The American Variants of "Earl Brand," Child No. 7
by Doris C. Powers
Western Folklore, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Apr., 1958), pp. 77-96
[Edited once; footnotes at end.]
The American Variants of "Earl Brand," Child No. 7
DORIS C. POWERS
"EARL BRAND," like so many of the English and Scottish popular ballads, has had a fairly vigorous history in the United States and adjoining provinces of eastern Canada. Some forty texts are utilized in this study,[1] gathered mainly in the Northeast, in the Shenandoah Valley, and in the southern Appalachians. The western boundaries of their distribution are marked by single texts from Indiana, Kentucky, and Missouri; the southern by one from Florida.[2]
This ballad lends itself readily to study since its history here has developed from quite simple beginnings: of the two British types of telling represented in the Child collection, only one was introduced into this country. Of that type, then, there have been produced a relatively large number of variants, in an interesting pattern of distribution. The findings of the study are of a double nature. As has been the case with other ballads sung here, some of the texts of this ballad embody material that has disappeared from the group of parallel variants in the British tradition. With this material, several missing links are provided in the history of "Earl Brand." A finding of wider interest concerns the working of oral tradition at large. A close comparison of texts from the three areas mentioned above as major sources of variants reveals a number of specific ways in which the telling varies radically from region to region-ways that clearly demonstrate the close relation between the literary complex that is a variant and the particular geographical/cultural complex that is its matrix.
As to the configuration of a regional pattern, for example, it develops as a consequence of the modification by singers of several (but not all) of the components of the ballad text. Of those components-structure, content, and phraseology-the structure seems far less subject to alteration than do the other two, not only perhaps because alteration in this area would involve major acts of re-casting, but also because it appears to be, so to speak, culturally neutral. It is upon items of content and phraseology that the effects of cultural pressures show; to these pressures may be attributed both the preservation in the Northeast of the civil manners, the sentimentality, and the 'high style' of the parallel British texts-and in the southern Appalachians, the transformation of these features that has brought them into conformity with the attitudes of a society as primitive in its manners as in its understanding of natural phenomena.
But once the statement of the tale in local terms has been accomplished, the tendency to preserve the telling-i.e., to sing it in much the same way each time-is just as strong as was the pressure to re-state it. Variations continue to occur, to be sure; they are, however, generally of a type that is in harmony with the pervading view of life (or of ballad art) which controls the telling. They usually amount, in other words, to what might be termed synonymous substitutions. That section of this study, though, has focussed primarily upon the phenomena of text acculturation, and the following is an attempt to separate the several factors which seem to be involved here in those processes of oral transmission.
* * * *
The American variants of "Earl Brand" derive, as has been said, from one of the two British lines of development in this ballad. One of these, represented by Child texts A, G, and H, tells the traditional tale insofar as it treats of the elopement of a pair of lovers (Unit 1); their encounter with an informer who tells the girl's father of their departure (Unit 2); the father's pursuit and the battle (Unit 3); their ride onward and pause by a streamside (Unit 4); and their deaths later that night at his mother's hall (Unit 5). But it shows certain unique narrative features, and a prosodic pattern, that have no counterparts in this country; a murderer, for example, has been substituted for dead-naming as cause of the lover's death, and the telling is cast in couplets. Therefore, we shall not be concerned with it further.
The British line in which we are interested is represented by Child texts B, C, D, E, and I (to which may be added a group of five variants in the same developmental tradition collected by Gavin Greig).[3] The texts of this group are also of a uniform narrative type-in quatrains-which is represented by variants in two relatively stable patterns: one simply a curtailment of the other. The first, omitting Unit 1 and most of Unit 2, opens with the rousing of the girl's father, and the other, worn away even more, opens with the lover's command to the girl, in Unit 3, to dismount and hold his horse while he fights their pursuers. As to the nature of the remaining action, all these texts are regrettably sparse in the details of the battle; however, the surrounding incidents and notably the girl's cry to the lover by name during the battle indicate that tellings of this group descend from a form of the tale whose tragic climax was the dead-naming. And finally, again unlike texts AGH, they show many marks of a refined artistry in their composition. Their manners are those of bower and hall: the lover is courtly, the girl torn between romantic love and filial duty, their deaths are elaborately managed, and so on-and the level of diction is appropriate to the level in society at which these principals move.
The place of Child F, a British text that has not been mentioned up to this point, is not capable of precise definition. However, as a possible literary antecedent of the whole group comprising the British texts BCDEI, and the Greig, and the American variants, it is highly important to this study. Although a fragment preserved in garbled form, its eleven stanzas re-arranged in the following order suggest the relation it probably had to the other tellings:
Unit 1
[Lover has come to the girl's hall.]
Stanzas 1 and 2: They discuss the dangers of the elopement that arise from her father's hatred of the lover.
Unit 2
[Lover and girl have ridden away from the hall and encountered the informer, who has challenged them and then ridden back to report the elopement.]
Stanza 7: Lover is about to look around and see the father and band of armed men in pursuit of them.
Unit 3
[Father and armed men arrive at the battle site.]
Stanzas 8 and 9: Father demands the return of his daughter, casting aspersions on the lover's lineage. Lover defends his noble birth and attacks the father in kind.
[Neither side having yielded, the battle will take place.]
Stanzas 10 and 11: Lover has girl dismount and hold his horse.
[The battle is over.]
Stanzas 3 to 6: Lover and girl converse, and then ride on.
From this description of the relevant characteristics of the British texts, we may move on now to suggest some of their possible developmental relationships. In this we shall be aided greatly by material in the American tradition. As has been remarked earlier, in this country there have been preserved full accounts of which the curtailed texts-the BCDEI/Greig group-represent the only British remains of this type of telling. That is to say, texts have been found here in the BCDEI/Greig style of telling which include action antecedent to that with which the British texts of this line open.
The fullest text is one recorded in Florida.[4] It is greatly deteriorated, with some gaps, but with the elopement described and with the character of the informer clearly there and in its place. In this telling the lover comes on a May morning to the girl's hall and they ride away together (st. 1-4). Stanza 5 abruptly introduces an unreferred "he," who is certainly the informer; "he" rides to the father's hall with the message that the daughter is being carried away. The father then rouses her brothers with the cry common to the opening of the majority of the British and many of the American texts:
O rise you up, you seven sons [st. 6]
Stanza 7 records the dialogue between lover and girl at the battle site, in which he tells her to get down and hold his horse. The battle scene itself does not appear in this text; stanza 8 finds lover and girl remounting to ride away. Stanza 9 appears to be both displaced and confused. It tells how the lover looks back (this is usually related to the discovery that the couple are being pursued) and sees father and brothers "all wallowing in their blood." This latter bit of action, in "normal" texts, takes place during the battle and becomes the reason the girl calls out to the lover to stop the slaughter. No conversation occurs, and stanza 10, the final one, records their arrival at his mother's hall where later both he and the girl die. Six more texts appear to be reduced versions of this full telling; several have the May morning setting, and all have the lover's ride to the girl's hall and their properly unobserved departure together.[5] From them, though, the stanzas which treat of the informer have fallen away.
With the help of these tellings, then, the formation of the first curtailed version of the text can be traced. The rhymes of the stanza in the full telling which describes the arrival of the lover at the girl's hall are of the ring/within cluster, and those which describe the informer's arrival later are of the say/ away group. Either through gradual loss by attrition, or in one stroke through the parallels in phraseology of the two "arrival" sequences, all the narrative material antecedent to the arrival of the informer was lost. When his rousing call then became the opening, we might expect to find the say/away rhymes which we do, preserved in British text D, in three texts from northeastern New England, and throughout the southern Appalachian group.[6] The informer, of course, has been metamorphosed variously into father, mother, or most commonly, the lover himself.
The second contribution of the American texts to an understanding of the British tradition lies in the links some of them seem to supply between texts of the BCDEI/Greig group and British text F. It is in the group of texts gathered in the southern Appalachians and in the more southern states that one may see the clearest connections with the British fragment.[7] A complex of verbal echoes includes the down/town rhymes of Text F, st. 3, 7, and 8 as well as the related expression a mile out of town in st. 3 and 7. (This latter, it will be objected, is a ballad commonplace, but I hope to persuade later that the commonplace is not so vagrant as it has been thought to be.) In other of the British and American texts there are entirely different formulae and rhymes. Another expression of Text F, the term play:
Whilest I and your father and your brether
Do play vs at this crosse [F, st. 10]
occurs in the parallel stanza of many of these texts. And, finally, it is possible that Ell in F's title has been influential in the choice of the girl's name, Ellen or Ellender. These are common names, to be sure, but in the other British and American texts, Margaret is the one usually encountered.
Besides these several verbal correspondences, this group shows a relation to F in certain major items of its narrative content. The flyting scene, which regularly appears in most of the North Carolina texts as part of the first meeting between lover and father, is certainly one of these. The scene has been shifted from the battle site to the girl's hall, but the substance of the father's objection (the low birth of the lover) and the lover's defense (his declaration that he is of high birth), as well as the very vocabulary and rhymes of F occur here. Compare F:
Her father was readye with her seven brether
He said, Sett thou my daughter downe;
For it ill beseemes the, thou false churles sonne,
To carry her forth of this towne. [st. 8]
and Text III:2-b from North Carolina:
O rise you up, you seven bretherens,
And bring your sister down;
It never shall be said that a steward's son
Had taken her out of town. [st. 1]
To relate the second narrative item of the southern texts under discussion to F requires that a feature which is found in the American texts be hypothesized for a complete version of F: it is the residual remains in the American texts of what appears to have been an injunction against deadnaming. An interesting parallel to the stanza with which F breaks off:
But light now downe, my owne true love,
And meeklye hold my steede ... [st. 11]
may be found in "Erlinton," Child 8:
O sit ye down, my dearest dearie,
Sit down and hold my noble steed... [B, st. 14]
The third line which supplies, F, st. 11, may very well have supplanted, in an act of forgetfulness, such a passage as completes the "Erlinton" stanza:
And see that ye never change your cheer
Until ye see my body bleed. [B, st. 14]
It appears to be wrongly remembered in F, and characteristically with such slips the singer broke down; he could not finish the stanza.
If the dead-naming was once a part of F, we can then understand the stress on the girl's silence which is a unique feature of the related stanzas in the American group. Some characteristic handlings of this detail are as follows:
Fair Ellen she still stood there
And never changed a word
Till she saw her own dear seven brothers all
A-wallowing in their own blood. [III:2-a, st. 7]
and:
She got down and never spoke,
Nor never cheeped
Till she saw her own father's head
Come trinkling by her feet. [III:2-c, st. 5]
Third, the post-battle conversation in this group includes a variation upon the wish as it is expressed in F. In F, the lover wishes himself away from the site, and in these American variants he expresses the wish in the following ways (note the assonance with F's from/to, st. 4, in the first example:
Are you offended at what I have done,
Or at what's been said before;
I wish myself in Old England's land,
And you was in the valley so low. [III: 1-c, st. 6]
and:
If you don't like what I have done,
You may like some other one.
For I wish you was in your father's chamber
And I in some house or at home. [III:2-f, st. 9]
A conversation occurs, of course, in other British and American texts; however, it includes no more than the lover's request that the girl choose whether she will go on with him or stay-and her answer that she will continue with him because she has no other "guide." Where it is fuller (in British texts C and D) the additional material is the girl's further reason (she would be unwelcome) for not returning home.
Considering the links between Text F and the texts of the southern Appalachian group, the verbal parallels among Texts BCDEI/Greig and the American texts generally, and, in another direction, the contrasting developments of the line represented by British texts AGH, some such schematic history suggests itself. We may suppose that the Scandinavian ballad entered Great Britain and circulated in a phraseology generally like that of Texts AGH. In one area it underwent a rationalization; the supernatural element was replaced by a rational handling of the lover's death (Texts AGH). To account for Text F, then, one may guess that either the unrationalized version continued to circulate in England and became the basis of F, or that the maker of F, fortified with a knowledge of the traditional tale, converted a text of the AGH type into the elaborately rhetorical, antiqued, courtly imitation of a ballad that-in any case- the present Text F represents in fragment.
The nature of this literary telling can be hypothesized from evidence in Text F and in the stylistically related texts, both British and American. It encompassed the full narrative and perhaps both manipulated and amplified it. It suffused the stern heroic account with sentimentality. Finally, it worked out the telling in an extended and sophisticated baroque parallel to ballad style. This conjecture, however it may foreshorten the ballad's actual history, does at least account for the corpus of texts other than AGH as we have them. The sentimentality is certainly there. An eloping ballad heroine is often quite willing to stand stolidly and watch her male relatives slaughtered if thereby the elopement can come off. Lady Margaret in these texts, though, reveals the filial orientation of her temperament when she cries out that she can get any number of lovers but can have only one father-and tenderly wipes his wounds with her handkerchief. That the account has been manipulated is suggested by the presence of the handkerchief in the battle scene at all; in the Scandinavian accounts, the girl in a more typical act binds up the lover's wounds-and this occurs at the stream-side, or, in another account, in her bower.
That it has been amplified, the flyting scene may be evidence. That it told the full tale has been suggested earlier as a possibility. As to its more elaborate rhetoric, this is quite evident in the way, for example, that the device of incremental repetition is handled. The simplest ballad way is to repeat a stanza just sung, changing the pronouns, to record the advance of the action. The sophisticated way is to construct two stanzas that introduce the increment elaborately indeed. Note for example Text F, st. 3 and 4, in which lines 1 and 3 are identical in each stanza, while line 2 in each simply express a variation upon one another, and line 4 alone, of stanza 2, the actual increment to stanza 1. One may guess that the prototype was freely developed in this baroque mode; i.e., by repetitive and relatively involved patterns in speech-and-action sequences, in question-and-answer units, in narrative passages, and so on. Reflections of this kind of rhetorical handling are to be found in Child text D:
Two chooses, two chooses, Lady Margaret, he says
Two chooses I'll make thee;
Whether to go back to your mother again
Or go along with me.
For to go home to my mother again,
An unwelcome guest I'd be;
But since my fate has ordered it so,
I'll go along with thee. [D, st. 7 & 8]
and in the texts of the southern Appalachians:
Fair Ellen she still stood there
And never changed a word
Till she saw her own dear seven brothers all
A-wallowing in their own blood.
Fair Ellen she still stood there
And never changed a note,
Till she saw her own dear father's head
Come tumbling by her foot. [III:2-a, st. 7 & 8]
The next step, then, would be for descendants of the F-type telling, some perhaps already reduced to the point in the action where the BCDEI/Greig texts now open, to have travelled to Scotland and taken on Scottish coloration (as did Percy's "Child of Ell")[8] and thence to Nova Scotia and the adjoining Canadian provinces, and northeastern and southern United States.
* * * *
I come now to the processes of acculturation which the texts transported to this country have undergone here. As has been stated earlier, the ballad has flourished mainly in the Northeast, in the Shenandoah Valley, and in the southern Appalachians. As will be shown, each group of texts from each region has acquired a distinct stylistic identity, the result of efforts, however unconscious, of singers to bring the telling into conformity with local manners, terminology, rhetorical patterns, and so on. The texts of any one group are not identical to one another; any of the texts utilizes in varying amounts, so to speak, items from that group's narrative stock, and there is variation in the diction. But the tone is uniform throughout any one group, and each text is expressed in the phraseology typical of its group alone and does not substitute verbal elements characteristic of another group.
The first group to be discussed (Group I)[9] comprises fourteen variants united mainly by the fact that they come nearest of all to preserving the known British tradition. The texts of this group, it must be said, are in their provenance unlike those gathered in other regions; they have been found mainly in the Northeast but also in Virginia, with a few additional texts in Indiana, Tennessee, and Missouri. They appear to represent versions that have descended from individual texts in the BCDEI/Greig group-and there are, therefore, slight variations among them such as may be discerned among those of the British group. Like that group, also, they show little assimilation to ballad ways. Text I: 2-a, for example, is extremely close to British text B. Its tone is aristocratic because its language and its manners are generally elegant. Characteristically with American texts, though, it is shorter-by five stanzas; it omits st. i, telescopes 3 and 4, and omits 18, 19, and 20 of text B's. It also includes an occasional ungrammatical form and it shows confusion at such points as for instance, where the Scottish pronunciation of down (to rhyme in the linking stanzas with moon) was not acceptable. It does, however, still stress the delicate bravery of the girl (she watches the battle without a tear) and her soft heart (she calls out when her father falls, and wipes his wounds). She is still helpless, too; she must go on with her gently courteous lover, as she has no other guide.
The texts of this cluster vary in narrative fullness. One (I:1-a, from Indiana) opens with the departure of the lover from his hall for that of the girl. The second stanza takes them on their way, and, omitting the action of the informer, the ballad continues by reporting as the remaining events the battle, the pause at the stream, and (as the sequence which takes them to his mother's hall has also fallen away) their deaths and burial there. Four more texts (collected in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New Hampshire, and Maine-Texts I:2-a to 2-d) are of the curtailed narrative type represented by BCDEI/Greig. Like them, they have lost Unit 1 and most of Unit 2; and three of these texts utilize in the openings the rhymes and phrasing of British text D. A final four (I:3-a to 3-d) complete this first sub-group. They are, like the last four, products of an imperfect memory for earlier portions of the song; paralleling British texts E and Greig XIII, 53A ff., one (learned in Vermont) opens with the lover's command to the girl to dismount, and of the remaining three (recorded in Virginia) one opens with the linking stanza which precedes this and the others follow the Vermont text. All of these last four, though, unlike their British parallels, proceed to the close, bringing the lovers to their death and burial. This group, it might be added, preserves the several items of phraseology characteristic of Child text B much as they are found in Text I:2-a; that is, they utilize the expressions with bugelet horn hung down by his side and 'twas all by the light of the moon.
The remaining five texts of this loosely-bound group use for their openings certain me rhymes found also in the Virginia texts of the next major group to be discussed. They utilize the formula he sounded his bugle loud and shrill for the linking stanzas, and for the site of the battle the term meadow or mead found also in Child text C. Otherwise they vary simply in the combinations of elements found in a number of the curtailed British texts. Two (I:2-e, and -f) from Newfoundland tell their tale much as the other Northeast variants do, with the differences as noted above. Two more (I:2-g and -h), essentially identical to one another, were recorded in Missouri; they add the lover's request that his sister bind his head. The final text (I:3-e) is from Tennessee; it includes the bright shining moon derived from the Child B type of text, and its close is that of the good-luck wish found throughout the BCDEI/Greig group. In none of these five texts has Unit 4, the pause at the streamside, been preserved.
What may be observed of this whole group of fourteen variants is that the telling has been in the main 'right' to the singers who have transmitted it; they have been preserving quite faithfully the attitudes and the very expressions of the variants as they were received from Britain-and these are markedly more literary than ballad-like. There is alteration, it is true. It occurs least in the variants of the Northeast, where they incorporate an occasional homely or ungrammatical term, lose an occasional stanza, telescope two, or substitute an end word without repairing the rhymes. If, on the basis of the high proportion of variants of this type gathered there, we may regard the Northeast as the area most likely to preserve the telling with its aristocratic features, then we may note with interest that it is the dispersed texts in which are found individual lines of development (as in the case of the single Indiana text) or in which are beginning the processes of assimilation in a culture that will finally transform them to its own taste (the three Virginia variants).
It is when one turns to the next major group (Group II)[10] that the differences become instantly clear between texts that have been somewhat scattered and those that are sung within a smaller geographical area with cultural practices of its own. The eight texts which comprise it were gathered in several counties of Virginia and West Virginia that saddle the Shenandoah Mountains and Valley. They have in common, for one thing, many more verbal elements:
Me rhymes in the openings.
The lover draws his buckles (buckles his pistol) down by his side.
After the battle, he goes bleeding away, with his lady so gay (dear).
He has the girl hold his horse for a while; she calls to him to hold his hand for a while; he tells his mother he should like to rest for a while.
His mother dies for grief (loss) of her son.
There are eleven (several) lives lost.
Of the eight texts, one (II:1-a) is of the full type: i.e., it tells of the lover's setting out for the girl's hall and of their riding away. This action is told in two stanzas; two more, which would have given the details of his arrival and her letting him in, could not be recalled by the singer. From there, the song moves directly into the pair's realization that they are being pursued, and so
on, to the end. The remaining seven are of the first curtailed type, with the opening created from the informer's arrival.
In these texts we find a telling that in certain quite discernible ways is partially transformed into a ballad. A homely touch marks the opening of the full text: the lover rose "at four o'clock and kissed his mother goodbye." [II:1-a]. And a homelier reason than the father's wish to prevent a marriage beneath his daughter's station is expressed, in five texts of this group, in his rousing cry to his sons:
Wake up, wake up, my seven sons bold,
And put on your armor so bright.
I will never have it said that a daughter of mine
Has lain with a lord all night. [II:2-d, st. 2]
From this group, also, the sentimental handkerchief scene is omitted and the close is starkly blunt:
Sweet William he died before midnight,
Lady Margaret before it was day;
And the old lady died for the loss of her son,
And there were eleven lives lost. [II:2-c, st. 12]
With these details of content, one finds also an occasional plainer expression: the lover's lady mother of another group in these closing stanzas is the old lady (woman), and the eloping couple-occasionally Pretty Margaret (Polly) and Sweet William, rather than Lord and Lady-ride up not to her hall but to her stile (stand, house). Ungrammatical forms and garbled words appear in this group, too, as well as a rather faltering sense of prosody. The ungrammatical forms appear as just a sprinkling throughout texts whose language otherwise sustains an aristocratic rather than a colloquial tone:
For the youngest are going with me [II:2-a, st. 1]
She never shedded a tear [II: 2-d, st. 6]
A father I'll never have no more [II:2-e, st. 6]
And away they went bluding away [II:2-f, st. 7]
And there was eleven lives lost [II:2-b, st. 12]
The garbled words (viper bay, defle/diple gray, etc.) are also relatively few in number-but like the bad grammar they work their effect. As to the prosody, the metrics are generally good but the rhymes are often quite casual. The reasons include the common ones (substitution of a word in rhyme-position, recasting of the line, and so on), and the matter is further complicated by the circumstance that certain expressions have been worked into positions that invite them, regardless of the effect upon the rhyme. Such an expression is the adverbial for a while. In the lover's command to the girl to dismount:
Get you down, get you down, Lady Margaret, he cried,
And hold my horse for a while
Until I can fight your seventh brother bold,
And your father is walking so nigh [II:2-a, st. 5]
there is an assonance in the final line (which has been recast from something like ... where they stand or ... who's nigh at hand). In other positions, the expression has not effected a new rhyme:
He rode, he rode that livelong night
Till he came to his mother's stand.
Get you down, get you down, Lady Margaret, he cried,
So that we can rest for a while. [II:2-a, st. 9]
Another expression, and she (they) never delayed any (no) time, is similarly and as casually-dispersed through several others of these texts.[11]
The tendency to utilize a single expression in several positions does, in fact, illustrate a second characteristic of this group: a marked inclination toward repetitiveness. In further illustration, note the persistent use of the term dear. It appears in the formula father (mother) she (he) loved so dear as often as fourfold in some of the variants, and may occur as well in the linking stanza (along with his lady so dear) and in the warning of the lover to the father (do take care of your oldest daughter dear).
Besides the dispersion of single expressions throughout the telling, and the duplication of rhyme words and their infiltration into other stanzas (both of which latter processes reduce variety in rhyme sounds), there is elsewhere a heavily repetitive phraseology. This trait is most notable in the opening lines of the stanzas; in a typical text, of eleven stanzas only two open with other than such a line as:
Wake up, wake up...
O they rode, o they rode ...
Get you down, get you down ...
O mother, mother...
and in some stanzas the first two lines will consist of repetition:
Stop your hand, stop your hand, stop your hand, she cried,
Stop your hand, stop your hand, stop your hand for a while
You can choose for to go, you can choose for to stay,
You can choose for to go or to stay
One sees in these texts a telling that in tone hangs somewhere between romance and ballad. More precisely, the nature of the principals, of their motivation and their manners, is different in the ways described above from what it is in the tellings of the northeastern area; the courtly quality has been noticeably modified by the transforming process characteristic of the area in which the song has been sung. As to style, the process of transforming the language has proceeded further in this group than in Group I; the tellings are cast to a considerable extent in what are evidently preferred local expressions. Often enough it is to the detriment of the rhymes, and this process of deterioration is joined by an equally pervasive tendency toward a repetitiveness that at some points distributes and thus "normalizes" such features as descriptive tags, but at other points merely iterates at intolerable length.
In the texts of Group III, we find a type of telling that reveals the effects of yet another complex of attitudes and modes. Indeed, in these, there seem to be occurring in most forceful action of all, processes that tend toward the making of a true ballad. This group consists of eighteen texts collected mainly in several counties of North Carolina but including representatives from Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Florida. Following are the expressions characteristic of this group:
In the rousing of the armed men, rhymes of the round/town/down cluster.
In the linking passages, lover swung his bugle around his neck, and he and the girl ride a mile out of town.
Lover and girl see their pursuers trippling (trickling) over the plain.
He tells her to hold his steed by the rein.
The girl watches in silence (without a word, cheep, note) until she sees her relatives a-wallowing (a-rolling, etc.) in their (own heart's) blood and her father's head comes tumbling by her foot.
She remarks that blood (love) runs free from every vein.
They ride on to his mother's house where they tingle, (jingle, jangle, etc.) at the ring.
Lover tells his mother and sister to make his bed and bind his head. With his death, the fowls began to crow and his heart's blood began to flow from his wounds.
Five of these texts are full tellings; the fullest, recorded in Florida, has been described earlier (p. 80) as a rare example of a text which has preserved something of all the major narrative features of the traditional tale. The remaining thirteen texts are of the first curtailed type, (with an opening stanza that preserves, perhaps, the bit of narrative that once accompanied the informer's rousing cry-though re-expressed, of course, to describe a different situation):
He rode up to the old man's gate,
So boldly he did say:
You can keep your youngest daughter at home,
But your oldest I'll take away. [III:2-a]
followed, in this group alone, by the flyting mentioned previously. The father responds by conveying an oblique verbal attack upon the lover in his rousing cry to his sons:
Come in, come in, all seven of my sons,
And guard your sister around.
For it never shall be said that the steward's son
Has taken my daughter out of town. [III:2-e, st. 2]
to which the lover replies defending his lineage and then, evidently, rides off with the girl.
The characteristics of this group have been partially described in an earlier section-wherein were taken up those verbal and narrative features which seem to illustrate a line of descent from Text F that is more direct than those of the texts of Groups I and II. While preserving the items noted of material and phraseology, however, these texts have developed a tone that is far from the feeling of insulated refinement in the F fragment-and for the following reasons. For one, the relationships between the characters have quite changed. The gentle courtesy of the lover in other texts (and his faintly pathetic and melancholy attitude in Text F) here appears as brusqueness and on the edge of irritability. Indeed, girl and lover engage in a brief quarrel after the battle. The formality of the encounter between lover and father, expressed in Text F in the rhetorical complexity of their speeches, is reduced to a plain and sturdy directness-and the lover's suavely insulting manner entirely gone. Finally, the girl's focus of interest, sentimentally divided in other texts between lover and father, here is located almost entirely where one would expect it to be in a ballad. The girl in British text B and elsewhere among the American variants has the lover stop the battle because he is slaughtering her father and brothers. By a simple shift in vocabulary, the girl's exclamation, Thy stroke it is wonderful sore [I:2-a, st. 5] becomes Your wounds are very sore [III:2-e, st. 8] and the shift of interest is accomplished.
Certain other details also contribute to the alteration in tone. The armor bright of other texts has no mention here; the seven brothers will simply guard [their] sister around. Further, the title lord and lady do not occur; that the tale has to do with the vicissitudes of royalty is more naively introduced in the lover's statement:
My father's of the richest of kings,
My mother's a Quaker's queen [III:2-a, st. 3]
And as in the texts of Group II, the handkerchief appears but rarely-and then usually to serve the lover's rather than the father's injuries.
Besides these substitutions and prunings, there has also been an accretion of detail which contributes to the unique tone of these texts. Blood, for example, which is mentioned throughout the British and American texts in the battle scene (when the girl grieves at her father's wounds) and in the pause at the stream-side (when she observes it in the water) deepens in its significance in these texts of Group III. There is no streamside incident, so that reference does not occur. But it is notable that wherever it can be remarked that this life-source is flowing away, the opportunity is taken. The girl stands silently until she sees her father and brothers a-rolling in their own heart's blood [III:2-e, st. 7]. She tells the lover to stop, as the blood runs free from every vein [st. 8]. She and the lover remount and go bleeding away [st. 9]. The lover repeats to his mother that his blood runs free from every vein [st. 11]. And in an ending common to many of these texts the primitive associations are even further stressed at the time of the lover's death:
It was about three hours till day,
The cock began to crow.
From every wound that he received
His heart blood began to flow [II1:2-b, st. 13]
* * *
To summarize: judging by the development of the ballad of "Earl Brand," a folk narrative will become acculturated here and the processes of acculturation will vary from region to region according to the thought and speech patterns of the group which sings the ballad. The pressures will not be perfectly uniform in their application, nor will they always affect the same components of the ballad everywhere. In the Northeast, "Earl Brand" is preserved by singers apparently still sufficiently committed to one British tradition of ballad art to try to transmit what they hear verbatim (these texts, incidentally, are the longest)-and perhaps literal-minded enough to accept this tale of sentiment and sorrow in the understanding that it represents life at a different level of existence from theirs. The content in the great majority of the northeastern variants has been preserved nearly intact. The phraseology also has been subjected to only minor modifications-though downward, toward a slightly more colloquial level. Withal, though, the "literary" quality and the sentimental cast of this record of events remain much the same in these texts as in the parallel British ones.
In the Shenandoah Valley, where perhaps because the local concept of life does not very strongly embrace the possibility of an aristocratic society, the variants show a much more marked transformation both in content and in phraseology toward the homely in manner and in diction. It is here, too, that one sees the effect of another pressure-that of the rhetorical practices of local ballad art-in, for example, the repetitive character of the phraseology.
Finally, in the southern Appalachians, there has developed a type of variant in which there has occurred an almost complete re-adjustment of the values of the British BCDEI/Greig group, a process that has involved both the "regularizing" of human relationships according to another and more primitive code of conduct and even the addition of detail which supplies and enhances a "right" view of, for example, the deaths which form the tragic climax of the action.
As to the findings that have to do with the varying susceptibility to change of the several components of a ballad text, and the phenomena of textual preservation once the restatement of the tale in local terms has been accomplished, I have remarked earlier that the order of decreasing yieldability of the components of a text will be phraseology, content, structure. Examination of element after element in these texts for soft spots-points at which the telling would yield to change or loss-shows that (besides the core situation) the larger patterns controlling the disposition of the material and the rhetoric in which it is cast are the only adamant features; anything else is subject to the acculturating process. The most persistently present items in any text are the linking stanzas; their phraseology will yield to re-expression, but even in the most eroded of texts the alternation of narrative units and links remains the patterning device by which the material is disposed.[12]
Even in the patterning of the rhetoric, structure will persist unless altered by substitutions in the phrasing of a line (which alter rhetorical patterns by accident rather than design). The stanzas developed by what I have called baroque incrementation offer material for a study of this sort of thing. One might think that the transforming processes operative in the Group III texts would have leveled out rhetorical elaboration; but many of even the curtailed texts of this group preserve full pairs of stanzas that are cast in this style (though rephrased in accordance with the pervading spirit of the telling). It is much more likely, apparently, for one of the stanzas to be lost than that either or both be recast. Indeed, that this is what does happen is evidenced in the texts of Group I (the most literary of all), where in one variant there is to be found a two-stanza development of the lover's command to the girl to dismount (Unit 3):
Light ye down, Lady Margaret, he said,
And hold my steed in your hand,
Until against your seven brothers bold
And your father, I make my stand.
Light ye down, Lady Margaret, he said,
And he stood by his arms to fight;
. ............. [I: -a, st. 4 &5]
Elsewhere throughout Group I, and II and III, this command is expressed in the single stanza that remains-and with all the sentence elements in the same order.
Then as to the tendency of singers to preserve a telling that has become "right," the following table shows the number of stanzas given to each of the several narrative units that make up the Group III curtailed texts gathered in neighboring communities:
Unit 1: None
Unit 2: 4 st. in 3 texts
3.5 st. in i text
3 st. in 2 texts
2 st. in 3 texts
Unit 3: 7 st. in 2 texts
6 st. in 3 texts
5 st. in 4 texts
Unit 4: None
Unit 5: 6 st. in 2 texts
4 st. in 2 texts
3 st. in 4 texts
2 st. in i text
It can be seen that the fullness with which any one narrative unit is treated varies within two stanzas (with the exception of two texts whose close includes the rose-and-briar detail). A similar analysis of the curtailed texts of Group II reveals the same thing:
Unit 1: None
Unit 2: 3 st. in 3 texts
2 st. in 4 texts
Unit 3: 7 st. in 1 text
6 st. in 3 texts
5 st. in 3 texts
Unit 4: None
Unit 5: 3 st. in 6 texts
2 st. in i text
In contrast, a chart of the relative fullness with which single units in the dispersed texts of one telling are treated shows the following:
Unit 1: 5 st. in 1 text
4 st. in 3 texts
2 st. in i text
Unit 2: 2 st. in 1 text
Unit 3: 7 st. in 1 text
5 st. in 3 texts
3 st. in i text
Unit 4: None
Unit 5: 3 st. in 1 text
2 st. in 3 texts
1 st. in i text
The treatments of the single narrative units here vary by as much as four stanzas. Interestingly, then, when the basis of comparison is changed for the moment and the single full text of Group II is held against the curtailed ones (charted on p. 94), it can be seen that this text-which was recorded in the same general area as were the curtailed ones-is closely parallel to them in the fullness with which are treated narrative units common to both:
Unit 1: 2
Unit 2: None
Unit 3: 6
Unit 4: None
Unit 5: 3
There remains the matter of the changes that, after acculturation, do, of course, continue to occur. I have omitted taking into consideration at any length those that are attributable to forgetfulness. The ultimate factor is, to be sure, the individual singer. Given the telling that has become "right," he will, if he has a good aural memory, transmit all or most of what he has heard. If not, or if the telling is still unacceptable, he will omit, telescope, transpose sentence elements, re-phrase, substitute words or expressions of similar sound or sense, and so on. About the actual loss of material-that which is not resupplied in some other way-this study has little to say beyond the common observation that conditions here have tended for some time to cut away at the traditions of oral transmission. Material will probably continue to be lost. But I think it can be demonstrated that where substitutions are involved, the singer will provide material that is in harmony with the attitudes and forms of his group. Compare, for example, the formality which controls the various expressions of the lover's command to the girl to dismount in the texts of Group I:
Light ye down, Lady Margaret, he said [I: 1-a]
Alight, alight, Lady Margaret, he said [I:2-b]
Arise, arise, Lady Margaret, he said [I:2-e]
Dismount, dismount! Lord Billy, he said [I:2-d]
and the colloquial tone of the parallel line in the texts of Group III:
Get you down, get you down, Fair Ellen, he said [III: 1-c]
Set you down, fair Ellinor, he said [III:2-d]
Light you down, fair Ellen, said he [III:2-f]
Crawl right down, Sweet Willie cried [III:2-g]
The changes that a series of singers thus make account for the long-range alterations of a telling. And if in addition the singer carries the ballad away from the region in which he learned it, he will lose the support to his memory that frequent hearing provided-and those processes of attrition and substitution will then go on at a pace and in ways of their own.
In conclusion, one may say that the acculturating processes can be seen to work (if the behavior of "Earl Brand" here is typical) both purposively and not entirely methodically in the treatment of a ballad that has been received in this country-and that the varying character of the American texts derives heavily from the handling they get of this kind.
University of California, Berkeley
--------------------------------
Footnotes:
1. The American materials for this study were gathered almost entirely from published collections in either printed or recorded form. This represents most of the variants available to the researcher through ordinary channels. Inquiries as to the contents of local unpublished collections have failed to produce any texts from west of the Mississippi. Though some additional variants may well lie in the manuscript collections from eastern regions that still await publication, I think that the 40 texts analyzed for this study represent a sufficient number and variety in distribution for generalizations of the kind that are made here.
2. The texts are listed here by stylistic groups, as they will be discussed by group in a later section of the paper. The system of reference is as follows: the Roman numeral (I, II, or III) identifies the group to which the text belongs, the Arabic (i, 2, or 3) tells which of the narrative patterns (full account, ist curtailment, or 2nd curtailment) the text follows, and the letter refers to the specific text.
GROUP I: [I:i-a] Paul G. Brewster, "Traditional Ballads from Indiana," JAF, XLVIII (1935), 308f.; [I:2-a] W. Roy Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea-Songs from Nova Scotia (Cambridge, Mass., 1928), pp. gff.; [I:2-b] Phillips Barry, British Ballads from Maine (New Haven, 1929), pp. 35ff.; [I:2-c] Barry, pp. 37ff.; [I:2-d] Barry, "The Ballad of Earl Brand," MLN, XXV (1910), 104f.; I:2-e] Maud Karpeles, Folk Songs from Newfoundland (Oxford, 1934), pp. 83-7; [I:2-f] Elisabeth B. Greenleaf and Grace Y. Mansfield, Ballads and Sea Songs of Newfoundland (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), pp. 7f.; [I:2-g] Vance Randolph, Ozark Mountain Folks (New York, 1932), pp. 2i9ff.; [I:2-h] Randolph, Ozark Folk Songs (Columbia, Mo., 1946), I, 48f.; [I:3-a] Cecil J. Sharp and Maud Karpeles, English Folk-Song from the Southern Appalachians (Oxford, 1952), I, 23; [I:3-b] Sharp and Karpeles, I, 22f.; [I:3-c] Winston Wilkinson MSS., University of Virginia Collection of Folk Music, 1936-7, p. 5; [I:3-d] Helen Hartness Flanders, Ballads Migrant in New England (New York, 1953), pp. 228ff.; [I:3-e] Mellinger Henry, Folk Songs from the Southern Highlands (New York, 1938), p. 37.
GROUP II: [II:i-a] Arthur K. Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), pp. 9of.; [II:2-a] Sharp and Karpeles, I, 21f.; [II:2-b] Winston Wilkinson MSS., University of Virginia Collection of Folk Music, 1935-6, pp. 9ff.; [II:2-c] John Harrington Cox, Folk-Songs of the South (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), pp. 18f.; [II:2-d] Davis, pp. 87f.; [II:2-e] Wilkinson MSS., 1935-6, pp. 7f.; [I:2-f] Davis, pp. 89f.; [II:2-g] Davis, pp. 88f.
GROUP III: [III:i-a] Alton C. Morris, Folk Songs of Florida and their Cultural Background (Gainesville, Fla., 1950), pp. 241ff.; [III:-b] John A. and Alan Lomax, Our Singing Country (New York, 1941), pp. 154f.; [III:i-c] Evelyn K. Wells, The Ballad Tree (New York, 1950), pp. 147f.; [III:i-d] Arthur P. Hudson, Folk-Songs of Mississippi and their Background (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1936), pp. 66ff.; [III:l-e] Arthur P. Hudson, George Herzog, and Herbert Halpert, Folk-Tunes from Mississippi (New York, 1937), pp. 22f.; [III:2-a] Cecil J. Sharp and Maud Karpeles, English Folk- Song from the Southern Appalachians (Oxford, 1952), I, 19f.; [III:2-b] Sharp and Karpeles, I, 14f.; [III:2-c] Sharp and Karpeles, I, 16f.; [III:2-d] Sharp and Karpeles, I, 17ff.; [III:2-e] Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore (Durham, N.C., 1952), II, 28f.; [III:2-ee] Folk Music of the United States, Library of Congress, Music Division, "Anglo-American Songs and Ballads," Album 12, No. 6oB; [III:2-f] North Carolina Folklore, II, 29f.; [III:2-g] Mellinger Henry, Songs Sung in the Southern Appalachians (London, 1934), pp. 45f.; [III:2-h] Described in North Carolina Folklore, II, 30 [III:2-i] Described in North Carolina Folklore, II, 31; [III:2-j] Described in North Carolina Folklore, II, 31; [III:2-k] Described in North Carolina Folklore, II, 31f.; [III:2-m] E. C. Perrow, "Songs and Rhymes from the South," JAF, XXVIII (1915), 152ff.
3. Greig MSS., King's College Library, Aberdeen, XIII, 53; XIII, 54; XVI, 96A; XXVI, 10ff.; XLIX, 105ff.
4. Text III:1-a, described in Note 2.
5. Texts II: 1-b; III: 1-c; III: 1-d; III: 1-e; II: 1-a; I: 1-a.
6. Texts I:2-b; I:2-c; I:2-d; Group III.
7. Group III.
8. See Gavin Greig, Folk-Song of the North-East, (Peterhead: printed by P. Scrogie, 1909-1914), No. CXXV, for a version transmitted by Miss Bell Robertson, who said she had learned it as a girl from a book.
9. See Note 2.
10. See Note 2.
11. Texts II:2-e; II:2-g.
12. And where, incidentally, a whole unit has disappeared, it is, I suggest, for the reason that these links are essentially identical in phraseology throughout the text. That is, being alike in each position, they make it easy rather than hard for a singer to skip over an entire section. Until a fuller text than the Florida one [III: i-a] turns up, one cannot say how Unit 2 was formulated, but as examination of that text reveals, the linking stanza (st. 4) leads now into st. 5 with an ease that was evidently fatal to the bulk of that unit. One can hardly see otherwise how or why a necessary unit like Unit 2 or a common one like Unit 4 should fall away.