The Psychopathology of Ballad Singing- Phillips Barry 1935
[Proofed once, quickly. Reprinted in Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast, Vol. 11, 1936. Condensed from paper read by Phillips Barry at Annual Meeting of The American Folklore Society, Andover Mass., December 28, 1935.
This is an analysis by Barry of The Youngest Daughter, a variant of Child No. 10, Twa Sisters, collected by Flanders (Flanders A, Ancient Ballads) from the singing of Amos Eaton, Vermont in 1934. Barry refers to the Archer Taylor article (JAFL) and to a variety of collected versions from different sources (mostly Child's ESPB). Barry's references to Child Y* collected by Parsons and sent to Percy in 1770 needs some clarification. Unknown to Barry, who likely examined the Percy Paper's at the Houghton Library (Harvard) and saw the first version, there are two Y versions sent by Parsons, the first was sent in 1770 (and Barry comments that it is different than Child Y) and the second was sent in 1775 (some 30 pages later), which Parson's called "imperfect." This second version was used verbatim by Child. Why Child selected the second, seemingly inferior version, is unknown. Regardless of his choice, Child should have included the variation in the two texts and commented on them. This he did not do.
Barry's comment on Child U is on the mark and it's interesting that he has labeled ballads up to Child EE (five additional ballads) when most scholars only recognize the original versions A-U from the first edition and the versions V-Z from later editions found in Additions and Corrections.
Sadly Phillips Barry would live only one more year.
R. Matteson 2014]
The Psychopathology of Ballad Singing
(Condensed from paper read by Phillips Barry at Annual Meeting of The American Folklore Society, Andover Mass., December 28, 1935.)
We shall show that, in the re-creation of popular ballads, one important factor is the presence of psychopathological traits in folk-singers. The Anglo-American tradition of The Two Sisters exists in three types:
Type I: Barry A, JAFL, XVIII, 130-31; the miller is the lover of the murdered sister.
Type II: Maine C, BES., British Ballads from Maine, pp. 42-3; the miller and the elder sister share guilt and penalty.
Type III: Child Y* (Percy MSS, 129), Y, BSPB., I, 495; the miller alone is put to death for the murder of the younger sister, Kate. Whereas Dr. Archer Taylor has referred to our unique Type I text as corrupt, (JAFL., XLII, p. 244 footnote 1). we call attention to the fact that in the important Aberdeenshire tradition (Child M, Greig, Last Leaves, pp. 9-13; 250-51), the miller is the lover of the younger sister: in one text (Greig, p. 251), he identifies the body by her engagement ring.
Ballad convention, generally, made the miller a rogue (Roxburghe Ballad's, VIII, 610), ready for any crime from petty larceny from robbing the dead (The Two Sisters, Child H, 14) and murder (Type II, III, in which he rescues the younger sister, strips her and throws her back to drown). Back of the ballad is always the ballad singer, who constantly intrudes his critical personality: hence the rise of folk in Type III, to spare the elder sister, either by commutation of the death penalty to a penance-voyage (Child, Rb, 14a, Rc, 14a, FSSNE., Bulletin 5, p. 20; 7 p.7), by letting her go unpunished (Child Y*, Davis C, Traditional Ballad's of Virginia, PP. 96-7).
A little over fifty years ago, the late Mr. W. W. Newell sent Child a fragment of the Two Sisters which Child subsequently printed (U, in ESPB, I, 137) with a misreading of the clearly written "west" (I, 1) as "mist." On April 26, 1935, Mrs. Helen H. Flanders recorded version of the ballad so closely related to Child U that we assign it to the same tradition. This version is here printed by courtesy of Mrs. Flanders:
The Youngest Daughter. Sung by Mr. Amos J. Eaton, South Royalton, Vermont, as learned from his mother in Sutton, Vermont. Text and air transcribed by H. H. F.
[music upcoming]
I There was a man who lived out west-
Lived out west, lived out west;
There was a man who lived out west;
He loved his youngest daughter best.
2 He bought for his youngest a gay gold ring;
The oldest she hadn't anything.
3 He bought for his youngest a beaver hat;
The oldest, she was mad at that.
4 One day these girls went down to swim;
The oldest pushed her sister in.
5 First she sank and then she swam,
Until she reached the miller's dam.
6 The miller put out his line and hook,
And caught her by the Petticoat.
7 The miller took off her gay gold ring,
And threw her into the stream again.
8 The king and his son were riding by
They heard the youngest daughter cry.
9 And so the riders pulled her out
To see what she was crying about.
10 Next day the old miller was hung for her sake,
And the eldest daughter was burned at the stake.
For purpose of record, we shall classify Child U as Child U*a, and Mr. Eaton's version, Vermont B, as Child U*b. Stanzas 1, 2, 3, 4, of U*a, correspond respectively to 1, 4, 5, 6 of U*b. In U*a 2 and U*b 4, we have a unique trait in Anglo-American tradition, surviving from the Scandinavian, the bathing stanza.
The textual affinities of Child U* are with a group of Type II versions, Child Z (ESPB., II, 509), Maine A, C, D, (BES, British Ballads from Maine, pp. 40, ff.), Vermont A (FSSNE., Bulletin 6, P. 5), Sharp-Karpeles H (I, P. 32), distinguished by the intrusive petticoat stanza, U*a, 4: U*b, 6, rather more common in the Northeast than in the South. On the other hand, the vulgate tradition of Type III in the South, represented by Davis C, and closest akin to Child R, S, Y, distinguished by the name, "Kate," of the younger sister, is absolutely unknown in the Northeast. If, given the clear evidence of a cleavage in tradition, both textual and geographical, which thus sets off Type III from Type II, a certain specific trait should be discovered to be common to certain versions of both types, in which the chance of textual crossing is not to be regarded as a factor, we should seek for the origin of such a trait, not a traditional, but a psychological explanation.
There is such a trait. It is found in the following texts:
Type II: Child U*, 2, Maine A (BES., op. cit., pp. 40-41).
Type III: Child Ra; Y (as printed by Child, ESPB., I, 495-6).
It consists in the progressive disappearance, finally becoming complete, of the part of the suitor of the younger sister, whose choice by him is the inciting cause, in the normal tradition of the ballad, of the elder sister's homicidal jealousy.
Every text, not obviously defective or fragmentary: of the normal tradition of The Two Sisters, introduces the suitor in the first act of the ballad music-drama. In the Anglo-American tradition, the "lover-stanza" takes the form as in our master-text of Type II, Maine C, 1 (BES., op. cit., p. 43):
There came a young man making love there,
And he made choice of the youngest fair.
The same stanza is found in both copies of Child Y*, omitted, however, with the omission marked, by asterisks, as printed by Child (Y, in ESPB., I, 495). This fact has remained quite unnoticed.
The beginning of the process of regression in the re-creation of the plot is seen in Child Ra, which has lost the lover stanza, retained in the normal text of Child Rb. The effect is incongruous: the father is put in the position of giving the youngest daughter the love-tokens which in the normal text are given by the suitor, who in Child Ra 6, Rb 6, is referred to in a stanza corresponding to Vermont A, 5 (ESSNE., 6, 5):
"No, I won't give You my glove,
But I will have your own true love."
Child Z has gone a step farther. The first stanza has, in the second line, been consciously re-created to the exact form of the corresponding line in Child U*a, 1; U*b, I ; Maine A, 1: "he loved his youngest daughter best". No normal text has this line: only Barry A, I (JAFL., XVIII, 130) has "and he had two daughters, just of the best", giving the rhyme "west . . . best". The rhyme, however, is so obvious in relation to the developing situation of paternal partiality to the younger sister, that it has no need of being referred to any textual precedent. And, whereas Child Z has retained, most incongruously, in stanza 6, the secondary reference to the suitor, Child U*a, U*b, Maine A have reached the final stage in regression. The suitor has entirely disappeared from the drama; the elder sister resorts to murder because she cannot face a situation in which her pathologically adored father is at least no less pathological in his affection for her younger sister. To put it succinctly, we have in Child U*a, U*b, Maine A, the Lear-complex and the Electra complex, both sides of a picture of father-daughter fixation, familiar in literature from Euripides and Shakespeare to The Barretts of Wimpole Street and O'Neill's neo-classic Lavinia-Electra. Psychologically, the situation calls for three sisters (E. R. Mason-Thompson, The Relation of the Elder Sister to the Development of the Electra-Complex, in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, f, 186-95). We may note that not only the nuncupative versions of Lear and. Electra, but also the Anglo-American tradition of the ballad generally, in common with the Polish tradition (cf. p. 2, above) and some forms of the Scottish (Child D, H, W) and Scoto-Irish (Child G) fulfill this condition. Child D, 4, by the way, shows through erotic symbolism (traces of which are in other Scottish texts), that the second, of the three sisters was the knight's leman.
It is easy to say that the loss of the lover-stanza is due to the action of Krohn's Law of Forgetfulness (Die Folkloristische Arbeitsmethode, pp. 59, fr.). That folk-singers forget verses and stanzas is known to every tyro in the field, but only a tyro is content to admit a fact without the attempt to account for it. Folk-singers are not mere animated dictaphone records: the best of them participate emotionally in the action of a ballad-drama. Such emotional reaction --the emotional coefficient, let us call it--is more of a factor in shaping tradition than has been suspected. In the case of the tradition of The Two Sisters, the loss of the lover-stanza so spoils the plot that this stanza ought to be the one least likely to be forgotten. Given, however, a folk-singer soured on the world by frustration or suffering from a regression to an infantile level of consciousness, as is observed in the Electra-complex, the lover-stanza would be not the least, but the most likely to slip from memory.
Wherefore we submit that, the regressive form of the plot of The Two Sisters, as we have it independently developing in both Type II and Type III of the Anglo-American tradition has developed through the reactions of a certain type of psychopathic personality to the situation in the normal form of the plot. The key position for the proof, which answers by way of anticipatory exclusion, the argument that such a version as Child U*b, though regressed to an infantile level, is a "nursery" version of the sort that appears in the tradition of such a ballad of intersibling fixation as The Two Brothers, is held, as it were by Child Y*.
We have said that Child Y* (Y*a, 1770, Y*b, 1775, the former lacking the execution stanza) has the normal form of the Type III plot. The copy taken for printing as Child Y, made between April 29, 1884, when the Percy MSS were sold at Sotheby's, and June of the same year, showed the lover-stanza omitted and asterisks substituted for it. Child Y, not a true copy of Child Y*, is left a text of the type of Child Ra, which has lost the lover stanza retained in Child Rb; it is a text, not only independent of any connection with the tradition of Type II, a purely American form, but, as printed, it is independent even of folk-tradition. Logic cannot dematerialize a fact.
P. B.