Bluegrass Messengers

The Ballad and the Dance
by Louise Pound
PMLA, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1919), pp. 360-400

XVII -THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE

It is the purpose of the following paper to examine the relationship of the medieval ballad to the dance, in origin and in traditional usage. Particular reference is had to the English and Scottish ballad type. In various preceding papers [1] I have considered the theory currently accepted in America of the inseparableness of primitive dance, music, and song and have shown that primitive song is not narrative in character. I have also questioned the assumption that the ballad is the archetypal poetic form this position should be assigned to the song, not the ballad -and the assumption of "communal" as against individual
authorship for the English and Scottish popular ballads.

The present paper examines the relation to the dance of the English and Scottish ballads. The view is widely accepted both in the Old World and in America that this, and similar ballad types, originated in the dance. The following paper canvasses the evidence for this view and makes inquiry as to its validity.

I. THE NAME "BALLAD"

Much of the confusion in scholarly and literary discussion of the English and Scottish ballads and their American descendants or analogues, rests on ambiguous and contradictory usages of the word " ballad." It has been employed for as many lyric types as were " sonnet " and "ode," and it has hardly yet settled down into consistent application. The popular use of the word for a short song, often sentimental in character, or for the music for such a song, is clear enough; but its most recently developed
meaning of narrative song, currently employed by literary historians, is only now assuming initial place in
the dictionaries.[2]

It is this newly developed usage which has brought confusion. For though the shifts in meaning of the terml "ballad" have often been noted and traced, clarity or consistency in its employment have not followed, even among the tracers. They distinguish what they mean by ballad clearly enough; but they lose sight of their own distinctions when they come to theorizing about their
material. Within the last one hundred and fifty years the name has been restricted, among specialists, to a type of English song to which it did not belong originally, and a type which is not called by that name in other languages, save when the usage has been carried over from the English.[3]
 
The etymology of "ballad" should not be given undue weight, since the attachment of the name to the material which it describes is recent. Over-emphasis upon its etymology, and the double and triple senses in which contemporary scholars use the term, have puzzled and misled many earnest students. Writers who insist that they have clearly in mind what they mean sometimes apply the name " ballad" to dance songs, sometimes to narrative songs, sometimes to pure lyrics, and sometimes
to all three.

Ballad, is derived from ballare, to dance, and historically it means dancing song; it is associated etymologically with ballet, a form of dance. In the Romance languages, from which the word issued into general European currency, it
came to apply to various types of lyrics. The French and
Italian pieces taking the name, or various forms of it, are
genuinely lyrical; they are to be associated with dance
origins, and they do not narrate happenings or suggest
action. 'Many were used, it is certain, as dance songs.[4]

To be a folk-ballad, not merely a folk-song, an English
piece must tell a story. Poems of the type of Rossetti's
Sister Helen or Stratton Water, or Longfellow's The
Wreck of the Hesperus, are termed " literary " ballads, as
over against anonymous traditional ballads, like Sir

362
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
Patrick Spens. The name ballad, meaning primarily, as
we have seen, a dance-lyric, is not entirely satisfactory for
these lyric-epics. It gained its distinctive application by
chance rather than by historic right, and it gained this
application late. Owing partly to the etymology of the
name, partly to the hypotheses of certain critics, who associate
the origin of the English and Scottish pieces with
the choral dances of mediaeval festal communes, ballads
of the type collected by Professor F. J. Child have come
to be associated with the dance to a degree which the evidence
does not justify. The dance is given place in the
foreground, as essential in defining the type and its origin,
instead of being made something remote and subsidiary.
For the Child pieces, the etymology of the name should
be given little or no emphasis; insistence on it is likely
to be misleading. In fact, dance-genesis has more immediate
connection with English lyrics of many other types,
in the consideration of which we are not asked to have it
constantly before us, than it has with the English ballads;
for instance, with the ballade, or the rondeau.
The name "ballad" was not applied specifically to
heroic or romantic narrative songs until the eighteenth
century. Sidney and Pepys use the term " song." In
Dr. Johnson's Dictionary "ballad" means "song" and
nothing more. It was Ritson whol first stated the distinction
that now obtains. "With us, songs of sentiment,
expression, or even description, are properly called songs,
in contradistinction to mere narrative pieces, which we
now denominate ballads." 5 For several centuries earlier
' Introduction to his Select Collection of English Songs, 3 vols.,
2nd edition, 1913. iShenstone and Michael Bruce had expressed the
distinction earlier (see iS. B. Hustvedt, Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia
and Great Britain, 1916, p. 254), but it wa,s first publiicly
enunciated by Ritson.
363
LOUISE POUND
the name had been applied with miscellaneous reference.
It might be given to a short didactic poem, a love poem (as
sometimes now), to poems of satire and vituperation, to
political pieces, to hymns and religious pieces, to elegiac
pieces, occasionally to narrative pieces; in short, to lyrics
of any type. Thus its specific application tol verse of the
Child type came late and not by inheritance, but arbitrarily.
Nor did the etymology of the name play any part in
the selection of it for the pieces to which it was applied.
It will be sufficient to sketch in summary here the stages
of development four English in the usage of the name
ballad.6
When Chaucer uses the term ballad it is for lyrics of
the fixed type imported from the French, the Balade de
Bon Conseyl, or Lak of Stedfastnesse, or the Compleynt
to His Empty Purse, not to lyric-epics.7 Ballad was long
used of dance songs of various types, as a few citations
I The entries in The New English Dictionary have been referred to.
Fourteen pages of matter illustrative of the history of ballade are
given in Larousse's Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX Sieclc,
Paris (1867), ranging from the first entry " chanson A danser " to,
"Aujourd'hui, ode d'un genre familier et le plus souvent lhgendaire
et fantastique: les ballades de Schiller, de Goethe, etc." Nothing is
said of a narrative element. But see especially Helen Louise Cohen,
The Ballade, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative
Literature, New York, 1915. According to Miss Cohen, the word
is used in contemporary French in the way in which it has come to
be used in English and in German. " In France, at the present time,
the same word, ballade, serves for the English or Scottish popular
ballad and for a certain kind of narrative poem, written in imitation
of German authors like Uhland, as well as for the artificially fixed
lyric poem." The usages of "ballad" for English have been traced
by Professor Gummere, Old English Popular Ballad, pp. xviii ff.
An excellent example of his usage is found in the Prologue to
The Legend of Good Women, where he has his characters dance in a
circle " as it were in carole-wise" while they sang the ballade-
" Hyd, Absolon, thy gilte tresses clere."
364
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
will show; e. g., these lines from Dunbar's Golden Targe,
of about 1500:
And sang ballettes with mighty notes clere,
Ladyes to daunce full sobirly assayit.
Ascham writes in 1545,8 " these balades and roundes, these
galiardes, pauanes and daunces." A passage in George
Gascoigne's Certain Notes of Instruction, 1575, is very
specific. He thinks of the term mainly in Chaucer's sense:
There is also another kinde, called Ballade, and therof are sundrie
sortes: for a man may write ballade in a staffe of sixe lines, every
line conteyning eighte or sixe sillables, wherof the firste and third,
second and fourth do rime acrosse, and the fifth and sixth do rime
togither in conclusion. You may write also your ballad of tenne
syllables, rimying as before is declared, but these two were wont to
be most comonly used in ballade, whiche propre name was (I thinke)
derived of this worde in Italian Ballare, whiche signifieth to daunce,
and indeed, those kinds of rimes serve beste for daunces and light
matters.
Ben Jonson, in Love Restored, writes " Unlesse we shold
come in like iMorrice-dancers and whistle our ballet ourselves."
All these citations show loose reference to, amatory
songs, and dance songs, lyrical, not narrative in character.
The word is also applied to pieces of the various
types enumerated at the end of the preceding paragraph.
Coitgrave's Dictionary of the French and English Tongues,
1611, associates the word with dance song. Burton writes,
Anatomy of Melancholy, III, 1, i, "Castalio would not have
young men read the Canticles because to his thinking it
was too light and amorous a tract, a ballad of ballads, as our
old English translation hath it." Percy, as often pointed
out, employs ballad in his Reliques with miscellaneous
application. Ritson's contribution toward establishing the
word in its latest meaning has been quoted already.
8 Toxopkilus, Arber ed., p. 39.
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LOUISE POUND
Coleridge's use is modern when he writes of " The grand
old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens." To summarize the
stages for English:
1. Ballad in the fourteenth century meant the French
art lyric with fixed form. The name could be given to a
dance song, though the latter was more often called a carol.
Ballad, in the period when it could mean dance song, did
not mean " narrative lyric."
2. In the Elizabethan period, ballads, ballets, ballants,
etc., are terms loosely associated with song, or lyric verse
of various kinds. The name could be applied to dance
songs, among these types and, though infrequently, to narrative
lyrics.
3. In the eighteenth century, ballad continues in loose
popular usage. With specialists it comes to have particular
reference to narrative songs. The narrative songs
which the eighteenth century collected were not dance
songs, and they are not the pieces called by cognate names
in the Romance languages, from which ballad, in lyric
nomenclature, is derived.
4. In the nineteenth century, ballad continues in loose
popular reference as synonymous with song. In the use
of specialists it is increasingly applied to narrative songs;
by the twentieth century, this has become the primary
meaning. The variant ballade, in the French and fourteenth-
century English sense, is revived, in the nineteenth
century, with the re-introduction of the fixed lyric type.
This sketch should have made clear that a definition of
the ballad as "a narrative lyric made and sung at the
dance and handed down in popular tradition " is not warranted,
for English ballads, by the history of the word.
For a valid etymological argument for ballad as a dance
366
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
song, one would have to derive the lyric-epic species, ballad,
from the fixed art species, the ballade. And there is no
sufficient proof that narrative lyrics were ever, anywhere,
at any time, by any people, made and sung at the dance.
The dance songs of primitive peoples are not narrative,
and the earliest English dance songs are not narrative.
Nor is this longer definition, also Professor Gummere's,9
better. " The popular ballad, as it is understood for the
purpose of these selections, is a narrative, in lyric form,
with no traces of individual authorship, and is preserved
mainly by oral tradition. In its earliest stages it was
meant to be sung by a crowd, and got its name from the
dance to which it furnished the sole musical accompaniment."
The first sentences are unimpeachable, but the
last is not. The lyric type to which reference is made did
not get its name until the late eighteenth century, and
then took it by borrowing or transference from songs of
another character, for which it was more appropriate. It
could not have taken its name from its origin, nor is its
name evidence as to its origin.
II
DANCE SONGS PROPER
The name actually given in England to dance songs of
the Middle Ages was " carol." We hear of carols before
we hear of ballads. There is a familiar picture of a highborn
throng singing to the caroling of a lady in the Chaucerian
Romance of the Rose:
The folk of which I telle you so,
Upon a carole wenten tho.
In The Popular Ballad, 1907, and " Ballads " in Warner's Library
of the World's Best Literature.
367
LOUISE POUND
A lady caroled hem that nyghte,
Gladness (the) blisful, the lyghte ....
743-6.
Tho mightest thou caroles seen,
And folk (ther) daunce and mery been
And make many a fair tourning
Upon the grene gras springing . . .
759-62.
The description is continued, 802-15, 850-54, and onwards,
anid teaches us no little concerning mediaeval dance customs.
Other passages, illustrating the use of carol for
dance song, in the next century, might be multiplied.
Many can be found in the dictionaries.
Suppose we try to put ourselves back into the old world
of dance songs. What kind of song was it which the lady
sang, and to which the others danced ? It might have been
a ballade, or roundel, or "virelai," or some type of art
lyric, with fixed refrain of regular recurrence; for such
lyrics were used for dancing.10 Or it might have had
greater suggestion of animation and movement, like many
examples afforded by Old French verse; 11 or it might
have been a gay love lyric. That it was anything like
King Estmere, or Thomnas Rymer, or Edward, or Lord
Randal, is most improbable. And when peasant throngs,
as over against aristocrats, danced in feudal times, they
did not dance, as I believe, to pieces of the lyric-epic type
just mentioned. Nor, as a general thing, the rule rather
than the exception, did they dance to their own improvisations.
It is more likely that they danced to current in-
10
Compare the quotation from Chaucer's Prologue to the Legend of
Good Women, note 7 preceding.
1 See the ballettes, in Jeanroy's Les Origines de la Po6sie Lyrique
en France au Moyen Age; and his letter, cited in Miss Cohen's The
Ballade, p. 15; also Joseph B6dier, Les Plus Anciennes Danses
Frangaises, Revue des Deux Mondes, Jan. 15, 1906, p. 398.
368
THE BATLT,AT) AND THE DANCE
herited songs, appropriate for dance purposes, with, possibly
enough, a bygone vogue in higher circles behind them;
that is, if we keep the analogies of existent dance songs
before us.
The following lines from Gawain Douglas point to the
dancing of his character,s mostly to lyric and amatory
matter: 12
Sum sang ryng-dansys ledis and roundis
With vocis schill, qhill all the dail resoundis
Quharso thai walk into thar carolyng
For amorus lays doith the Roches ryng:
And sang, 'the schyp salys our the salt faym
Will bryng thir merchandis and my lemman haym';
Sum other syngis, I wil be blyth and lycht
Mine hart is lent upon so gudly wight.
But we need not speak speculatively of mediaeval dance
songs. Many remain to us; and it is possible to derive
from them pretty clear ideas as to what the typical ones
were like. The well-known Sumer is icumen in of the
thirteenth century, might have been a dance song-its
animation and movement would make it appropriate; and
welcomes to ,spring, when dancing on the green or in the
grove could be resumed, were common for dance-song usage
in all parts of Europe.13 A classic example of a dance
song is that preserved by Fabyan (1516), celebrating the
victory of the Scots at Bannockburn: 14
Maydens of Englonde, sore may ye morne,
For your lemmans ye have loste at Bannockisborne!
With a hewe a lowe.
' iiJneid, Prologue of Bk. xII, p. 193.
13 ,, King Cnut's Song," of which a few lines remain, in thirteenthcentury
form, seems, from external and internal testimony, to have
been a rowing song, later used, possibly as a dance song. For its
bearing on ballad origins, see Modern Language Notes, March, 1919.
14 Concordance of Histories.
369
LOUISE POUND
What wenyth the Kynge of Englonde
So soon to have wonne Scotlonde:
With a rumby lowe.
This song, says Fabyan, " was after many days sung in
dances, in caroles of the maidens and minstrels of Scotland."
High-born maidens they were, too, most likely, not
peasants. It is appropriate for a dance song. It is lyrical,
not a verse story. The refrain is important, and holds it
together; but it is not narrative. It is nothing like a
Child piece, and never became like one, so far as there is
evidence.
Here are two songs which are presumably dance songs,
from the fifteenth century, the first unusually spirited: 15
Icham of Irlaunde,
Am of the holy londe
Of Irlande;
Good sir, pray I ye
For of Saynte Charite,
Come ant daunce wyt me
In Irlaunde.
The second also sounds suitable for its purpose:
Holi with his mery men they
can daunce in hall;
Ivy & her ientyl women can
not daunce at all,
But lyke a meyne of bullokes
in a water fall
Or on a whot somer's day
Whan they be mad all.
Nay, nay, ive, it may not be,
iwis;
For holy must haue the mastry,
as the maner is.
3 The first is from MS. Rawlinson, D. 913, f. 1, the second from Ms.
Balliol, 354, f. 229, b. They are cited by Professor Padelford, Cambridge
History of English Literature, II, xvi, p. 422.
370
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
Neither of these has the stanzaic pattern of the ballads.
A song certainly used as a dance song, and very animated
and lyrical, is the familiar The Hunt is Up of the time of
Henry VIII. The lines are short, and they throw the
hearer into the dancing mood. Some examples of Old
English dance songs, lively and appropriate in melody,
coming from the sixteenth century, are given in Chappell's
Old English Popular Music. An especially popular one
was John, Come Kiss Me Now.
Jon come kisse me now, now,
Jon come kisse me, now,
Jon, come kisse me by and by,
and make no more adow.
Both nobly-born groups from castle or court and village
peasant groups had their dance songs in the Middle Ages;
but surely these songs were not contemporaneously of
identical type; and it is very improbable that either type
was the Child type. There is a great deal of unmistakable
testimony as to the use of lyrical, song-like pieces, in
England, for dance songs. Next to none exists-not to
dwell upon their smaller intrinsic appropriateness-for
the staple use of narrative songs for such purpose.
There is evidence, from recent times, that in a few cases
well-known Child pieces have been ritualized into dance
songs. W. W. Newell speaks of Barbara Allen as used in
"play party " games in the early part of the nineteenth
century in New England. This ballad was an actress's
song, in the seventeenth century, when we first hear of it.
According to Professor Child, The Maid Freed from the
Gallows has known game-song usage.16 A version recovered
in Nebraska of The Two Sisters has obviously been
'See also Gilchrist and Broadwood, Journal of the Folk-Song
Society, v, pp. 228 ff.
371
LOUISE POUND
used as a dance song. The following are specimen
stanzas:
There was an old woman lived on the seashore,
Bow down
There was an old woman lived on the seashore,
Balance true to me
And she had daughters three or four,
Saying I'll be true to my love
If my love is true to me ....
The oldest and yongest were walking the seashore,
Bow down
The oldest and yongest were walking the seashore,
Balance true to me
The oldest pushed the yongest ore,
Saying I'll be true to my love
If my love is true to me ....
Such might not have been the case, yet one feels as though,
if any of these pieces had been orally preserved for some
generations as a dance song, for throngs on the village
green, the narrative element would have become yet more
fragmentary and inconsequential than it is in the quoted
dance-song version of The Two Sisters; the refrain meantime
assuming greater and greater prominence, and becoming
the stable and identifying feature of the song. For
dance songs proper, preserved in tradition, one expects a
strong refrain formula and a fading or utterly absent
narrative element.
That the Child pieces should be utilized, though infrequently,
as dance or game songs is not to be wondered at;
for popular songs of all kinds are so utilized occasionally,
alongside the more appropriate inherited dance songs.
Mediaeval dancing throngs, like their descendants now,
were no doubt likely to utilize any new song as a dance
song; as The Hunt is Up, of the time of Henry VIII,
according to The Complaynt of Scotland (1549). We are
told that in the fast-dying-out play-party or ring-dance
372
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
songs of our own rural communities, songs like John
Brown's Body, Captain Jinks, Little Brown Jug, and the
negro minstrel Jim along Jo, or Buffalo Gals, have been so
used. Indeed, the minstrel Old Dan Tucker has died out
of memory as a minstrel song, and has been kept alive as
a ring-game song. But if the Child ballads had been dance
songs par excellence, they would have come down to us
very differently in tradition. They played a large role
in popular recital and song in the Middle Ages, and had
the role they played as dance songs been proportionately
large, we should have unmistakable evidence of it; both
external testimonies, and evidence within the songs themselves.
We should know from the changes which they
developed in structure, from internal allusions to the
dance, and from the lore of traditional dance songs.
The dance may well have started many forms of
mediaeval lyrism with refrain formulas, whether of the
artistic or of the more popular type. Such derivation is
usually assigned to many of them. But it is the more
lyrical forms, rather than the verse-tales, which were most
closely bound up with the dance. We also associate with
the dance the spontaneous popular lyrics, dance songs
proper, which have been preserved for us here and there
in printed form, or those which have descended to us in
our ring-dance or game songs. Both the art lyrics with
refrains, and the more popular and impersonal lyrics with
refrains, like Sumer is icumen in, make their appearance
in literature before ballads of the Child type do.
If dance origin, or connection with the dance, is an
essential feature of "ballads," the name belongs with
better right to medieval art lyrics, to the surviving dance
songs proper, or to the type remaining in our play-party
songs and ring games, for which we have no specific name,
aside from the inclusive and ambiguous " folk-song." It
3
373
LOUISE POUND
is always a safe thing to test our theories as to older
conditions for popular song-mediaeval conditions, for
example-by usages in living society, where these afford
analogies; for human procedure, whether in language,
action, or song, has remained pretty constant from primitive
times onward. The ring games of young people of
the present day preserve many of the dramatic elements
of the communal dance, and the songs used in them seem
to preserve many of the features of the old dance songs.
It was the form of these songs, not that of the Child pieces,
which was conditioned by dance usage, and bears the
marks of such usage. If the Child pieces were primarily
evolved in the dance, they ought to show more signs of it,
and to be structurally more suitable; for instance, they
should suggest more swing and movement. And to think
of them as evolved via dances of commoners, not of aristocrats,
is difficult indeed.
Let us look at some of the dance songs remaining in
present tradition, and then apply our observations backward.
Children's game songs, and the play-party songs
of young folks on the green and in the parlor, in rural
communities, have been collected, in England chiefly by
Mrs. Gomme, and in the United States by W. W. Newell
for New England, and by many collectors for the central
west. It is generally agreed that our traditional dance
and game songs descend from those of the middle ages
and preserve many ancient features; especially the dances
in circle form which are executed to the singing of the
participants, not to the music of instruments. A number
of these pieces seem surely to be of high descent, and many
even reflect the old environment of grove and green. Some
of the texts sound as though they accompanied the dances
of the high born. Recall the many references to " ladies "
or "my fair lady "-" lady " is not yet a democratic noun
374
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE 375
in England-to kings and princes, or dukes, to solid gold
rings, to " He wore a star upon his breast," and the like.
Most of the songs suggest that they are movement songs
by their very wording, or structure. In most cases a
typical stanza only will be cited; for the songs are pretty
familiar, and they have become accessible, in late years,
in game books for school usage. The citations are from
lMrs. Gomme's Dictionary of British Folk-Lore.17
Here we go round the mulberry bush,
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush,
Here we go round the mulberry bush,
On a cold and frosty morning.
Mulberry Bush, I, p. 404.
Round and round the village,
Round and round the village,
Round and round the village,
As we have done before.
In and out the windows,
In and out the windows,
In and out the windows,
As we have done before.
Round and Round the Village, II, p. 122.
Tripping up the green grass,
Dusity, dusty day,
,Come all ye pretty fair maids,
Come and with me play ....
1Mrs. Gomme gives a list of dance games, II, p. 465, and of
circle-form games, with singing and action, II, p. 476. The songs
cited here are recognized by her as descending in traditional dance
usage.
"In den Kinderreigen," says Bohme, Geschichte des Tanzes, ch.
xvii, "werden wir noch alten tberresten von Tanzliedern der Vorzeit
begegnen." As ring-dances were given up by the mature they lingered
among children. One should not infer, however, that all children's
play songs were originally game or dance-songs of grown-ups. Childhood
is as ancient as maturity, and even the savagest children have
their own songs.
376 LOUISE POUND
Naughty man, he won't come out,
He won't come out, he won't come out,
Naughty man, he won't come out,
To help us in our dancing.
Green Grass, I, p. 156.
From another text of the same song:
Here we go up the green grass,
The green grass, the green grass,
Here we go up the green grass,
So early in the morning.
Ibid., I, p. 160.
A ring, a ring o' roses,
A pocket full of posies;
A curtsey in and a curtsey out,
And a curtsey all together.
A Ring of Roses, n, p. 108.
Green gravel green gravel, the grass is so green,
The fairest young damsel that ever was seen ....
Green Gravel, I, p. 171.
The material is too abundant and too familiar for much
illustration to be needed. A few more miscellaneous
stanzas are:
Here we come a-piping,
First in spring and then in May,
The Queen she sits upon the sand,
Fair as a lily, white as a wand:
King John has sent you letters three,
And begs you'll read them unto me,
We can't read one without them all,
So, pray, Miss Bridget, deliver the ball.
Queen Anne, II, p. 91.
Here's a soldier left his lone,
Wants a wife and can't get none,
Merrily go round and choose your own,
Choose a good one or else choose none,
Choose the worst or choose the best,
Or choose the very one you like best.
Here's a Soldier, I, p. 206.
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
Poor Mary, what're you weepin' for,
A-weepin' for, a-weepin' for,
Pray, Mary, what're you weepin' for?
On a bright summer's day.
Poor Mary Sits A-Weeping, II, p. 47.
The following dramatic song is listed by Mrs. Gomme as
a circle-form song; though she thinks it originally a
harvest-song:
Oats and beans and barley grow!
Oats and beans and barley grow!
Do you or I or anyone know
How oats and beans and barley grow?
First the farmer sows his seed,
Then he stands and takes his ease,
Stamps his foot, and claps his hands,
Then turns round to view the land
Waiting for a partner, waiting for a partner!
Open the ring and take one in.
Oats and Beans and Barley, Ii, p. 1.
Let us turn next to some of the ring-dance songs of
young people in the United States, surviving in our fastdying-
out play-party songs. The dancing, as in the
medieval dance songs, is to, the singing of the dancers, not
to instrumental music. Old World importations are easily
recognized. The refrains remain the same as in their
British cognates:
Come honey, my love, come trip with me,
In the morning early
Heart and hand we'll take our stand;
'Tis true, I love you dearly.
Weevilly Wheat, p. 18.78
Oh, the jolly old miller boy, he lived by the mill,
The mill turned round with a right good will,
And all that he made, he put it on the shelf,
18 Mrs. L. D. Ames, The Missouri Play-Party, Journal of American
Folk-Lore, xxiv (1911), p. 302.
378 LOUISE POUND
At the end of the year he was gaining in his wealth,
One hand in the hopper, and the other in the sack,
Gents step forward and the ladies step back.
The Jolly Old Miller, p. 19.19
Go out and in the window,
Go out and in the window,
Go out and in the window,
For we shall gain the day.
We're Marching Round the Levy, p. 20.20
Lost your partner, what'll you do?
Lost your partner, what'll you do?
Lost your partner, what'll you do?
Skip to ,My Lou, my darling.
Skip to My Lou.21
Come all ye young people that's wending your way,
And sow your wild oats in your youthful day,
For the daylight it passes, and night's coming on,
So choose you a partner, and be marching along, marching along.2
Professor E. F. Piper points out 23 that in songs which
describe the progress of a game, like The Miller Boy (The
Jolly Miller of Ars. Gomme) and Juniper Tree:
0 dear sister Phoebe, how happy were we,
The night we sat under the juniper tree!
The juniper tree, heigho, heigho!
The juniper tree, heigho!
Then rise you up, Sister, go choose you a man,
Go choose you the fairest that ever you can,
Then rise you up, Sister, and go, and go,
Then rise you up, Sister, and go ....
the form remains fairly constant. In such songs one
cannot easily change the words without changing the
formula. In the same way, Oats, pease, beans, remains
19 Ibid., p. 306. 20 Ibid., p. 306.
Ibid., p. 304. 2 Ibid., p. 314.
23 Some Play-Party Games of the Middle West, Journal of American
Folk-Lore, cix, p. 264.
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
fairly constant. Wevilly Wheat and Kilmacrankie perhaps
afford examples of " the decay of ballad matter under the
usage of the singing game, or dance." 24 Many of the
songs he lists show the influence of quadrilles and other
dances, illustrating once more the tendency of the imported,
or higher, or newer, to descend and linger among
the humbler and more remote. A few more illustrations
of genuine communal dance songs should suffice:
We come here to bounce around,
We come here to bounce around,
We come here to bounce around,
Tra, la, la, la!
Ladies, do, si, do,
Gents, you know,
Swing to the right,
And then to the left,
And all promenade.2
Up and down the center we go,
Up and down the center we go,
Up and down the center we go,
(This cold and frosty morning.
Chase that Squirrel.
When popular songs, or street songs, are utilized as
dance songs, they are handled like this:
Captain Jinks
I'm Captain Jinks of the horse marines,
I feed my horse on corn and beans,
And court young ladies in their teens,
For that's the style of the army.
This seems the natural process; but compare Professor Gummere's
present theories of ballad growth and "improvement," cited
a little farther on. The process which, to collectors of folk dancesongs,
brings ballad degradation, to Professor Gummere is the process
by which are evolved "good " ballads. At other times, however,
he still speaks occasionally of the " degradation " and " decay " due
to tradition.
25 Ames, p. 296. 26 Piper, p. 266.
379
LOUISE POUND
We'll all go round and circle left,
We'll circle left, we'll circle left,
We'll all go round and circle left,
For that's the style of the army.
The ladies right and form a ring,
And when they form you give'm a swing,
And when you swing you give'm a call,
And take your lady and promenade all.2
Jim along Jo
Hi, Jim along, Jim along, Josie
Hi, Jim along, Jim, along Jo
Hi, Jim along, Jim along Josie
Hi, Jim along, Jim along Jo.28
Little Brown Jug
Sent my brown jug down in town,
Sent my brown jug down in town,
Sent my brown jug down in town,
So early in the morning.9
Not one of these pieces is a ballad, just as the vocal
accompaniments to old British dances round the Maypole
were not ballads. One of the latter has survived in the
ring games of the Georgia negroes, again illustrating the
survival, in outlying places, among the humble and remote,
of matter assimilated from the usage, in bygone vogue, of
people of another social class:
All around the May-pole,
The May-pole, the May-pole,
All around the May-pole.
Now, Miss Sally, won't you bow? etc.3
27 Ames, p. 309. 8 Piper, p. 268.
2 Goldy M. Hamilton, The Play-Party in Northeast Missouri,
Journal of American Folk-Lore, xxvii, pp. 269, 297 (The Girl I Left
Behind Me), p. 301.
80 Loraine -Darby, Ring Games from Georgia, Journal of American
Folk-Lore, cxvI (1917), p. 218.
English Folk-Song and Dance, by F. Kidson and Mary Neal, 1915,
contains some material on English folk-dances, with bibliography.
380
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
Repetition and interweaving of lines, is much more pervasive
and essential in communal dance songs than in
pieces of the Child type, and it is of a different kind. It
shows us, however, the type of repetition to be expected in
such dance songs. There is no evidence that ballads are
ever built up from dance songs, but a great deal that dance
songs may be built upon popular songs of all types. Mrs.
Gomme notes that many English circle-game songs have
evidently been derived from love ballads, drinking songs,
and toasts, and that some of the dance games are of this
origin.
If the ballads had been used typically in popular dances,
collections like those made by Mrs. Gomme and MIr. Newell
should reveal many traces of such usage. On the other
hand, when we do not assume that ballads were the staple
material of mediaeval dance songs, what has come down
to us in tradition is of just the character which we should
expect. There are many "situation" songs among these
traditional dance and game songs, and there are dialogue
pieces; 31 but one finds no traces of the development of
dialogue songs into ballads proper, or of the " divorcing"
of dance songs from the dance, on the way toward becoming
lyric-epics.
When we examine genuine dance songs, it becomes clear
that their most important element is the repetitional
element. The texts of most of them shift even more than
do the ballad texts, for there is no story to hold them
together; but the repeated element, or the refrain, is stable.
They are lyrical, and they tempt to movement. And, as
suggested above, no matter how long they have been pre-
'1 Mrs. Gomme thinks that the dialogue songs are of later development,
ii, p. 500. Professors W. M. Hart and G. H. iStempel think
that dialogue songs represent a very early stage, in the history of
ballads proper.
381
LOUISE POUND
served in usage as dance songs, they have never developed
into anything like Child ballads, nor have they been transformed
into narrative pieces of any type. They show no
signs of the evolution sketched by Professor Gummere, in
his chapter in the Cambridge History of English Literar
ture:
The structure of the ballad-what makes it a species, the elements
of it-derives from choral and dramatic conditions; what gives it its
peculiar art of narrative is the epic process working by oral tradition
and gradually leading to a new structure.
Or in his The Popular Ballad: 32
? . . the course of the popular ballad is from a mimetic choral situation,
slowly detaching itself out of the festal dance and coming into
the reminiscent ways of tradition in song and recital.
The songs cited in the foregoing pages have survived
under the right conditions, oral and communal, but they
show no signs of an "epic process" leading to a new
structure. The Child ballads, on the other hand, show
something quite different from the dance songs. For
them, the refrain is the variable element. Their texts
remain as constant as the conditions of transmission allow;
but the refrain does not remain constant within the same
ballad. The test of living folk-song, examination of the
kind of thing which the folk can improvise now, and the
character of the songs which are genuinely and primarily
dance songs, preserved in oral transmission, ought to show
the fatuity of seeking an identical genesis for these types
and for pieces like the English and Scottish popular
2 P. 84. It is rather surprising to find, on pp. 68-69, that " narrative
is not a fixed fundamental, primary fact in the ballad scheme."
This means that the very thing that makes a ballad a ballad, not
verse of some other lyric type, is not a fundamental or primary
feature of its structure.
382
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
ballads.33 It is a safer hypothesis that the Child type of
piece, once established in popularity, might at times be
fitted to well-known dance tunes, or be utilized, like nearly
any other kind of song, as a dance song, than that dancegenesis
evolved the Child type-that the Child type represents,
par excellence among poetic types, an evolution from
dance origin.
III
NARRATIVE SONGS AND THE DANCE
We have seen that the most suitable dance song is in
general of another type than narrative song. To begin
with, primitive peoples do not dance to narrative songs;
in fact they hardly know the latter. "The earliest universal
form of poetry " is just what the ballad-meaning by
ballad narrative song-is not. There are no primitive
narrative songs, to which savage people dance while they
sing; they dance to ballads only if by ballads we mean
songs. Testimony concerning the Botocudos, or similar
tribes, shows only that primitive peoples dance to very
brief choral lyrics.34 But it is not the origin of the lyric
3 Andrew Lang, in his article on Ballads in the Encyclopcedia
Britannica wrote: "It is natural to conclude that our ballads too
were first improvised and circulated in rustic dances." He held at
the time the views still held by the majority of American scholars.
But in his article on the same subject in the last edition of Chambers's
Cyclopcedia of English Literature (1904), he has given up this
theory of ballad origins, and indeed, from his article, is hardly
recognizable as still a communalist.
3 Strictly, what are called " dances " among savages are in large
part drama, and there is abundance of histrionic or mimetic action
accompanied by songs of which action is the illustration, i. e., there
are songs suggesting ideas, and these are to some extent enacted.
Over against these are the rhythmic chants and ejaculatory refrains
that form simple motor suggestions or reverberations. The latter
are the only ones " danced" in our modern sense of "dance."
383
LOUISE POUND
in general, even if it sprang from the dance, instead of
being as 'old as the dance, which is in question; nor are
we concerned with the origin of various mediaeval lyric
types which probably had their genesis in the dance. To
affirm that the lyric-epic type represented by the English
and Scottish ballads developed from the dance is another
thing, and not to be proved by the same materials.
It would be going much too far, would indeed be contrary
to the facts, to affirm that there is never dancing to
narrative songs. Among European peoples where the
narrative song has established itself as a leading type of
popular song, instances of it occur, and there should be
occasional instances of it anywhere among advanced
peoples.35 This should be especially true of the shorter
and more tuneful ballads. There was perhaps some
dancing to heroic narrative songs, if not to " histories,"
probably to romantic tales, in England. We have seen
that in American ring-dance or "play-party" games, the
descendants of mediaeval dance-modes, narrative songs are
utilized occasionally, as Barbara Allen's Cruelty, referred
to earlier, to accompany the dance. Songs of all types
have undergone this experience, probably ballads along
with the others, especially when the words were fitted to
some familiar dance tune. But in a majority of cases the
narrative pieces would be less suitable. Such utilization-
6 " Narrative, too, are most of the dance songs in a modern Russian
cottage," writes Professor Gummere, Old English Ballads, p. lxxix,
and cites Ralston, Songs of the Russian People 1872. But the
examples given by Ralston are not narrative; they are not ballads
but lyrics, and of the expected type. Professor Gummere's solitary
example of a dance ballad is from the Ditmarsh folk of Holstein,
but even that is more lyric than lyric-epic. It labels itself as a
dance song, and might well be an older song which has been fitted
to the dance, not one made in the dance. The Popular Ballad, p. 97,
footnote.
384
THE RATJTAD AND THE DANCE
this is my point-would not represent an original stage,
but would be exceptional rather than n'ormal.
Our best evidence for early European dance songs comes
from France. The French dance songs which remain to
us are lyric, not lyric-epic, and they are aristocratic.36
Indeed, admits Professor Gummere, " all the Old French
dances were aristocratic to the point of making modern
investigators doubt the existence of the 'popular'
customs." 37 English dance songs have already been
examined. Let us turn to Icelandic usage. Vigfusson 38
tells us that the " dance, in full use accompanied by songs
which are described as loose and amorous "-lyrical pieces
these seem to be-appears at the end of the eleventh century.
Icelandic danz comes to mean song; and flimt,
loose song, and danz are synonymous words. The rimur,
or epical paraphrases, with matter like that of our ballads,
first appear about the middle of the fourteenth century.
Almost all Icelandic sagas and romances, even the historical
books of the Bible, were turned, we are told, into such
lays or ballads. " The heathen heroic poems were certainly
never used," says Vigfusson, "to accompany a dance.
Their flow and meter are a sufficient proof of that." The
word dance points, wherever found, to a new fashion introduced
from France and spreading quickly over Europe.
The old words would not serve for this new French art,
which brought its own name even to Iceland. Icelandic
evidence is the earliest that we have for the dance songs
of Scandinavian countries, and the early Icelandic dance
songs were, it would appear, lyrical and amatory, like the
Jeanroy, Les Origines de la Poesie Lyrique en France au Moyen
Age, 1904; B6dier, Les Plus Anciennes Danses Francaises, Revue des
Deux Mondes, Jan. 15, 1906, p. 398.
37 The Popular Ballad, p. 97.
88 Cleasby-Vigfusson, Iceklndic Dictionary, under danz.
385
LOUISE POUND
early French and English dance songs. The employment
of heroic romantic narrative material belongs to a later
stage.
In Denmark, courtly society of the later middle ages
danced to narrative ballads, and the pieces closely resemble
the Child ballads. But Danish literature seems to know
no other song, no body of purely lyrical movement songs.
The wealth of lyric poetry appearing in England and
France and Germany was unknown in Denmark. It had
no erotic lyric poetry. The ballad was practically the
only form, we are told, in which the people expressed their
feelings. The Danish ballads are very valuable. "We
possess," says Steenstrup, " 40 ballad manuscripts of the
period prior to 1750, while Sweden possesses 10, the oldest
antedated by many Danish." The Danish ballads were
preserved by high-born ladies of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, who did fine service in collecting into
manuscripts the songs current in the castles of the period.
The Danish pieces show their connection with the dance,
as do most dance songs, in their very texts, and they even
show how the dance was conducted. Here are some
specimen lines: 39
Midsummer night upon the sward,
Knights and squires were standing guard.
In the grove a knightly dance they tread
With torches and garlands of roses red.
In sable and martin before them all
Dances Sir Iver, the noblest of all.
To the king in his tower strong
Floats the noise of the dancing throng.
89These and other examples are cited by iSteenstrup, The Mediceval
Popular Ballad, p. 12. Translated by E. G. Cox.
386
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
"Who is yon knight that leads the dance,
And louder than all the song he chants ?"
Proud Elselille, No. 220.
Now longs the king himself
To step the dance;
The hero Hagen follows after,
For them the song he chants.
So stately dances Hagen.
Hagen's Dance, No. 465.
It was Mettelil, the count's daughter,
She stepped the dance for them.
No. 261.
There dances Sir Stig, as light as a wand,
With a silver cup in his white hand.
No. 76.
An account of the Ditmarsh folk of Holstein by Johann
Adolfi (Neocorus) written in 1598, says that the people
have adapted nearly all their songs to the dance, in order
to remember them better, and to keep them current.40 The
dances he describes are like the Danish dances, with singing
by a "foresinger," and choral response and refrain.
There were also, as in our own ring-dance songs, whole
pieces where all the participants sang as they danced.
There is little or nothing of the Danish type of selflabeled
dance songs among the Child pieces. All but a
few of the Danish ballads have refrains. Those lacking
them are mostly late importations or translations. The
movement is often nimble and rapid. On the other hand,
of 1250 versions of the English ballads, about 300, i. e., a
fourth, have refrains.41
4o Chronik des Landes Dithmarschen, edited by F. C. Dahlmann,
I, p. 177: "Nichtess weiniger isst tho vorwunderen (den up dat de
Gesenge edder Geschichte deste ehr gelehret unnd beter beholden
worden unnd lenger im Gebruke bleven, hebben se de alle fast den
Dentzen bequemet), dat se nha Erfordering der Wortt and Wise des
Gesanges," etc.
41 The Popular Ballad, p. 74.
387
LOUISE POUND
As to origins, the Danish ballads do not help the communalists,
but the contrary. The dancing for which they
were used-some were employed for entertainment of
other kinds, like riding or rowing-was the dancing of the
high-born; both in content and movement, they seem suitable
for this purpose. Both Grundtvig and Steenstrup
seem to be satisfied with the hypothesis of minstrel authorship
for them. They offer no suggestion of the responsibility,
for the type, of festal village throngs, or of the
throngs of primitive times. And it is interesting to note
that when Steenstrup seeks to restore the Danish ballads
to their older and truer form, and to rid them of spurious
accretions, one of his first steps is to shear away various
types of repetition, as " padding." 42
At this point, something should, no doubt, be said with
reference to the ballads of the Faroe Islands. They have
been brought much into the foreground, in the discussions
of the genesis of the ballads, and afford to communalists
their chief stronghold; 43 although Steenstrup advises
caution 44 in using them for help in understanding older
ballad forms. Their recollection of Saga and Eddie
poetry is strong, and this knowledge must have blended
with knowledge of the poetry of the middle ages. Moreover
popular ballads, he says, were taken up by priests and
learned people. Several types of verse are to be noted in
Faroe folk-song; but mostly the introduction of Danish
ballads, supposed to have begun in the sixteenth century,
has affected them. In the Faroes, in the preceding century
at least, as, in less degree, in our own fast-dying-out ringgame
or play-party songs of young people, throng dancing
42 The Medieval Popular Ballad, pp. 75-77.
43 The ballad-genesis is more plainly proved for the Faroes than
for any other modern people " (Gummere, The Popular Ballad, p. 69).
'See The Mediceval Popular Ballad, p. 7.
388
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
of the old circle type, with linked hands, was still preserved.
The dancing is to singing rather than to instrumental
music, again as in our ring-games; and as in the
latter, all take part in the singing and all join in the
refrain. Sometimes spontaneous improvised lines or
verses, still as in our ring-games, arise out of the occasion
itself.
The classic report of the Faroe dances was made by
Pastor Lyngbye in 1822, who left descriptions of them.
Their dance-themes are derived from Norwegian or
Icelandic sources, a favorite subject being the "hero
Sigurd." They dance to historical ballads, like the
Danes,45 but to religious and lampooning ballads as well.
There are many lyric-epics, like the Danish ones we have
mentioned. Indeed, the Icelanders know and use ballads
in the Danish language. The fishermen also have rude
dances, sometimes to songs of their own creation. Pastor
Lyngbye tells of one, often utilized for argument by
Professor Gummere, concerning a fisherman, pushed by
his comrades into the center of the throng, while they
improvised verses upon a recent mishap which had befallen
him. The text of the song is not preserved, so we cannot
place its type. We have no right to call it a ballad; most
probably it was not. From what we are told of them,
4 Our earliest testimony concerning the Faroe dances is to be
found in the Faroa Reserata of Lucas Debes, Kopenhagen, 1673. He
writes, p. 251, that "the inhabitants of the Faroe Islands are little
inclined toward useless pastimes or idle gaiety, but content themselves
mostly with singing psalms . . . only at marriages or at
Christmas time do they seek amusement in a simple circle dance,
one grasping another by the hand while they sing old hero-songs."
Pastor Lyngbye's much-quoted Fcer0iske Quceder, etc., was published
in 1822. See also N. Annandale, The Faroes and Iceland, Oxford,
1905. The whole matter of Faroe folk-song was cleared up satisfactorily
by H. Thuren in his Folke Saangen paa Fcerorne, 1908.
4
389
LOUISE POUND
these improvised fishermen pieces sound analogous to our
own ranch-hand, cowboy, lumbermen, or negro improvisations,
or to the occasional spontaneous ventures of our
own ring-dances. They are upon events of the moment,
of interest to members of the circle involved. They are
fashioned on or are imitations of, songs of better type, of
higher descent, and they are markedly crude and poor.
Further, the Faroe fishermen pieces are sung to hymn tunes
or to familiar airs, not to invented melodies, or to traditional
melodies-not at least to melodies traditional from
ancient times.46 The Faroe songs teach us nothing as to
the genesis of the lyric-epic type, for they themselves
preserve and continue imported fashions. All in all, there
is nothing to be learned from the Faroe dance-song customs
that runs contrary to evidence from other sources. Rather
do they bear it out. And certainly we cannot look to them
as mirroring par excellence what is oldest.47
The type of song now used by Shakers, Holy Rollers, and other
dancing religious sects ought to be a point of corroborative interest.
They probably resemble the (Salvation Army type of 7 hymn. For German, an excellent display of dance-song material may be
found in Franz Bohme's Geschichte des Tanzes in Deutschland,
Leipzig, 1886. iIn chapter xv, "i ber Tanzlieder," he groups his
material into classes, to show the varied character of the content.
He gives amatory songs first place, as the most frequent accompaniment
of the dance, with many examples. Historical songs, old hero
songs, and mythic pieces (his second class), were sung, he thinks,
in the oldest period, for the dance. But his evidence for this is the
hero songs of the Faroes, concerning which we have evidence from
the seventeenth century, and the testimony of Neocorus (1598) concerning
the Ditmarsh folk of Holstein. The bearing of this evidence
has already been considered. The third class he names consists of
ballads or epic folk-songs, for which his examples for Germany are
meager. This class, he says, was "in full bloom" in the Romance
languages and in England, as sung at the dance-a hasty and mistaken
generalization. A fourth class consists of lampoons, vituperations,
satires, etc., abundantly illustrated. This is the class of dance
390
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
In the Child pieces, the story, not suggestion of movement
or suitability for movement, is the main thing. When
a refrain is present, the only sure inference to be made
from its presence is that the piece was made to be sung,
or possibly to be recited orally. The refrain is present in
mediseval as in modern songs which have no connection
with the dance. But the refrain itself is not an essential
in the Clhild pieces as it is in the Danish; we have just
pointed out that hardly a fourth, by Professor Gummere's
count, have refrains. In those which are surely old, like
songs which is often improvised. His next class consists of bird and
animal songs, as of the nightingale, cuckoo, heron, owl, fox, etc.
Riddle, wishing, and wager songs, and (rarely) religious songs constitute
the last classes. In the second part of his history, the author
prints 356 specimens of dance songs and melodies, in chronological
sequence. Among these illustrative dance songs, the epic folk-song,
the ballad of the Child type, is the type playing the least conspicuous
role. How any scholar who examines Bihme's display of mediseval
dance-song material-,it is strikingly parallel to English dance-song
material-can retain the belief that lyric-epic pieces like the Child
pieces were conditioned first of all by mediaeval dances, is hard to
understand. They seem to be a lyric type least to be associated with
such usage.
It is true that Professor Bohme, whose book was published in
1886, begins with the view that "Tanzlieder waren die ersten
Lieder," "Beim Tanze wurden die altesten epischen Dichtungen
(erzihlende Volkslieder) gesungen, durch den Tanz sind sie veranlasst
worden . . .," "Die ilteste Poesie eines jeden Volkes ist eine
Verbindung von Tanz, Spiel, und Gesang." But his material does
not bear out his preliminary statements, nor is he insistent upon the
narrative song as the earliest dance song, as his book proceeds. He
tells us, p. 230, that we learn the origin and the form of dance songs
best from the South German Schnadahiipfln, short two- or four-line
songs, to familiar melodies, often improvised (see his fourth class)
by singers and dancers. Among these songs, the heroic element
hardly appears, and the historic never. A careful survey of the
citations in Bihme's Geschichte des Tanzes should disillusion believers
in the ballad as the characteristic type of mediaeval dance song,
or as the leading lyric type of dance genesis.
391
LOUISE POUND
The Battle of Otterbourne, The Hunting of the Cheviot, or
Judas, no refrain is present. It is not then a constant
feature, but occurs variably. Nor is it constant even for
individual ballads, but fluctuates, apparently, with the
melodies to which they were sung. If the Ohild ballad, or
its archetype, was a dance song, the refrain formula ought
to persist above all else, through oral tradition and dance
usage, as it does in the dance or ring-game songs of which
we are sure. It is what should identify the individual
ballads. Moreover, refrains appear very abundantly in
the later pieces and in broadsides; that is, they are not
distanced, the farther we get from the hypothetical dancethrongs
with which they are supposed to be bound up.
When the English and Scottish ballads do use the
refrain, they use it in the art way, not in the folk way.
It is something extraneous, introduced from the outside,
varying for the same ballad, subject to modification or
replacement at the will of the singers, not part of the
fabric of the song. And like the refrains of the art songs
of the middle ages, carols, or roundels, or ballades, it comes
at regular intervals. It is not handled like the repetitions
of traditional dance songs, usually the most stable element
of the song, nor in the crude way of much of the repetition
in unlettered folk-improvisations. Nor should it be confused
with the one-word and two-word songs chanted in the
choral repetitions of savage tribes. The latter are not
refrains, but the whole song.
Refrains and choral repetitions are more necessary to
other kinds of medieval lyric verse than they are to
ballads. It is not, in fact, the presence of a refrain, or
of choral repetition that makes the Child pieces ballads.
What is essential, if pieces are to be classified as ballads,
is that they tell a story in verse. If they are ballads of
the Child type they probably exhibit structural or lyrical
392
THE BAT,TJAD AND THE DANCE
repetition in their presentation of narrative material; but
no amount of structural or lyrical repetition makes a piece
a ballad unless a narrative element is present. Repetition
of both types is a striking characteristic, for example, of
revival hymns, and these had their origin neither as ballads
nor as dance songs; 48 and it is characteristic, most of all,
of game and dance songs proper; yet these are not ballads.
In practice, it is conceded by everybody, communalists
too, that a lyric may have a refrain, or repeated lines, as
do many of the lyrics from the Elizabethan dramatists,
yet not be a ballad. Sumer is icumen in has a refrain, but
is not a ballad; the Bannockburn song has a refrain, but
is not a ballad. On the other hand, a lyric may have no
refrain or choral repetition, like King Estmere, or Thomas
Rymer, yet be a ballad. As already pointed out, the name
ballad attached itself to the type of lyric which is pretty
far removed from the mediaeval lyric type of early dance
employment. If we are to insist on a dance element in a
lyric which we are to classify as a ballad, we might apply
the name, with better right, to art lyrics, or to folk lyrics
of the fluid traditional type, held to unity and memorableness
by the refrain, which persist in the ring-games of
young people and in children's songs; or we should restrict
it to genuine dance songs, of which we have many, of
equal age with the majority of ballads which have come
down to us.
In the English and Scottish ballads, dancing plays
hardly any role. It is referred to a fair number of times;
but as a recreation for the lords and ladies who appear
'ICompare "Incremental repetition made up the whole frame of
The Maid Freed from the Gallows simply because such ballads were
still part and parcel of the dance" (The Popular Ballad, p. 117).
Repetition is emphasized as the most characteristic feature of ballads,
pp. 117-134, etc.
393
LOUISE POUND
in the ballads it plays a less striking part than does the
game of ball, its rival and a recreation with which it was
often combined. It is far less frequent than reference to
songs and to minstrelsy. Mostly the allusions are to
dancing of the more modern type, accompanied by the
music of instruments; and they bear testimony to the
coming of dance-modes from France. A few typical
passages are the following:
Seek no minstrels to play, mother,
No dancers to dance in your room;
But tho your son comes, Leesome Brand,
Yet he comes sorry to the town.
Leesome Brand.
There was two little boys going to the school,
And twa little boys they be,
They met three brothers playing at the ba,
And ladies dancing, hey.
The Two Brothers.
I'm gauin, I'm gauin,
I'm gauin to Fraunce, lady,
When I come back,
I'll learn ye a dance, lady.
Rob Roy.
Another text ends:
I hae been in foreign lands,
And served the King o' France, ladie;
We will get bagpipes,
And we'll hae a dance, ladie.
Or:
Get dancers here to dance, she sais,
And minstrels for to play;
For here's my young son, Florentine,
Come here wi me to stay.
The Earl of Mar's Daughter.
Two might have reference to dancing of the older type:
Her father led her through the ha'
Her mither danced before them a'.
The Cruel Brother.
394
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
When dinner it was past and done,
And dancing to begin
We'll go take the bride's maidens,
And we'll go fill the ring.
0 ben then cam the auld French lord,
Saying, Bride, will ye dance with me?
'Awa, awa, ye auld French lord,
Your face I wowna see.'
Fair Janet.
Fair Janet, with its theme of probation by dancing, closely
resembles certain Scandinavian and German ballads, but
has lessened the part played by the dance test.
The internal evidence that the English and Scottish
ballads were used as dance songs is very meager, compared,
for example, with the very abundant internal evidence
that they were sung. But in practice, few scholars would
now make special claim that they were used as dance songs.
No doubt they were, here and there, as in late times, we
have seen, were Barbara Allen and The Two Sisters, in
this country. The refrains of several might connect them
with the dance, as Mrs. Brown's The Bonny Birdy (no.
82), or The Maid and the Palmer (no. 21). But most
sound more suitable for recital or singing than to accompany
rhythmic motion. Fitted to dance tunes they might
be used as dance songs, but typically they were composed
for other purposes. It is pretty hard for the student of
real dance song to feel that the mass of the Child pieces, or
their archetypes, developed from the folk-dance. Mediaeval
rural throngs, like their descendants to-day, probably
danced mostly to something already familiar, and in itself
suitable; more rarely they may have danced to their
own spontaneous but inconsequential and impermanent
improvisations. The typical mediaeval dance song was,
however, more lyric than epic. The English and Scottish
ballads are as epic as they are lyric.
395
LOUISE POUND
There is a classic passage in The Complaynt of Scotland,
49 1549, by which we can check pretty well our
assumptions and conclusions. The author of The Cornplaynt
makes his "shepherds" (pretty literary and
classical shepherds they are, genuine shepherds of the
"Golden Age") tell tales, sing songs, and afterwards
dance in a ring. Among the 48 tales with which they
amused themselves, alongside Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,
Arthurian romance, and classical stories, as of Hercules,
or of Hero and Leander, are listed the tale of " robene
hude and litil ihone," and the tale of the " zong tamlene"
(Tamlane). Among the 36 songs, are the Henry VIII
Pastance with gude companye, The frog cam to the myl
dur, The battel of the hayrlau, and The hunttis of cheuetprobably
the song that Sidney praised; also The perssee
and the mongumrye met, i. e., The Battle of Otterbourne.
The Child pieces referred to thus far have been either told
or sung, as we should expect. Then comes a list of 30
dance pieces-most of them obviously such as Al cristyn
mennis dance, The gosseps dance, The alman haye, The
dance of kcyrlrynne, Schaik a trot, etc. The list is headed
by The Hunt Is Up, the tune of which is well fitted for
dancing. No Child pieces appear. Number 92, Robene
hude, is probably a chanson de Robin (see Cotgrave), or
Robin Hood and Maid Marian piece. There were many
Robin Hood dances, and they are not to be identified with
the Robin Hood ballads. Number 93, Thom of lyn is not
the ballad Tamlane, listed among the recited pieces, but
the very different and wholly appropriate song of Young
Thomlin, licensed in 1557-58. Number 108, Ihonne
ermistrangis dance, is the one possible Child piece of the
4 Edited by J. A. H. Murray, for the Early English Text Society,
1872, vol. x, p. 63.
396
THE BALLAD AND THE DANCE
30; but neither Mr. Furnivall nor Mr. Murray believes
it to be identical with any of the four ballads involving
Armstrongs (Johnny Ar trong, Johnny Armstrong's
Last Goodnight, Jock o' the Side, Dick of the Cow) which
have come down to us. The Armstrong ballads in Child's
collection are hardly suitable as dance songs.
Should not the Complaynt's roll of tales, songs, and
dance songs, read very differently, had the English and
Scottish ballads been the typical songs for the dances of
rural throngs ? The ballads which are mentioned are not
mentioned as dance songs, and they are in highly literary
and aristocratic company. The dance songs which are
mentioned seem to be exactly of the suitable type which
we should expect.
Much dance-song material, primitive, mediaeval, and
modern-the latter in our still-existent ring-dance songsis
available, from which to make observation and to generalize.
The tendencies to be inferred from it are exactly
the reverse of those assumed by Professor Gummere, and
currently accepted in America.50
1. When songs already existent are used as communal
dance songs, they tend to retrogade to simple repetitions
of striking lines or titles. If narrative, they are likely to
lose the story. As for primitive dance songs, they are
never narrative.
2. The repetitions of communal dance songs are much
more abundant than the repetitions of the ballads, and
6 That belief in dance origin, emergence from the illiterate, communal
improvisation, epic development, and the priority of dialogue
and situation songs, has current American acceptance, is shown by
the fact that such belief is set forth, without hesitation or question,
in the two latest American ballad anthologies: Professor W. M.
Hart's English Popular Ballads, 191G, and Professor G. H. Stempel's
A Book of Ballads, 1917.
39Y
LOUISE POUND
they belong more genuinely to the fabric of the song. They
are not of the symmetrical art type, of regular recurrence,
the refrain type proper, but are cruder, or more pervading.
Often some striking formula recurs over and over, and
is the main song. For ballads proper, the refrain is not
the most stable element but the most fluctuating.
3. There is no tendency for dance songs, whether situation
songs or dialogue songs, to develop epic elements or
to become " refined and ennobled by tradition," i. e., to
become real ballads. Real ballads used as dance songs
tend to decay, through the wearing process of dance usage.
Songs used as dance songs do not tend to develop into
ballads, but rather to become simplified to some striking
line or formula.
4. As regards form, genuine communal dance songs are
not necessarily or invariably in ballad stanza, but of more
fluid and variable pattern. They exhibit no one fixed
stanzaic type. Sometimes they consist of but one short
stanza.
We are hardly justified by the evidence, then, in saying
that the English ballads represent a lyric type which has
been " divorced from the dance, originally their vital condition."
There is no testimony that the structure of the
English ballads rests upon the dance, but rather the contrary;
for theirs is not the structure :of the normal and
more appropriate dance song. That the dance songs of
primitive peoples, and the earliest dance songs that we
have in English, and our latest surviving dance songs are
all three lyric, not lyric-epic, does not point to the origin
of the English ballad type by " divorce from the dance."
There are three forms of psychic suggestion in poetry;
first, emotional, as in the simple lyric; second, ideational,
as in the narrative; third, motor, as in the refrain type,
coupled with simple imperatives. The first and second
398
THE BALLAD AND TIIE DANCE
types may be associated with action in the sense of conduct,
and they are so associated in primitive poetry. They
are sometimes continued traditionally in what are called
" dances," but are really drama; that is, they become
histrionic. The third type is the only form fundamentally
associated with the dance, and it is psychologically simple,
i. e., presentative not representative. This psychical distinction
should be borne in mind in study of the subject.
Not all lyrics tempt to movement, and narratives (ballads
proper) never, one would think, tempt to measured movement
of the dance type.
Association with the dance of the festal multitude may
be in place for the French ballade, or for the Italian
ballata, but our own ballads do not include pieces which
were primarily dance songs. That the English ballad type
had its genesis in the folk-dance seems to be not only
unproved but unlikely. Those who believe in dance genesis
for the lyric in general may find in the dance the ultimate
genesis of the lyric-epic type which we call ballad. But,
in that case, no attempt should be made so sharply to
differentiate the ballad in origins from other types of lyric
verse. Those scholars who hold both positions at the same
time, affirming that ballads originated as dance songs, yet
that they were manifestly composed in some way utterly
different from other lyric verse, are maintaining positions
which are incompatible.
To the present writer, the gift of song seems as instinctive
in man .as the gift of rhythmic motion, not a development
from the latter. Both were his from the first. No
festal dancing chorus of a unanimous throng is needed to
account for the song of birds, and song, the expression of
emotion, not motion, may well be as instinctive in man as
in birds. Other lyric forms, as lullabies, conjuring or
healing songs, labor songs, love songs, are as primitive as
399
400 LOUISE POUND
choral dance songs, not offshoots of the latter. Children
sing instinctively, and they make their own songs, without
waiting for the communal inspiration of group dancing;
and it is commonly assumed that the development of the
child mirrors that of the race. The beliefs that from the
dance emerged music and rhythmical utterance, or song,
that dance songs are the earliest lyrics, that narrative
songs are the earliest dance songs, and that the English
ballad type had its genesis in the dance, are neither borne
out by the evidence, nor intrinsically probable.
LOUISE POUND.

Footnotes:

1. See The Beginnings of Poetry, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xxxnI (1917), pp. 201 ff.; The Southwestern Cowboy Songs and the English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Modern Philology, xI (1913), pp. 195ff.; New-World Analogues of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads, The Mid-West Quarterly, in (1916), pp. 171 ff.; Ballads and the Illiterate, ibid., v, p. 4, etc.

2. Although the meaning narrative song gained headway in the eighteenth century, it was not very clearly recognized in the New English Dictionary, 1888. The entry given fifth place is "A simple spirited poem in short stanzas, originally a 'ballad' in sense  3 [popular songs-often broadsides] in which some popular story is graphically narrated. (This sense is essentially modern.) " The New Tebster International, 1910, also gives this meaning fifth place, but contributes clarity: "A popular kind of short narrative poem adapted for singing; especially a romantic poem of the kind characterized by simplicity of structure and impersonality of authorship." In The Standard Dictionary, 1917, is entered as the first meaning of the word: "A simple lyrical poem telling a story or legend, usually of popular origin; as the ballad of Chevy Chase." Here the older order of definition is reversed, recognizing the change established long before in usage.

3. The Danish name for pieces of English lyric-epic type is folkeviser.
The Spanish name is romances. The German usage of Ballade
follows the English; German poets derived much of their balladry
from England. The name is applied to short poems in which the
narrative element is as important as the lyrical. See F. A. Brockhaus,
Konversations-Lexicon, Berlin and Vienna, 1894. Pieces of
the English lyric-epic type have no specific name in French. They
are grouped under the large class of chansons populaires, a name as
inclusive as our "folk-song." But see also note 6.

4Dante, for example, assigns ballata a lower plane than song
proper or sonnet on account of its dependence on the aid of dancers.