The Interdependence of Ballad Tunes and Texts
by Bertrand H. Bronson
California Folklore Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Jul., 1944), pp. 185-207
The Interdepedence of Ballad Tunes and Texts
BERTRAND H. BRONSON
HISTORY, doubtless, has its logic, if a man could but find it out. After fifty years of arduous and enthusiastic effort in the collection of British folktunes, and,
behind that, another hundred and fifty devoted with increasing scholarly intensity
to the collection and detailed comparative study of ballad texts, nothing
but the apparent unreason of history could justify the absurdity of recommending
at this date that for their proper comprehension it is necessary to
study texts and tunes together. For that is so logically and so obviously the
initial point of departure! And before any other approach was thinkable an
unnatural divorce had to be effected between two elements which had always
existed, not side by side, but so inextricably interwoven that even Psyche's
"confused seeds" were not more intermixed. The absurdity of urging an
axiom for acceptance rests on a greater absurdity: namely, that the greatest
scholar in the field, the acknowledged "prince" of ballad students, could all
but complete his lifework on the subject without a single word ofI analysis
or description of the traditional music-the vitalizing, breath-giving half of
balladry.
Latterly, however, thanks to the sound work of individual collectors and
folk-song societies, there has been plenty of interest in folk music, and some
pious exhortation from older students of the ballad not to neglect the tunes.
If I am justified in taking as my theme the elementary interdependence of
ballad tunes and ballad texts, it is because throughout the country too many
academic courses in the ballad still proceed on the basis of textual study alone,
with perhaps for a final flourish an hour or so devoted to the concert rendition
of a few selected numbers, or the playing of such commercial phonograph
records, unaccompanied by critical remarks, as the instructor may have
chanced to scrape together-with the acquiescence, one hopes, of a wife indulgent
to his extravagance. But as for the exhaustive accumulation of records
of the same song for comparative or analytical study of traditional variation,
where are the English or Music departments that have budgeted for this?
Yet, I insist, if the student of the ballad is not prepared to give equal attention
to the musical, as to the verbal, side of his subject, his knowledge of it will
in the end be only half-knowledge. If he lacks the necessary acquaintance withmusical rudiments, or is indisposed or unable to enlist the active and continual
collaboration of others properly equipped, he had better turn to other fields.
For he dismisses the ballad music at his peril. In spite of the scanty and undependable
records which have survived from earlier centuries, there is always
a possibility that some illumination may be thrown on a particular problem
by what is known or can be deduced from ballad music. And, for our own
century, for the study of the ballad as something else than a fossil deposit,
there is available a fairly large mass of evidence awaiting critical examination.
In the present brief survey, I shall devote most of the space at my disposal to
supporting these contentions by characteristic examples.
Take first the elementary matter of the ballad stanza, the unit which matches
each complete repetition of the tune, of which it must be the exact counterpart.
What is the nature of this unit? What is its irreducible minimum, what
are its constituent parts, how is it to be divided? How is a scholarly editor to
dispose it upon his page? Ordinarily, as every one knows, it consists of fourteen
stresses, with a pause after the seventh, set off by a rhyme between the seventh
and fourteenth. The pause may be, and frequently is, filled in by another
stress, in which case a corresponding stress will also be added at the end.
Metrically, the iambic is the usual pattern, but other types of feet are so freely
substituted in easygoing popular verse that it is best not to overemphasize the
metrical unit. Hymnodists call these two varieties of stanza "common metre"
and "long metre," respectively, or CM and LM. In actual length, however,
they do not differ, because the length of the added foot, or stress, in LM- that
is, the eighth and sixteenth stresses-precisely equals the length of the pause
or sustained note in CM. Both forms, that is to say, are sixteen pulses long.
The pause which occurs at the halfway point of the stanza corresponds with
the most obvious structural feature of a tune of this sort, the mid-pause, or
middle cadence, which in the majority of our tunes comes on the dominant musically
the most satisfying point of rest after the tonic.
As ballads are generally printed, the stanza is divided into four lines, alternately
of four and three stresses, or, in LM, of four and four. And for this
division also there is as a rule musical justification; for subordinate pauses,
or cadences, ordinarily occur in a tune at just those points, so that we feel
a natural division into four musical phrases. This pattern is so ubiquitous in
English and Scottish folk song that where it does not occur-unless the departure
is according to some well-defined pattern, as in the case of five-, six-, or
eight-phrase tunes-we may almost assume that something has gone wrong
with the traditional machinery, whether from forgetfulness of text or tune,
or from some extraneous influence.
There is no sign that there has been any appreciable variation in this structural
norm for ballad tunes since the beginning of the record. During its whole known history, that is to say, the ballad tune has shown no inclination
to transcend or exceed in any manner the structural bounds that we know
today. But also, during its whole history, this folk-tune pattern has shown no
preference for ballads, or narrative songs, over any other kind of traditional
song text, whether work song, carol, or personal lyric. There is no evidence, or
inherent probability, that in the beginning it belonged to the ballad alone,
unless we maintain that in the beginning there was only narrative balladwhich
is to me unthinkable. Without stopping to muster arguments, it seems
obvious that the narrative ballad, in the form in which we know it-and be it
remembered that we deny the name when the form is lacking-cannot have
existed before the musical vehicle which sustains it had been invented. By
definition the ballad is a song. The first ballad, therefore, was sung to a tune.
Regardless of whether that particular tune came into existence simultaneously
with the first ballad, the form of the tune-this ubiquitous musical pattern
found with nearly every kind of popular song-was already in existence. For
the proponent of the theory of communal ballad origins it is even more necessary
to believe this to be true than it is for the believer in individual composition.
For a group can join in communal singing only when the members of it
are in approximate agreement about the tune.
I do not propose to enter upon the question of communal origins. At this
distance from Harvard University I dare, indeed, to call the theory metaphysical
moonshine, in so far as it has any bearing upon the popular ballad
of recorded history-the ballad as represented, for example, by any known
variant of any of Child's three hundred and five, including "The Maid freed
from the Gallows." Let me then revert to the four-phrase musical form which
we take as the norm for our ballad of tradition.
When we find a ballad text which notably fails to conform to this pattern of a minimum of four equivalent phrases, what is to be concluded? Child, following Motherwell, prints his A text of "The False Knight upon the Road" (3) in this fashion:
1. "O whare are ye gaun?"
Quo the fause knicht upon the road:
"I'm gaun to the scule,"
Quo the wee boy, and still he stude.
2. "What is that upon your back?" quo, etc.
"Atweel it is my bukes," quo, etc.
3. "What's that ye've got in your arm?"
"Atweel it is my peit."
And so on. Now it is obvious that the first and third lines are in general abnormally
short. To lengthen them, nothing seems detachable from the alternating
refrain lines, because we can hardly borrow less than the two-stress phrases,
"Quo the fause knicht" and "Quo the wee boy," and borrowing so much would
leave us in worse case than before, with only two stresses for the refrain lines.
Moreover, the refrain lines look as if they were to be regarded as proper fourstress
lines as they stand. Can we, then, put any trust in this text as one actually
sung? On the contrary, when we turn to Motherwell's Appendix of tunes, we
find a tune for this ballad with variant words for the first stanza as follows:
"0 whare are ye gaun?" quo' the false knight,
And false false was his rede.
"I'm gaun to the scule," says the pretty little boy,
And still still he stude.
The evidence of this variant suggests that the first was given inaccurately,
either to save space or to avoid unnecessary repetition. Unless there was a sharp
cleavage in the tradition, we should suppose that "quo the false knicht" was
after all part of the first line, and was repeated to fill out the second. Thus:
"0 whare are ye gaun?" quo the fause knicht
[Quo the fause knicht] upon the road:
"I'm gaun to the scule," quo the wee boy,
and so on. Motherwell's giving "quo, etc." on the same line of text, after the
first stanza, might hint corroboration. Looking for further light, we come upon
a North Carolina variant collected by Sharp in 1916. (The first, of course, was
Scottish, 1827.) The first two phrases of the music carry the following text:
"Where are you going?" says the knight in the road.
"I'm going to my school," said the child as he stood.
A Virginia variant confirms this pattern, as do two others, from Tennessee and
Indiana. A connection in the melodic tradition can be traced through all these
with one another and with Motherwell's tune. One would consider the case
closed, therefore, were it not for an odd little circular tune preserved by Macmath
from Scottish tradition about the end of last century. This tune has the
look of being much worn down in tradition, but as it stands it carries the exact
counterpart of Motherwell's first text, and so ought finally to settle the question
of line adjustment. Well, it does! It proves that the stanzas should be printed
as long couplets, and that it is a violence to split them in two. For the tune is
one of those which forego any real first and third cadence, and bring you to
the mid-point without a break. Any fixing of first and third cadence would
have to be arbitrarily determined by the words, for it would have no musical
significance. Musically, an arbitrary cadence point would be possible on any
one of four successive beats-which is but to say again that there is no real cadence. If we divided exactly in half, which would be the musical norm, we should get the textual absurdity of
"0 whare are ye gaun?" says
The fause knicht upon the road.
"I'm gaun to the scule," says
The wee boy; and still he stude.
But the musical phrase, I repeat, begs not to be divided at all: then why should
the words? There is, I might add in lieu of further discussion, a melodic connection
between this tune and a Nova Scotian one; and since that is connected
with the Appalachian variants, we can link the whole series onto the traditional
melodic chain-though not in a straight line of descent.
A textual problem of a somewhat different sort arises in connection with
the ballad of "Clerk Colvill" (42). Child's A text of this ballad comes from the
famous Mrs. Brown of Falkland, who supplied Jamieson and Scott with some
of their choicest and rarest texts. A few years ago, Ritson's transcript of a lost
manuscript collection of Mrs. Brown's ballads was turned up in the auction
rooms, was bought by Dr. Rosenbach, and presented to Harvard. The transcript
preserves the tunes to which this lady sang her ballads, set down, unfortunately,
by a confessedly inexpert hand, but, in the lack of anything better,
a valuable record, as indeed anything of the sort back of 18oo must necessarily
be. "Clerk Colvill," it will be remembered, is the ballad of a mortal man who
meddled with a beautiful water-sprite, incurring her enmity with fatal results.
A headache set in, which only grew worse when she gave him a piece of her
sark to bind about his head for a cure. He had barely time to reach home before
death overtook him. Keats's "La Belle Dame" is perhaps an educated cousin
of this ballad. Mrs. Brown's text is in LM, quatrains of four-stress lines, rhyming
on the second and fourth. There is no refrain, internal or external, and
there is no indication in the manuscript that a refrain was sung. The words are
not written under the notes: the tune is given first, by itself, and the text follows
after, separately. Now, the tune is composed of two phrases of equal
length followed by a repeat mark, and then a longer phrase, also marked for
repetition. It is hard to see how a quatrain could have been sung to such a tune.
A line of text corresponds well enough to either of the first two phrases. Then
what of the repeat? It is quite against custom to sing the first two lines of a
stanza through twice. The repeat, then, must mean that the second half of the
stanza was sung to the same two phrases. But that leaves the second part of
the tune unaccommodated with words. Two lines of text could with an effort
be squeezed into this second part, but there are convincing reasons against it.
One is that there is no phrasal correspondence between the first and second
part of the tune. Another is that the second part must be divided just where two notes are tied together (by the only tie which the writer took pains to insert in this half). A third is that the second half is four bars long, as against six bars in the first half-a very odd fact, if equal lines of text are to be carried by it. And a fourth is that the second half is felt to be naturally only one long phrase. It appears to me, therefore, that no part of the text as we have it was sung to this second half. The only deduction possible, then, is that it must have carried a refrain which Mrs. Brown's copyist, her nephew, never bothered to set down. Presumably, if the words o r syllables h ad made sense, he would have done so: we may infer that they were nonsense syllables. And for such a case there are parallels in Greig's collection of Aberdeenshire tunes.[1] But the fact that Mrs. Brown's nephew left out the refrain without the least hint of omission raises a question about other ballads which have come down from
her, only one of which in this manuscript has a refrain. Two, in particular, are in the form of tetrameter couplets. Now, so far as I am aware, although it is a common practice to omit an alternating internal refrain after the first
stanza, in printing, so that the rest of the ballad reads in short couplets, no
ballad has ever been taken down from actual folk singing, by careful and
accuratec ollectorsl ike Sharp and Greig, in this short-couplet form. If the
refrain comes inside the quatrain, on lines 2 and 4, there is of course no sign
of the fact in the tune alone. The fact that the tunes of these ballads of Mrs.
Brown appeart o be of the usual four-phrases ort (in one case abab, or two
phrases repeated) consequently throws no light on the question. But in view
of the general rule, and the all-but-demonstrabloem ission in the case just
discussed, it appears strongly probable that Mrs. Brown sang "Willy's Lady"
(6) and "Gil Brenton"( 5) with an interlaced r efrain. M oreovert, he same probability
appears to me to hold in all similar cases of early texts in short couplet
form, taken down without their proper tunes. Such a conclusion would
affect, to name no lesser things, the A* text (ca. 1450) of "Riddles Wisely
Expounded" (1), supposing it to have been sung, and "Earl Brand" in its
first and most important text. But the same would not hold for the long
couplets-really a half-stanzat o the line-of "St. Stephen and Herod" (22),
"Judas" (23), and "Bonnie Annie" (24).
The question of patterns in refrain has obvious importance for the melodic tradition of a ballad. Had Child been concerned to establish the singing tradition of his ballads, it is clear that he must have given more attention to their refrains than he did. In many cases, such concern would have resulted in a rearrangement of his variants. For, obviously, where there has been a shift in the type of refrain, as from interlaced refrain at the second and fourth lines to refrain as an added fifth line, or to a more complicated interlacing, there must also have occurred a corresponding alteration in the melodic vehicle.
A change of this kind could not be a gradual transition, such as produces the multiplicity of related variants. It must have been single and sudden, a conscious
shift from one tune to another. This sort of aberration is not ordinarily
included in the conventional description of the traditional process. Nevertheless,
the evidence is sufficient to show that, whatever the motives, the
phenomenon is not uncommon; and it must be reckoned with as an important
factor of change in oral transmission.
For illustration we may use "The Twa Sisters" (10), a ballad unusually rich
in changes of refrain. One would guess from the record that. the earlier type
of refrain here was the simple interlaced pattern at the second and fourth lines.
The earliest English texts (of mid-seventeenth century provenience) are of
this kind, and the majority of Child's Scottish and Irish texts belong to it. (In
all, he takes account of about forty texts.) All the variants of the "Binnorie"
group fall into this category. Incidentally, it might be noted that the currency
of the "Binnorie" refrain appears mainly in the wake of Scott's Minstrelsy,
18o.. It does not appear in the Herd manuscripts, nor in the Scots Musical
Museum, and Pinkerton is the only authority-he is not often entitled to the
name-to make use of it before Scott. And Scott, as his manuscripts prove,
engrafted it upon his primary copy of the ballad from another.
Of this same type of refrain we have various styles: "With a hie downe
downe a downe-a" (in the seventeenth century); "Fal the lal the lal laral lody"
(English of the nineteenth, and probably eighteenth, century); "Norham,
down by Norham," or "Nonie an' Benonie," coupled with "By the bonnie
mill-dams o Norham," or "Benonie"; "Hey with a gay and a grinding O"
and "About a' the bonny bows o London"; "Cold blows the wind, and the
wind blows low" with "And the wind blows cheerily around us, high ho";
"Oh and ohone, and ohone and aree" with "On the banks of the Banna, ohone
and aree"; "Hech hey my Nannie O" with "And the swan swims bonnie 0."
The last two styles are especially Celtic, and the swan refrain would be particularly
favored in Ireland, where they go in for swans. Child's suggestion
that the explanation of the obscure name, "Binnorie," may possibly lie in the
phrase, "On the banks of the Banna, ohone and aree," is supported neither
by the rhythm nor by the Irish tunes, which appear fairly distinct from the
Binnorie group. As a final example of this type of refrain, a variant found in
Michigan, in 1934, might be cited: "Viola and Vinola," with "Down by the
waters rolling"-wherein the proper names turn out to be those of the rival
sisters. It is to be hoped that the gloss of commercialism on these names is too
high. to be perpetuated in traditional memory.
This ballad still persists in vigorous life in our own country, especially in the Appalachian region. There its association with dancing is attested by the words of a refrain of a different type, prevalent wherever the "play-party" tradition has been current, and probably elsewhere. Here the pattern is of a stanza of double length, the interlaced refrain coming on the second, fourth, seventh, and eighth. lines. There is a threefold repetition of the first line of text, on lines one, three, and five; so that the narrative advances only two lines with each stanza. Here is a characteristic e xample, f rom Kentucky:
There lived an old lord by the Northern Sea,
Bowee down!
There lived an old lord by the Northern Sea,
Bow and balance to me!
There lived an old lord by the Northern Sea,
And he had daughters one, two, three,
I'll be true to my love,
If my love'll be true to me!"-
a canny proviso.
Musically, this stanza implies a double-strain, or eight-phrase air, with the middle cadence coming after the second element of refrain. It is especially apt for dancing, for the greater length gives space for the figures to develop, and the slow rate of narrative progression permits concentration rather on
the dance than on the story. Many of the seventeenth-century English countrydance
tunes in Playford and elsewhere are of this form. But it is older than the
seventeenth century and has associations with a number of early ballads and
songs, such as "The Wedding of the Frog and the Mouse," "The Friar in the
Well," "The Three Ravens." That its perennial serviceability is not yet spent
is proved by the currency of "Mademoiselle from Armentieres" ("Hinky
Dinky, Parlez Vous"). And that the demoiselle is in the direct line from an
Elizabethan daughter of Eve can be proved by a morality-play of about 1568.
In William Wager's The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou, Moros,
whose head is stuffed only with idle mischief, enters singing snatches from
the popular songs he has picked up from his pothouse companions. He gets
through the first stanza of one of these, as follows:
There was a mayde cam out of Kent,
Daintie loue, daintie loue,
There was a mayde cam out of Kent,
Daungerous be:
There was a mayde cam out of Kent,
Fayre, propre, small and gent,
As euer vpon the grounde went,
For so should it be.
That is the earliest appearance of the full-blown "Twa Sisters" stanza known
to me; but there may well be earlier cases, for many early carol texts, assuming
natural repetitions, would fall into the same form. It is doubtless evidence of
a depraved taste to confess that one would give the rest of Wager's play in
exchange for the rest of Moros's ballad.
As for "bow and balance": how old are the names of these postures in the dance can perhaps be settled by the historians of that subject. In its present
connection, the question is complicated by several ambiguous possibilities.
The earliest trace of the Appalachian refrain which I have noted with this
ballad goes back to Kent, as it happens, about the year 1770. Among the
Percy papers there is a copy of that locality and date, with refrain on 2, 4, 7, and 8 as follows:
... Hey down down derry down
... And the bough it was bent to me
... I'll prove true to my love
If my love will prove true to me.
There can be no doubt of the connection between these refrains. But the earlier one has no indication of the dance-step. From a Yorkshire variant of the later nineteenth century comes a new suggestion:
... Low down, derry down dee
... Valid we ought to be
... And I'll be true to my love
If my love will be true to me.
Here are neither bent knees nor bent boughs. But in another variant of about the same time and place as the last comes this:
... Bow down, bow down
... As the bough doth bend to me
... And I'll be true to my true love
If my love will be true to me.
This last gives us a consistent reading, but it is not easy to prove that it is the
original consistency. Certainly "hey down down derry down" has ancient
precedent behind it, notably in the Robin Hood cycle; whilst "low down" in
such a context has little or none. Nor does "low down" seem likely to have led
to "bow down." Yet "down" by itself contains the suggestion of "low"; and if
"hey" were ever pronounced "hi" by singers, someone sooner or later would be sure to change "hi down" to "low down." Again, there is on record among such singers the pronunciation "bo" for "bow": "he bo'd his breast and swum." The sequence is therefore possible, if barely so. On the other hand, "the bough was bent to me" might of itself induce the."bow down" of the other line; and in its turn "bow down" might suggest in oral tradition the other image, as it obviously has in one recorded variant, "Bow your bends to me." From this to "bow and balance" is but a skipping step in a dancing community. But the "Valid we ought to be" can hardly have been corrupted into "balance and bo(w) to me": it must have been the other way round, where the dance terms were unfamiliar. So that a greater antiquity may be indicated for "bow and balance" than any of which we have record. Nevertheless, boughs that bend, and bows-whether elbows or bows of yew-have ancient and legitimate connections with balladry, and may well contain the radical images. Moreover, the American variants continue the confusion between bows and boughs. Balance, however, comes not in such a questionable shape; and when "the boys are bound for me," as in certain late variants, they wear their folk etymology upon their sleeves.
At any rate, the variants with these refrains-there are between three and four dozen of them on record-all belong to one melodic family, which can never have been related to the "Binnorie" group. The "bow down" pattern has shown an occasional tendency, as exhibited in about a dozen additional recorded variants, to abridge itself to a six-phrase pattern, generally by omitting one repetition of the first line, together with the second element of the refrain. As thus, in a Berkshire version:
A varmer he lived in the West Countree,
With a hey down, bow down:
A varmer he lived in the West Countree,
And he had daughters, one, two, and three,
And I'll be true to my love,
If my love '11b e true to me.
That this is not actually a new pattern, but a corruption of the former one, is proved by the fact that every case of it is an incomplete and usually disordered member of the same melodic family.
Finally, a separate Scottish tradition as old as the eighteenth century makes use of the same eight-phrase interlaced stanza pattern, but with place names for the refrain, and (apparently) a distinct melodic tradition. Thus Mrs. Brown's text:
There was twa sisters in a bowr,
Edinburgh, Edinburgh,
There was twa sisters in a bowr,.
Stirling for ay
There was twa sisters in a bowr,
There came a knight to be their wooer.
Bonny St. Johnston
stands upon Tay.
The same refrain is found with. several other ballads.
It will perhaps be a relief if I turn to another aspect of my subject, another
way in which texts and tunes are interrelated. It not infrequently appears that,
just as a refrain will get attached to more than one ballad, so variants of one and the same tune will be discovered in association with the texts of different
ballads. What are the possible explanations of such a phenomenon, and what
legitimate inferences may be drawn from it?
There are undoubtedly certain tunes, or tune families, which are so
strongly and ineradicably rooted in traditional singing that, like the commonest
sorts of weed, they tend to crop up everywhere and take possession of
any available space, crowding out the less hardy plants. Such, for example,
are the common tunes for "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" (4) and "Lord
Thomas and Fair Eleanor" (73), which are found all over the ballad landscape.
From these I can draw no significant deduction, other than the obvious one
that certain tunes are so catchy and easy to remember that, once heard, they
cannot be shaken off. Like burrs, they cling to every passer-by and are carried
far and wide.
But there are other tunes which require a congenial soil for transplantation,
and sometimes reveal an interesting lineal connection. There may be fortuitous
resemblances between tunes which cause them to gravitate and coalesce.
Equally, there may be verbal or narrative connections between ballad texts
which facilitate a borrowing by one ballad of the other's tune. Or, again, there
may be tunes which, from a relationship half-consciously sensed by the singer,
act as the disintegrating and reintegrating agents that gradually win away
elements of a ballad, and reestablish these in new contexts, modifying the
conduct of the narrative, or otherwise effecting a crossing that produces a
new and different species. Many of these textual interconnections have been
remarked in Child's head-notes. But it can hardly be doubted that the tunes
have been responsible for the linkages perhaps as often as have parallels of
situation.
Sometimes related tunes suggest or lend confirmation to a suspected connection
between ballads. A case in point is Child's no. 27, "The Whummil
Bore." Child introduces it with the dubious remark: "This ballad, if it ever
were one, seems not to have been met with, or at least to have been thought
worth notice, by anybody but Motherwell." As the piece is very short, it may
be quoted here:
1. Seven lang years I hae served the king,
Fa fa fa fa lilly
And I never got a sight of his daughter but ane.
With my glimpy, glimpy, glimpy eedle,
Lillum too tee a ta too a tee a ta a tally
2. I saw her thro a whummil bore,
And I neer got a sight of her no more.
3. Twa was putting on her gown,
And ten was putting pins therein.
4. Twa was putting on her shoon,
And twa was buckling them again.
5. Five was combing down her hair,
And I never got a sight of her nae mair.
6. Her neck and breast was like the snow,
Then from the bore I was forced to go.
This appears to be an example of pawky fun at the expense of high romance,
like "Sir Eglamore," "The Twa Corbies," (26) or "Kempy Kay" (33). For
this sort of thing there is, of course, high precedent in Chaucer's "Sir Thopas,"
to name but one out of multitudes. "The Whummil Bore" appears to me a
by-blow of a serious romantic ballad. The evidence of its tune indicates where
its affiliations lie. Here is Motherwell's tune:
THE WHUMMIL BORE (Motherwell, 1827, App., No. 3)
Sev - en lang years I have served the king, Fa, fa, fa - lil - ly, And I
ne'er got a sight of his doch - ter but ane With my glimp-y glimp-y
glimp - y ee - die, Lil - lum too a tee too a tal - ly.
If the order of the first and second phrases is reversed, the result is a fairly
close parallel to Miss Minnie Macmath's tune for "Hind Horn" (17), amounting
almost to identity in the third phrase. The Motherwell tune, flown with
insolence, repeats its third phrase with variation, and ends with a fifth phrase
which would supply an equally appropriate termination for the Macmath
tune, which in fact seems to have forgotten its proper conclusion:
HIND HORN (Child, I, 503, and V, 413)
She gave him a gay gold ring, Hey lil - le lu and how lo_ lan, But
he gave her a far bet -ter thing,Wi my hey down and a hey did-die down-ie.
Child, incidentally, did not miss the fact that some versions of "Hind Horn"
contained a curious reference to Horn's seeing his love through some small
aperture, e.g., an augur bore, or a gay gold ring, and conjectured that the detail
was borrowed from "The Whummil Bore," where it manifestly comes in more appropriately. He did not, however, suggest that a much greater obligation
lay in the opposite direction, which to me appears altogether probable.
"Hind Horn" is an ancient and honorable ballad, and its tune, in one variety
or another, is well established and consistently associated with it.
The ballad of "Lizie Wan" (51) is one which has not often been found. It
first appears in Herd's manuscripts and has been recovered once or twice in
our century in this country, and once in England. As Herd gives it, it tells an
unpleasant story: Lizie sadly confesses to her father that she is with child. By
comes her brother, and she charges him with equal guilt:
There is a child between my twa sides,
Between you, dear billy, and I.
When he finds out that she has revealed her state, he draws his sword and cuts her to pieces. His mother asks him, later, why he acts so distraught. He replies, first, that he has killed his greyhound, and next, under pressure, that he has slain Lizie Wan.
"O what wilt thou do when thy father comes hame,
O my son Geordy Wan?"
"I'll set my foot in a bottomless boat,
And swim to the sea-ground."
"And when will thou come hame again,
O my son Geordy Wan?"
"The sun and the moon shall dance on the green
That night when I come hame."
The parallel in the latter part of this ballad with the much more famous
"Edward" (13) is obvious. It is therefore interesting to find a similar parallel
between the tune collected by Sharp in his Appalachian version of "Lizie
Wan" and one of the tunes which he got in the same region for "Edward":
EDWARD Sharp MSS 4314/3083 [Sharp-Karpeles (1932), I, o50]
0 what are you going to do when your fa - ther comes home? 0
son, come tell to me. I'll put my- foot in
yon - ders boat, And sail a - cross the sea.
The question of relationship between these two ballads opens up a fascinating
field for speculation. Both, if not of Scandinavian birth, have important
Scandinavian counterparts.
LIZZIE WAN Sharp MSS 3838/2810 [Sharp-Karpeles (1932), I, 89]
Fair Lu - cy sit - ting in her fa - ther's room, La -
ment-ing and a - mak - ing her mourn; And_ in 'steps her
bro - ther James: 0 what's fair Lu - cy done?
Both appear in the Scottish record at approximately the same time. Neither has had currency in England or Ireland. Professor
Archer Taylor, in a comparative analysis of all available variants, has
shown that the Percy text of "Edward," from the point of view of tradition,
is spurious and sophisticated." The version next in date is later by more than
fifty years in the record, and, although doubtless a good deal closer to tradition,
still affected in the denouement by Percy. The traditional versions of
"Edward" do not implicate the mother in her son's guilt, and tell a tasteless
story of brother-murder in a fit of anger devoid of tragic significance. The
brothers fall out about a little bush that might have made a tree, which one
of them has untimely cut down. Phillips Barry has suggested that the bush
(holly or hazel in the Appalachian variants) is to be interpreted symbolically
as a girl. This sort of symbol seems to me-I speak under correction-alien to
the popular habit; and "Lizie Wan" shows how unnecessary it was to veil the
meaning in such obscurity. Nevertheless, it is natural to suppose that originally
the ballad of "Edward" had a more compelling narrative core than
appears in extant tradition. And certainly the murder of a sister as a crime
passionel, or of a brother out of jealous rivalry, would provide a plot sufficiently
Aeschylean. It is a fact that some Swedish texts of "Edward" make the
sister the victim, whether this mean much or little. "Lizie Wan" is one of four
ballads in Child on a similar theme, and its roots are undeniably deep in northern
tradition. It might, incidentally, have been expected that a connection
would be found between "Edward" and "The Twa Brothers" (49), where the
same brother-rivalry and fratricide occur. And in some texts of the latter ballad
such a connection is in fact disclosed. (Child 49 D, E, F, and G.) But the
melodic connections in the latter case do not support the association. Instead,
they mainly lie rather with "Little Sir Hugh" (155), and apparently rise from
a similar opening of schoolchildren playing ball. But, without being dogmatic,
I would only remark further of "Edward" and "Lizie Wan," that if, granting
contamination of one ballad by the other, we attempt to establish a priority,
the claims of "Lizie Wan" to being more deeply rooted in early Scandinavian
lore, and inherently less likely to have derived from "Edward" than the reverse,
are claims not to be lightly dismissed.
Another interesting case of possible crossing occurs between "Young Hunting"
(68) and "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" (4). The melodic tradition of
"Young Hunting" is rather perplexed and hard to make out, whilst that of
"Lady Isabel" is unusually clear. But a small group of variants of "Young
Hunting" makes use of a distinct variety of the "Lady Isabel" tunes, and the
texts of this group commence in a very particular way:-with the sound of a
distant horn, and the conflicting emotions stirred up by that music in the
breast of Young Hunting's sweetheart. Elsewhere, the ballad generally opens
abruptly with her invitation to come in and stay the night. Now, in the current
variants of "Lady Isabel" there is no mention of a horn. But formerly,
as in Child's A text and in various Continental analogues, the horn had a most
important and necessary function to perform in that ballad. It was elfin
music, and it had such power of magic persuasion that before the heroine
ever saw the creature who blew it, she was ready to run away with him. No
other ballad, I believe, makes such. introductory use of a horn except "The
Elfin Knight" (2) which Child supposes also affected by "Lady Isabel." The
occurrence of the horn in "Young Hunting," then, may be an intrusion from
"Lady Isabel" and may have drawn the characteristic tune with it; or the tune
may have brought the horn over to the other ballad, from versions of "Lady
Isabel" formerly in circulation. It is worth notice, moreover, that both ballads,
besides sharing the theme of a sweetheart's killing her lover (albeit for very different
reasons), makes prominent use of a talking bird. In "Young Hunting,"
this bird has been understood to be a relic of former belief in metempsychosis,
the bird being the soul of the slain lover.' It plays a vital and significant role
in the narrative. But in "Lady Isabel," the parrot that chatters idly when the
heroine comes safely home before the dawning, and has to be bribed to silence
with the promise of a cage of ivory and gold, performs no office essential to the
plot, and is doubtless an importation. There may be here a borrowing in the
opposite direction, underlined perhaps by the similar promise of reward from
Young Hunting's mistress, if the bird will not reveal her guilt. However it be,
there appears sufficient evidence of a hitherto unnoticed crossing of these
ballads in tradition, signalized by the melodic convergence.
Much, again, can be learned about the ways of tradition, both textual and musical, from what has happened within the last three hundred years to the ballad of "Sir Lionel" (18). Back of 1650 lies the earliest known text of this ballad, in the Percy Folio manuscript, a very defective text, without a tune, and not certainly known to have been sung. In spite of serious deficiencies- there are two large lacunae where pages have been torn out of the manuscript this is still our fullest text in narrative content, and a serious treatment of a theme of high romance. Except for a nineteenth-century Scottish text recorded by Christie, all the other versions of this ballad which have been collected, whether from English or American tradition, tend in varying degree
toward the farcical. The Percy version is in quatrains, with an interlaced refrain at lines 2 and 4-- the refrain, incidentally, echoing a song that has survived in a manuscript of Henry VIII's time.
In the present century, but doubtless going back in family tradition a hundred years or more, there appears in this ballad a marked change of pattern as well as of mood. Instead of the staid refrain of the older form, we find a series of nonsense syllables, fitted to the elaborate eight-phrase scheme already met in "The Twa Sisters." This new (but ancient) pattern is exemplified in a Wiltshire variant, published, without a tune, in 1923:
Bold Sir Rylas a-hunting went-
I an dan dilly dan
Bold Sir Rylas a-hunting went-
Killy koko an.
Bold Sir Rylas a-hunting went-
To kill some game was his intent-
I an dan dilly dan
killy koko an."
This, with occasional abridgment, is the nearly universal stanza form of the ballad in current tradition. Now, obviously, there has either been a complete break here with the older tradition, or else the traditional antecedents of the modern ballad are not adequately represented in the examples printed by Child. What has happened to the narrative will support the latter alternative.
Child pointed out that "Sir Lionel" had much in common with the old metrical romance of "Sir Eglamour of Artois." This relationship is clearest in the Percy Folio text. There we have a lady sore beset, whose knight has been slain by a wild boar; a fight between Sir Lionel and the boar (implied, but lost with the leaf or leaves gone from the manuscript); a rencounter between the giant, who owned the boar, and Sir Lionel, in which Sir Lionel is worsted but chivalrously granted a forty-day respite to prepare for a new combat; Lionel's return to fight with the giant and rescue the lady; and, finally, in the last portion (again missing, but badly summarized in Christie's version), the defeat of the giant. All these elements had appeared in the old romance, which, however, Child carefully abstains from calling the original of the ballad.
Now, in the nineteenth-century English versions, the giant's place has been supplied by a "wild woman" whom the hero treats as unmercifully as he had earlier treated the giant. The central incident, however, has become the boar fight. The lady in distress is barely mentioned, and is easily confounded with the wild woman who owns the boar. In the more recently collected versions, she appears only long enough to tell the knight that a blast of his horn will bring on the boar; or (as usually in the American variants) she makes no appearance whatever. The wild woman in some variants does double duty for gentle and savage; but she, like her predecessors, also tends to drop out of the story. What finally remains is the single episode of the boar fight, told now as riotous farce.
At some time in the seventeenth century, apparently early, another ballad on the subject of Sir Eglamore became popularly current, and was perpetuated on broadsides. The first known copy seems to be that in Samuel Rowlands's "The Melancholie Knight," 1615, and Rowlands may have written the ballad. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century it was widely known and was circulating independently of print. It had a catchy tune which went about in variant forms, as popular tunes unshackled by copyright laws will do. One form of the tune-with new words, but identified by its proper name--was printed in Nat. Thompson's 180 Loyal Songs (1635), page 276, as follows:
SIR EGLAMORE (N. Thompson, 18o Loyal Songs [1685], p. 276) [9]
......
Another was copied into a manuscript of approximately the same time, and now lies in the Edinburgh University Library, hitherto unprinted (MS Dc.
1. 69):[6]
SIR EGLAMORE (Edinburgh Univ. MS DC. I. 69,
(a) No. I at back of MS)
Sr Eg - la - more that val - iant Knight
fa la lan - kee downe dil - ly
Heetooke upp his sword & bee went to fight
fa la la
And as bee rode o're Hill & dale
all armed with a Coate of Male
fa la la la la la la lan - kee downe dil - ly.
(a) ms. readings (b)
In nearly identical form, this variant later appeared in Durfey's Pills, with the following text:
Sir Eglamore, that valiant Knight,
Fa la, lanky down dilly;
He took up his Sword, and he went to fight,
Fa la, lanky down dilly:
And as he rode o'er Hill and Dale,
All Armed with a Coat of Male,
Fa la la, la la la, lanky down dilly.
There leap'd a Dragon out of her Den,
That had slain God knows how many Men;
But when she saw Sir Eglamore,
Oh that you had but heard her roar!
Then the Trees began to shake,
Horse did Tremble, Man did quake;
The Birds betook them all to peeping,
Oh! 'twould have made one fall a weeping.
But all in vain it was to fear,
For now they fall to't, fight Dog, fight Bear;
And to't they go, and soundly fight,
A live-long day, from Morn till Night.
This Dragon had on a plaguy Hide,
That cou'd the sharpest steel abide;
No Sword cou'd enter her with cuts,
Which vex'd the Knight unto the Guts.
But as in Choler he did burn,
He watch'd the Dragon a great good turn;
For as a Yawning she did fall,
He thrust his Sword up Hilt and all.
Then like a Coward she did fly,
Unto her Den, which was hard by;
And there she lay all Night and roar'd,
The Knight was sorry for his Sword:
But riding away, he cries, I forsake it,
He that will fetch it, let him take it.[7]
Here we have the stanza pattern of the current ballad of "Brangywell" or "Bangum and the Boar," as "Sir Lionel" is called today; and the tunes sung in our century will prove to be variants of the same melodic idea as "Sir Eglamore," with such shortening and rhythmical modification as might be looked for in its translation from country-dance usage to its present solo form. A characteristic example from Kentucky is the following:
BANGUM (SIR LIONEL) Sharp MSS 3701 [Sharp-Karpeles (1932), I, 551
O Bang - um would a - hunt - ing ride,
Cub - by kye, cud - dle O,
Bang - um would a - hunting ride,
cud - dle down O
Bang - um would a - hunt - ing ride,
Sword and pis - tol by his side,
Cub - by kye, cud - dle down,
kil -ly quo quam.
It is plain, then, that both in spirit, in narrative, and in melodic tradition, the recent forms of "Sir Lionel" are primarily descendants of the "Eglamore" ballad, and only secondarily of the ancient romance ballad. Any who wish for that reason to exclude it from the authentic traditional canon may do so: not I.
The foregoing will serve as examples of a common melodic tradition between different ballads, and of characteristic results of such a crossing. What
further of the contrary case, where a single ballad is sung to different tunes?
One aspect of the problem has, of course, already arisen in this matter of deflecting
crosscurrents. But we should like to know more about what might
be called the sharp corners in tradition, where tune or text, or both, appear
suddenly to have taken a new direction. What is the nature of the prism which
must be hypothesized at these nodal points? It is a mechanism that cannot be
examined at first hand: we can only deduce it from its effects. But no subject
of human inquiry is more open to all the winds of chance than that of folk
song; and it is altogether probable that not one but many prisms have produced
these deflections. So that any generalizations are likely at best to account
only for a limited group of phenomena.
What, for example, can be deduced from the fact that a ballad is sung in
Scotland to one melodic tradition, and in America to another? There are cases
of this kind, where no relationship can be discerned between the melodies
current or on record in the old world and the new, but where the text is recognizably
close. The ballad, we must presume, was brought across the ocean by
singers, for the Bell Robertsons who remember only the words are black swans
in balladry. And if the tune were dropped overboard on the way, the reasonable
inference would be that the ballad came West on paper and not in the
head. Then the water barrier, we conclude, is of no real significance: the
melodic tradition turned the corner either before or after the ballad crossed
the Atlantic. We are thus faced with the original problem: Why is the same
ballad, continuously handed on from singer to singer, never heard without its
air and committed to paper during such transmission only as an aid to verbal
memory-why and how is this ballad found with different tunes?
The conventional explanation would probably be that these songs had been
so long in circulation, uncontrolled by an authoritative original version, that
the variants had drifted farther and farther apart. The older the song, the
wider the differences; so that where we find no traits of resemblance between
two or more tunes of a ballad, we may infer many generations of traditional
transmission behind its present state.
To such a conclusion I should myself grant only a tentative and very limited
assent, for I do not find that the available evidence at all justifies so sweeping
a generalization. There is plenty of evidence, I believe, to support a contrary
position: that where a melodic and textual tradition is solidly established,
vigorously and continuously alive, its identity will be perpetuated, with a
notable consistency in its main outlines, for long periods of time. Such has
been the way, for example, with the melodic traditions of "Barbara Allen,"
and "Lord Lovel," and "Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor." I do not speak of
the texts in these cases, which have been more or less subject to the control of
print. Conversely, I believe it sometimes to be an indication of a late start that
a ballad displays no dominant melodic tradition. Thus, it strikes me as a suspicious
circumstance that "Sir Patrick Spens" (58) shows no such melodic continuity
anywhere. It is quite clear that Johnson, when he first printed a tune
for this ballad in the Scots Musical Museum, knew no traditional setting, for
he put it to an unsingable pipe or fiddle tune which has never since been
found with it in tradition, although it has been several times reprinted from
Johnson. It may, in fact, be a point of real importance that the musical record
of this ballad seems to show-I do not positively say does show, for the variants
are not abundant enough for proof-a gradual convergence in the last century
and a half. Contrary to what we have been taught to expect, the period of
widest diversity here is the earliest, since which time the traditional tunes of
the "Spens" ballad have appeared to exhibit a tendency, as yet indistinct and
uncertain, to drift toward a relatively similar melodic form. Indeed, I throw
it out as an open question whether, in the decline of folk song which, we must
inevitably expect as more and more of the population becomes corrupted by
musical literacy, as it already has been by verbal literacy-for literacy and culture
are very different-whether, I say, all folk music will not evince the sametendency to dritf toward a single, universal, indistinguishable, ultimate tune.
The one process which seems to be universally operative in the realm of tradition,
however it be by fortunate circumstance obscured or delayed, is, alas,
no "epic process," but the process of abrasion, which tends always from complex
to simple, and more simple, until the iniquity of oblivion, or soon or
slow, shall have completed her office.
I believe, nonetheless, that the natural conservatism of the folk singer admittedly
very impressive in particular cases-has been greatly exaggerated
as a universal phenomenon. It is of course just the cases of extraordinary
tenacity which would strike a collector most forcibly, whereas the opposite
tendency would be relatively little subject to remark. The evidence, in its
total recent bulk, seems to me to point to a greater independence, or potential
infidelity to strict tradition, than has heretofore been allowed. The rate of
change, involving unconscious, semiconscious, and even wilful alteration, may
have been considerably more rapid than most students suppose. The coefficient
of change-speaking now particularly of consistent and not disruptive changeis
the level of intelligence of the folk-singing community, and the liveliness
of its artistic sensibility. The higher that level, the more unwilling-indeed,
unable-a singer will be to serve merely as a passive transmitter of the songs
that he has loved. Those students who have maintained that there was, hundreds
of years ago, a creative period of oral tradition, but that since the sixteenth
century or thereabouts tradition in balladry has been on the road
downhill, have really been saying the same thing. But their view of the matter
has been conditioned and limited by the fact that they were looking almost
exclusively at the texts. Faced on the one hand with a number of superior early
ballad texts, and on the other by the spectacle of increasing dilapidation in
the multiplying evidence of the variants collected from recent tradition, their
conclusion was in fact almost the only rational one possible. The spread of
literacy has drawn off into other channels a large proportion of the creative
energy which once went into the ballads. The later generations of ballad
singers have for the most part lacked the gifts to do more than perpetuate in
a relatively unenlightened fashion the verses they had received, so that, speaking
generally, the negative influences of forgetfulness, confused recollection,
and imperfect comprehension have been the major influences at work on the
ballad texts. But the musical tradition has not been subject to anything like
the same rate of decay. Beyond the reach, until very lately, of any sort of
written or recorded control, it has persisted, to a surprising degree, in its
primitive vitality. That this assertion is hardly open to contradiction is demonstrable
in the vast number of beautiful tunes which have been gathered in
our own century from illiterate, or nearly illiterate, singers on both sides of
the water. It is possible for an uneducated, even a comparatively unintelligent, singer to reach a level of comparativelyh igh musicalc ulture, within the circumscribedl
imits of traditionals ong:-a power of melodic discriminationa,
subtle sense of rhythmical effect, an artistic sensitivity of no mean musical
order; to display, in fact, what may fairly be called creative ability, subject
again to the unwritten canons of an ancient tradition. I do not mean that
many, or perhaps any, of these singers could deliberately create at will a new
and original folk tune. But, in spite of themselves, their musical sensibility
and instinctive knowledge of the values they seek inevitably result in constant
modification and variation which is effectually creative, or, more strictly, recreative.
T hey essentiallyr emember;a nd the fallings horto f exactr ecollection
has, as yet-it may not continue long to be so-been more than compensated
by a powero f miniaturei nvention sufficientf or their habitual needs,a nd of
which they appearb ut dimly aware.M oreoverw, hat they have in their minds
is not a note-for-notea ccuracya s of a writtent une; but rathera n ideal melody,
or melodic idea, which is responsive to the momentary dictates of feeling or
verbal necessity. What else can we conclude from the evidences of constant
variation,r ecordedb y meticulousc ollectorsl ike Sharp,i n successives tanzas,
or successive renditions, of the same song? Sharp's blind singer, Henry Larcombe,
o f Haselbury-PlucknetSt,o merseti,s an extremec aseo f this re-creative
ability. Whenever Sharp asked him to repeat a phrase or a stanza of a song,
he got a new variation in return, many of them beautiful, ingenious, and resourceful-
and this without the singer'sr ealizing,a pparentlyt, hat he was not
giving what was requested.J osephL avero f Bridgwaterw as anothers ingero f
the same kind. Now, if any other folk singer had learned a song from the lips
of a singer like these, what else could he possibly have carried away in his
memory but the idea of a tune, the general pattern or form of it which resides
in a more or less constant melodic contour and rhythm? When we are told that
a singer hands on his song exactly as he learned it, what other exactness than
this is possible to conceive? Since the song was never sung twice in exactly the
same way, and since it is humanly impossible for the memory to make an indelible
and phonographic record of a single rendition, stanza by stanza, it is
obvious that exactitude in this realm bears a very different meaning from what
it does when a Schnabel gives us the results of his study of Beethoven's manuscript
of a sonata.
Larcombe and Laver are cases at one extreme; but they are not for that
reason any the less genuine and authentic folk singers. At the other extreme,
and equally genuine and authentic, are the singers with a low coefficient of
artistic sensibility, who can neither improvise nor invent, who only dimly
remember, and who by dint of desperate effort manage to hang onto a single
phrase, or perhaps half a tune, which they repeat at need until so much of the
text as they have kept for themselves has been sung through. These, in varying degree, a re the singers w ho most easily get sidetracked o nto another t une of which they have a clearer notion; so that, by the hooks and eyes of unconscious
suggestion, be it of rhythm, of melodic cadence, or verbal commonplace, a
ballad is slowly or rapidly transformedt o somethingo ther than it was. But
these, again, are doubtless most often the deleterious influences: they are in
generalt he disruptersn, ot the reintegratinga nd positivef orcesi n traditional
transmissionP. robablyt hey, in the main, are responsiblef or the most abrupt
and inexplicabled eparturesf rom establishedp atterns.T heir influencem ust
not be minimized,f or mediocrityi s commonert han talent. Nevertheless,t he
evidence both of tunes and texts in balladry can lead only to the conclusion
that, leavening the undistinguished mass, there have been, even up to our
own time, more Larcombesa nd Laverst han we have any recordo f; and that,
formerly,t heir verbal counterpartss, o to put it, constituteda phenomenon
common enough to have molded into familiar forms that body of narrative
song, at once naive and yet capable of the most poignant beauty, which has
been enshrined in Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads.
Footnotes:
1. For the tune in question, and further discussion of it, cf. California Folklore Quarterly, I (1942), 188-190
2 Raine, Land of Saddle-Bags (1924), p. 118.
3. Archer Taylor, "Edward" and "Sven i Rosengard" (1931), especially pp. 26, 38. Cf. also my independent argument to the same effect in Southern Folklore Quarterly, IV (1940), 1-13, 159-161.
4. L. C. Wimberly, Folklore in English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1928), p. 192.
5. A. Williams, Folk Songs of the Upper Thames (1923), p. 118.
6 The time of this tune is equivalent to 6/8; the stemless black notes are twice the length of those
with stems.
7 Durfey, Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719), III, 293-294. A third form of the tune, with other titles, is in Playford, The Dancing Master, 1650 (reprint, 1933), p. 421; this was reprinted, with grossly unjustifiable majorization of a Dorian tune, by William Chappell (n.d.), I, 274.