The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and Its Imaginary Contexts
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The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts DAVID ATKINSON To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/250 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts David Atkinson http://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2014 David Atkinson This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that she endorses you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Atkinson, David, The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0041 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/ Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at http://www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783740277 ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-027-7 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-028-4 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374–029–1 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-030-7 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-031-4 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0041 Cover image: Henry Robert Morland (1716–1797), The Ballad Singer (circa 1764). http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_Robert_Morland_-_ The_Ballad_Singer_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders; any omissions or errors will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. Please see the list of illustrations for copyright relating to individual images. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified. Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers For Catherine, Francis, and Jennifer Contents References and Abbreviations List of Illustrations Preface 1. Where Is the Ballad? 2. On the Nature of Evidence 3. Textual Authority and the Sources of Variance 4. The Material Ballad 5. Sound and Writing 6. Agency, Intention, and the Problem of Version (with a brief history of ballad editing) 7. Palimpsest or texte génétique 8. Afterword: ‘All her friends cried out for shame’ Select Bibliography Index References and Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used throughout for standard editions and reference works: CSD: Concise Scots Dictionary, ed. Mairi Robinson (Edinburgh: Polygon at Edinburgh, 1999). DSL: Dictionary of the Scots Language / Dictionar o the Scots Leid, available at http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/ [DSL-DOST: Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue entries; DSL-SND: Scottish National Dictionary entries]. EDD: The English Dialect Dictionary, ed. Joseph Wright, 6 vols (London: Henry Frowde, 1898–1905). ESPB: Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882–98). ESTC: English Short Title Catalogue, available at http://estc.bl.uk OED: Oxford English Dictionary, available at http://www.oed.com Child numbers: refer to items in ESPB. Roud numbers: refer to items in the Roud Folk Song Index and Broadside Index, available at http://vwml.org.uk/search/search- roud-indexes Bodleian Library broadside ballads are available at http://ballads. bodleian.ox.ac.uk All web addresses cited, and Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the Select Bibliography, were accessed prior to publication on 12/13 February 2014 and were valid at that date. List of Illustrations 1.1 Enos White and his wife, outside Crown Cottage, 2 Axford, Hampshire. Provenance unknown. 5.1 Carpenter Collection, Photo 101, James Madison 102 Carpenter sitting in his Austin Roadster. Courtesy of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. 5.2 Carpenter Collection, MS p. 08356. Courtesy of the 106 American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. 5.3 Joseph Taylor, ‘Lord Bateman’, transcribed by Percy 114–115 Grainger, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 3.3 (no. 12) (1908), 192–93. Courtesy of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. 6.1 Carpenter Collection, MS p. 04267. Courtesy of the 143 American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. 7.1 Carpenter Collection, MS pp. 04384–04387. Courtesy 156–157 of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. 8.1 Carpenter Collection, MS pp. 04403–04404. Courtesy 176 of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. Preface The ‘imaginary’ in the title of this volume is quite deliberate. The ballad and its imagined contexts, with its echoes of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, Georgina Boyes’s imagined village, and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s invented traditions, might have evoked an oral, ballad-singing community of a kind that owes as much to the broad thrust of Romanticism as it does to a historical back-projection from (limited) evidence drawn from the folk song revivals of the twentieth century. The imaginary contexts of the title, in contrast, refer to the abstract ideas that are the necessary counterpart of any attempt to describe the ballad – be it at the level of genre or of the individual literary/musical item in its social and historical context – in terms either of ontology or of textual constitution. Conceptually, there is a danger that ‘the ballad as abstract idea’ might appear perilously close to the sort of conflationary, ‘idealist’ notion of ballad editing that characterized publications of a much earlier period. Editions such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and William Motherwell’s Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern drew on and compounded different texts in order to achieve a comprehensive and complete, ‘ideal’ version of each individual ballad. They have been much reviled for doing so, although as an exercise in ‘best-text editing’, duly described and documented, this could still be a defensible approach. However, it is certainly true that it falls foul of the ethnographic turn that ballad studies have taken since that time. Both Scott and Motherwell came to reject their own editorial practices and instead to laud the discrete integrity, and poetic and musical value, of each separate ballad instance, or ‘version’. Subsequently, mediated by the practice of the Danish editor Svend Grundtvig, this insight provided the theoretical basis for Francis James Child’s standard edition of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The ‘type/version paradigm’ embodied therein xiv The Anglo-Scottish Ballad represents the distinctive contribution of ballad studies to editing theory. In short, the ballad ‘type’ is identified as the abstract sum of all actual and possible manifestations, or ‘versions’, of what is recognizably the ‘same’ thing. The definition is notably circular – but it does mostly work in practice because there turns out to be a high level of seemingly inherent stability in ballad narratives and melodies, which makes it possible, most of the time, to recognize quite intuitively which items belong together. Since it is frequently possible to ascribe individual versions to individual sources, this type/version paradigm lends itself very neatly to the ethnographic orientation. In what has been rather grandly termed ‘the post-Child era of scientific folklore’, a premium attaches to the precise recording, attribution, and presentation of the collected item. And yet there is already a paradox here, because the type/version paradigm has also, almost uninvited, introduced an abstract dimension into the discussion. For the ‘version’ cannot exist without inherent reference to the ‘type’ – and so while on the one hand the item’s uniqueness is being identified, on the other it is simultaneously being absorbed. Just as the ‘version’ is a constituent part of the ‘type’, so the ‘version’ itself derives from the ‘type’. This ‘imaginary context’ then goes to the heart of ballad representation, for the type/version paradigm has to incorporate all possible manifestations and not just a chosen few. ‘Ballad representation’ impinges on many of the critical dimensions that have dominated (some might say, bedevilled) ballad research: ballad origins; oral and printed transmission; sound and writing; agency and editing; textual and melodic indeterminacy and instability; and the premises and purposes that lie behind collecting, editing, publishing, and research. Some of these issues are addressed in the chapters that follow. While the focus here is mostly on ballad texts (words), and a good deal of the argument draws on theories of textual editing, it is to be hoped that several of the main ideas that can be extracted from the discussion will turn out to have a bearing on ballad melodies. Nevertheless, it is unwise to press too far the idea that the ballad comprises an indivisible textual and melodic whole. Not least because the two things are inherently separable: the same words can go to different tunes, and vice versa; and the words can exist without the melody (in broadside print, for example), just as the melody can exist without the words. While there is the possibility for melody to impact upon versification, and the two things can certainly interact associatively – collectors like Cecil Sharp have commented on the difficulty Preface xv singers sometimes experience in recalling words in the absence of a tune (and there is some evidence from neuroscience for the synergy of the two things in human memory) – there is still an absence of a critical vocabulary that would convincingly facilitate the discussion of an integrated whole.