of formulas and his improvising ability hold out, but the ballad-singer
can only add strophe after strophe. There are, for instance, five commonplaces
appropriate to the verbal-message theme, and the ballad-singer may use two of
them or all of them-but after using them he must go on to a new narrative idea
in a new strophe. This is partly responsible for the ballad's leaping and lingering.
Nevertheless, the ballad-singer does within well-defined strophic limits what the
epic-singer may do with no limits: he proceeds by amplification. Thus,
He hadna sailed a league upon the sea,
A league but barely ane.
is akin to the epic-singer's style in the Kalevala whereby one singer states the idea
and the second singer amplifies it:
I am driven by my longing,
And my understanding urges,
That I shall commence my singing,
And begin my recitation.
Still, while the epic-singer-especially if he sings without a partner-might keep
elaborating, the ballad-singer must go on to a new narrative idea once he has
completed his strophe, unless he chooses to expand by repeating as narrative what
he has already presented in dialogue, as, for instance, in:
"0 brither dear, take me on your back..."
He took him upon his back...
Whereas the commonplace may be used in a variety of situations, has no necessary
effect upon the story, may form part of a configuration, cannot be expanded,
and may have synonyms, the ballad theme comprises a specific situation, may
comprise a configuration of commonplaces, and may be expanded through repetition
in narrative of what has already been presented in dialogue or by the use of
supernumerary commonplaces. Theme and commonplace may be identical if a
given passage comprises a single and unique situation which is always presented by
the same words. We may distinguish further two kinds of themes: the synchronistic
theme connecting parts of a narrative (e.g., the message, bower-visit, procession,
arrival, departure, abduction, birth), and the terminal theme ending a ballad
(e.g., vow of austerities, legacy, burial, return of ghost). The wide variation in the
handling of themes-as in the handling of commonplaces-implies the singer's
selectiveness rather than his memorization.
The theme of the "lady's vow of austerities" is, as Child notes, "a satisfactory
termination to the tragedy" of "Clerk Saunders," but it is not the exclusive property
of any particular ballad, for it is rather part of the ballad-singer's art, and, as Child
notes, is also used (with varying effectiveness) to end 72, 81L, 92, 204E, 242, 262.
The legacy theme, never quite as adventitious as the vow of austerities, is an
integral part of 11, 12, 13, but is sufficiently independent for a singer to use it to
conclude 491.
The evasive-answers theme comprised the whole structure of 12 and 13, but
served well as a means of expanding 16, 49, 51, 52.
The theme of the ghost returning to its mother comprised a whole ballad, 79,
but its several stanzas increase the effectiveness of 72. In another form, the revenant
theme comprised nearly the whole of 78, but was also used appropriately to end
49B and 69.
The theme, essential to the endings of ballads of tragic love, of the lover's suicide
or death from grief upon his discovery of his sweetheart's death, employs a varied
configuration of commonplaces. Although the handling of this theme varies greatly
from ballad to ballad and from version to version, we may perhaps observe a typical
pattern which includes the death of the lady, the lover's arrival at her bier, his
words, his death, and the burial of both lovers. This sequence is most fully preserved
in 73, 74, 75, 76, but many of the commonplaces used here are also used independently
or in configurations in numerous other ballads such as 7, 64, 67, 84, 87, 88,
222. The commonplaces typically present the following configuration: "Now the
first town that he came to" (73E, 76B, C, 811, cf 87, 96A, 110F, 218), "Set down, set
down this comely corpse" (751, 76B,C, cf 25, 85, 96), "It's I will kiss your bonny
cheek" (73E,F, 74, 83D, 222, V, 262), "And first he kissed her bonny cheek" (751,
76A,B,C,E; cf 239), "Gar deal, gar deal, for my lov's sake" (73E, F, G, I, 74A,
75C,G, 76A, 88E, 64C, 222), "Make my bed, lady mother, he says" (7B; cf 42), "And
he has taen his little penknife" (64H, 73A,B,E, 76B), "He set the hilt against the
ground" (67T, 73D, 81G, J), "Sweet William he died in the middle o the night"
(7D, 74A, 75A), "Lord William was buried in St. Mary's kirk" and "The twa they
met, and the twa they plat" (passim), "But bye and rade the Black Douglas" (7B;
cf. 74A, 85). Often this theme is preceded by three other commonplaces: "I dreamed
a dreary dream last night," "Go saddle me the black, the black," and "When he
came to Lady Margaret's bower." This general configuration was sometimes rejected
in favor of another configuration, used in an only slightly different situation,
which presents the bereaved lover as going mad or making the "vow of austerities."
In the night-visit theme, according to Baskervill, "the most consistent element
... is a dialogue of two stanzas, the first containing the lover's plea to be admitted
and his complaint of the weather, the second containing the girl's warning of the
presence of her parents and her conventional refusal to let him in."29 To these two
commonplace stanzas, we may add at least two more: "0 will ye to the cards?" and
"They hadna kissed and love-clapped." Parts of the first two stanzas are used in
many ballad themes other than that of the night-visit. Although the night-visit is
most essential to 69, 70, 71, 248, 249, and 255, some of its customary commonplaces
are also used in other ballads in which the lover does not gain admittance (76, 86,
216), in related situations in which a knight appears outside his mother's bower
and asks her to care for his lady (7) or for his newly-born son (64A, 264), or in
trysting (90), or in the revenant's request for release from his troth-plight (77),
in border-rescue ballads (186, 187, 188), or in a variety of other situations (80, 81,
165).
5) An examination of any of the twenty versions30 of "Johnie Scot" (99)-
especially A or D, for they are the fullest--discloses that in its approximately thirty
stanzas there is scarcely a unique line, for the ballad is composed almost entirely of
seven-stress and fourteen-stress commonplaces, especially in its central section
which contains the verbal-message theme comprising nearly a third of the ballad.
The variation in incremental repetition, theme, and commonplace implies that
the singers were not simply transmitting memorized ballads but were consciously
composing their own versions, and that they could have done so even if they had
never heard the ballad sung before: all they needed to know was the story outline,
that a man rescued his pregnant sweetheart from imprisonment by defeating her
irate father's champion in single combat. Like the singers of oral-epic, the balladsingers
filled in the story outline by selecting from their traditional store of commonplaces
and themes, and by using incremental repetition when they wanted to
lengthen their versions. Variation resulted largely from conscious improvisation
rather than from faulty memorization.
For convenience the ballad may be divided into three main parts, each of which
may be further divided into themes and commonplaces: 1) Johnie's Love-affair and
Its Consequences: theme a) Hero's Foreign-service, theme b) Father's Discovery of
Daughter's Pregnancy, theme c) Father's Imprisonment of Daughter; 2) Preparation
for the Rescue: a) Daughter's Written-Message, b) Johnie's Return Verbal-
Message;31 3) The Rescue: a) Departure, b) Approach, c) Arrival. Although our
discussion will examine in detail only Part 2, Parts 1 and 3 could be examined in
the same way.
Since "Johnie Scot" is essentially the story of a rescue which requires only that
Johnie get word of his sweetheart's imprisonment, only one message need be sentfrom
the girl to Johnie-as in versions C, F, G, I, K, L, M, Q, T. It is equally
appropriate, however, for two messages to be sent-from Johnie asking the girl to
join him, and from the girl saying that she cannot-as in versions A, B, D, E, H, J,
N. In the two-message versions, the singers used two distinct themes, the verbalmessage
("Where will I get a bonny boy?") from Johnie, and the written-message
("Then she has written a braid letter") from the girl. While it would be futile to
try to establish that the "original" ballad used either one or two messages, the
hypothesis that ballad versions are unique improvisations clearly accounts for
variation: each singer rendered the story outline to his taste.
Within the two-message versions, variation consisted largely in the use of more
or less repetition and in the varying selection of from one to five commonplaces in
presenting the verbal-message theme. In the one-message versions, it consisted in
the placing of some stanzas between commonplace stanzas usually found one after
the other (I), in having the lady's father rather than the lady send the message
(G, L) probably because the written-message theme usually begins "THE KING
has written" in combining some of the commonplaces belonging to each theme
(Q), in having the lady send a verbal-message instead of a written-message (M, T)-
probably because the singer wished to lengthen his version by using a theme usually
presented in five commonplaces rather than one presented in only two commonplaces.
It is noteworthy that in all of the versions (except A, N), so strong was the
compulsion to use the "Where will I get a bonny boy" commonplace, that the
singer leaped from the imprisonment to the verbal-message theme without even
stating that Johnie had left the English court.
The fullest and (perhaps) most typical presentation of the verbal-message theme
(which comprises the calling, appearance, instruction, journey, and delivery of
the messenger) is that used in version N, comprising ten stanzas (stanzas 7-16) in
which four distinct commonplaces are rendered in both dialogue and narrative
(7 and 8, 9 and 13, 10 and 14, 11 and 15), and one commonplace expanded by
incremental repetition into two stanzas is rendered both in dialogue and in narrative
(11-12 and 15-16). The four commonplaces used here are also used in
numerous other ballads. Thus, stanzas 7 and 8 ("Where will I get a bonny boy?"
and "0 here am I, a bonny boy") are found also in 58, 65, 66, 72C, 73, 83F, 87, 91B,
96D, 209, 222, 229, 251; stanzas 9 and 13 are found in 65, 72C, 81C, D, F, 83F, 91B,
222, 251; stanzas 10 and 14 are found in 76, 161C; and stanzas 11 and 15 are found
in 83, 90B, 209D. Here then are four commonplaces expanded by repetition into
ten stanzas and thus making nearly a third of the ballad completely traditionall
The singers of the other versions sent the same message in eight stanzas (H,
omitting the "broken brigs" commonplace); in seven stanzas (A, rendering stanzas
9, 10, 11, and 12 only as narrative, and adding a superfluous "0 up it starts a bonny
boy" commonplace); in five stanzas (S, omitting stanza 8, using a variant of stanza
7, and using stanzas 10, 12, 14, and 16); in four stanzas (R, using stanzas 7, 11, and
15 and interpolating the "What news" commonplace before the boy delivers his
message). Version B used four stanzas, stanzas 8 and 10 in roughly the same way
as in N, but stanzas 7 and 16 in variation.
Version D used four stanzas differently than N:
O Johnie's called his waiting man,
His name was Germanie:
'O thou must to fair England go,
Bring me that fair ladie.'
He rode till he came to Earl Percy's gate,
He tirled at the pin;
'O who is there?' said the proud porter,
'But I daurna let thee in.'
So he rode up and he rode down,
Till he rode it round about,
Then he saw her at a wee window,
Where she was looking out.
'O thou must go to Johnnie Scot,
Unto the woods so green,
In token of thy silken shirt,
Thine own hand sewed the seam.'
Version E used only two stanzas:
'O do you see yon castle, boy,
It's walled round about;
There you will spye a fair ladye,
In the window looking out.'
'Here is a silken sark, lady,
Thine own hand sewed the sleeve,
And thou must go to yon green wood
To Johnie, thy true-love.'
Finally, and perhaps not least effectively, Version J used only a stanza and a half:
(The lady was laid in cold prison,
By the king, a grievous man;)
And up and starts a little boy,
Upon her window stane.
Says, 'Here's a silken shift, ladye,
Your own hand sewed the sleeve,
And ye maun gang to yon green-wood,
And of your friends speir na leave.'
One notes, then, that the verbal-message theme was presented in from one and
one-half to ten stanzas, and that expansion occurred when a singer used incremental
repetition, contraction when he used no incremental repetition, and variation
when he used different commonplaces.
In the light of our discussion of "Johnie Scot" we know that when Horace Beck says of the ballad, "Remove the cliche and one still has a narrative,"[32] he is distinctly wrong. Remove the commonplaces from "Johnie Scot"-or from many of the other quatrain ballads-and there is nothing left! Clearly the role of memory in transmitting the ballads of Child's collection was much less important than most ballad students have assumed, for whereas ballads collected from a tradition in
which ballads are memorized-the tradition apparently presented by the ballads
contained in American collections-are likely to be obscure and confused, the
versions of "Johnie Scot" are neither, only more or less full. One need only compare
American with British versions of a given ballad ("Lord Randall," for instance)
to discover the difference. The common assumption that the singer used commonplaces
to fill gaps occasioned by poor memory may hold for the American tradition,
but in the older British tradition the reverse seems true: memory filled gaps for
which the singer had no commonplace.
The analysis has nevertheless probably only scratched the surface of the balladsinger's
art, for it seems likely that the tradition of composition by theme and
commonplace not only freed the singer from dependence upon his memory, but
also freed him from dependence upon ready-made commonplaces and enabled him
to improvise new commonplace-like lines. This may be illustrated by the lines
used by the singer of version Q to describe Johnie's determination to rescue his
sweetheart no matter what the danger:
But Johny turned him round about,
I wat with muckle pride,
'But I will gae to London town,
Whetever me betide.'
Here, Johnie's words "Whatever me betide" suggest that the singer purposely
varied the commonplace "Betide me life, betide me death," and combined it with
the commonplace "turned him round about" (which is so appropriate here) to
create a stanza which feels like a fourteen-stress commonplace but is not. Evidently
the singer was so thoroughly grounded in the tradition of composition by commonplace
that he was able to achieve originality by improvising. This special ability
probably results from the effect of the ballad's regular rhythm upon the singer's
thinking, a regularity so pervasive that it enabled him to keep singing even if he
forgot or ran out of ready-made lines. If one reads the Kalevala aloud for a few
minutes, he will be able to put the book down and continue the narrative, provided
he has some kind of outline in mind, by improvising in the same meter. Charles
W. Stork remarked that Coleridge succeeded best in narrative poetry when he used
the ballad stanza, because the ballad stanza insisted upon progression and allowed
for no lapses in poetic imagination.33 Albert Lord has demonstrated that
"making new metrical expressions patterned on the old is... a part of the oral
technique." "The oral singer," Lord continues, "thinks in terms of these formulas
and formula patterns."34 Lord also found that some of the Yugoslav singers
tended to converse in epic meter after finishing a long song. Poets have often found
that a particular rhythm may become so compulsive that they must set exercises
for themselves in other meters in order to escape it. These remarks are given not
primarily as a contribution to the study of formulaic thought in the ballad, but
primarily to give pause to those who would conclude that lines in the ballads
which cannot definitely be called commonplaces must therefore be memorized.
NOTES
1Gordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford, 1932), p. 126, in spite of the fact that
he thought that we "are dealing with what has become a single type," pointed out that the sevenstress
couplet is "the commonest metrical form of our ballads," and that we have 179 ballads in
this form and only 39 ballads in four-stress couplets.
2 Sigurd B. Hustvedt, Ballad Books and Ballad Men (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), p. 15. Francis B.
Gummere, The Popular Ballad (Boston, 1907), p. 60, remarked that Usener had found the fourbeat
to be "the prevailing measure for early popular poetry everywhere." Gerould noted (p. 121)
that the "four-beat couplet with the ballad lilt was used as early as the twelfth century, and
presumably in the eleventh," and that "there was a double tradition of ballad singing down to the
end of the sixteenth century at least," in which either a leader sang narrative while a chorus
chanted refrain or a "blind crowder" sang alone. Nevertheless, Gerould refused to concede that the
four-beat couplet was the older form.
3Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge, eds., The English and Scottish Popular
Ballads (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), p. xxi. See also Gummere, passim.
4 "Studies in the English Ballad Refrain," unpubl. Harvard dissertation (1897), p. 58A.
6 Ibid.
6 The Elder Edda and the Ancient Scandinavian Drama (Cambridge, 1920), p. 98. Perhaps, in
the four-stress ballads, it is a case of lines rather than strophes.
7 Walter M. Hart, Ballad and Epic (Boston, 1907), passim.
8 Milman Parry, quoted in Albert Bates Lord, Serbocroatian Heroic Songs (Cambridge, Mass.,
1954), I, 4.
Ibid., I, 140. See also Lord's The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
N Lord, Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, pp. 3-4.
"Parry, quoted by Lord, p. 4.
2 Parry, quoted by Lord, p. 4.
13 Parry, quoted by Lord, "Composition by 'Theime il Homer and Southslavic Epos," 'Transactions
of the Amterican Philological Association, LXXXII (1951), 71.
' "Narrative Inconsistencies in Homer and Oral Poetry," Transactions of the American Philological
Association, LXIX (1938), 440. Francis P. Magoun, Jr. has utilized the Parry-Lord thesis to
demonstrate the oral-improvised background of Anglo-Saxon poetry. See his "Oral-Formulaic
Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry," Speculum, XXVIII (1953), 446-68, and his "Bede's
Story of Caedman: The Case-History of an Anglo-Saxon Oral Singer," Speculum, XXX (1955),
49-63. See also James Ross, "Formulaic Composition in Gaelic Oral Poetry," Modern Philology,
LXII (1959), 1-13.
16"Homer's Originality: Oral Dictated Texts," Transactions of the American Philological
Association, LXXXIV (1953), 127.
16 Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs: Some Conclusions (London, 1907), p. 10.
17 Ibid.
8 English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (Oxford, 1932), I, xxviii.
19 Op. cit., p. 164 (my italics). Arthur K. Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Cambridge,
Mass., 1929), p. 36, notes that "probably most ballad singers... would regard the slightest variation
in words or tune as hardly short of a crime."
20
Op. cit., p. 107.
21 Op. cit., pp. 114-15.
22 Ibid. (my italics).
23"Ballads," Midwest Folklore, VI (1956), 54 (my italics).
24 The Viking Book of Folk Ballads (New York, 1956), p. xv.
2Op. cit., p. 185.
26 Introduction to Gavin Greig's Last Leaves of Traditional Ballads (Aberdeen, 1925), p. xxxvi.
27As William Motherwell had termed them in his Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern (Glasgow,
1827).
28See "Eras of English Poetry," PMLA, LXX (1955), 853-75.
29 Charles Read Baskervill, "English Songs on the Night Visit," PMLA, XXXVI (1921), 611.
30 Only four other ballads have twenty or more versions in the ESPB: 10 has twenty-seven, 12 has
twenty-five, 173 has twenty-eight, and 155 has twenty-one.
31 The verbal-message theme (perhaps the most useful of all ballad themes) is used in at least
nineteen other ballads, in some versions as alternate to the written-message theme and in others in
combination with commonplaces belonging to the written-message theme. See especially 65, 66, 96,
221, 222, 240 where the situation is much the same as in 99; see also 72, 73, 751, 81, 83, 87, 90, 91,
209, 229, 251, 253, 254 where the situation is different but the theme is handled in the same
manner as in 99, with more or fewer commonplaces and more or less incremental repetition. It
seems likely that if we had more traditional versions of 59, 66, 166, 175, 177, we would find the
theme used in the same way as in the other ballads. Note especially how the A version of 90 uses
the thematic configuration, while the B version uses only the "word is gone" commonplace, and
how the A version of 209 uses the written-message theme, the I version the verbal-message theme,
and the other versions combinations.
32 "Ballads," Midwest Folklore, VI (1956), 54.
33 "The Influence of the Popular Ballad on Wordsworth and Coleridge," PMLA, XXIX (1914),
320.
84 The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 130