Most important of the post-Child generation of American ballad scholar-collectors, whose theory of communal re-creation eventually laid to rest the communal theory of ballad origins. Barry based his scholarly writing on both library research and fieldwork and “was the first Anglo-American scholar to investigate traditional song in all its aspects: text, tune, performance, and transmission” (Wilgus 1959:68). Barry brought to his endeavors the unique combination of vast learning, superb academic training, and a comprehensive understanding of musicology. He was a great stimulus to the critical study of the ballad, and his nodons of the genre were prescient and far reaching, still exerting their influence on the field. Educated at Harvard University in the years immediately after Francis James Child, Barry studied folklore, theology, and classical and medleval literature, maintaining a long relationship with his mentors, George Lyman Kittredge, Kuno Franke, and Leo Wiener. This lent him meaningful credibility as a private scholar of independent mind and means, for Barry enjoyed both the respect of the academy and the freedom to devote his time and energies exclusively to scholarship. At the start of his career, the very definition of a ballad was far from settled (the terms “folk-song,” “ballad,” and even “folk music” were used interchangeably). Despite increasingly strident attacks, Francis Barton Gummere’s theory of communal origins held sway. Through extensive fieldwork, exacting documentation, gradual publication, and continual analysis of a growing body of American folksong items, Barry and his peers presided over the sorting out of definition, style, transmission, and other vexing matters left unclear by the great library-centered scholars of the preceding century. A dedicated collector, Barry followed fieldwork leads from family, friends, and associates, moving beyond these personal networks by placing notices in local newspapers, the Boston Transcript, among others. He kept in close contact with other collectors and scholars, contributing both insights and examples to the work of such learned colleagues as H.M. Belden and encouraging hosts of amateur collectors, especially in New England. Barry’s pursuit of American folk music, beginning in 1903, bore fruit in a steady harvest of folksong texts and melodies, primarily from northern New England and the Maritimes, a region that, until his pioneering work, was thought devoid of migratory ballads. Publishing his results, in such journals as the Journal of American Folklore, American Speech, and Modern Language Notes, initially he was adding Northeast examples to a growing compendium of American folksong texts. His first article, “The Lord Randall Ballad in America” (1903), presents six texts and three melodies of Child 12 and includes a few comments comparing Barry’s collected examples to versions already in print. He was soon working out his ideas, bit by bit, in headnotes to texts and melodies and in a number of ballad histories, making important theoretical advances. His responses and reactions to ideas of other ballad scholars appear throughout his writings, in lively discussions or brief statements like fine tunings, always confidently asserted. Typically, his gracefiilly written, succinct, and erudite commentaries illumine matters large and small, so that, taken together, they comprise a thorough treatment of his subject.
Working in the era of discovery of American folksongs, Barry ushered in the modern age of ballad studies. Among the more recognized of his accomplishments is his demonstration that songs of the folk, rather than being products of “dancing throngs” composing communally, are instead compositions of “individual invention plus communal re-creation,” a term he introduced in 1907 in an instructive musicological discussion contrasting “traditional” and “composed” airs. He considered the notion to be the very crux of the issue of origins. A song is traditional, he claimed, if it is composed by the folk, first as an individual composition, then communally recreated through the process of transmission. “It should be understood,” he stated at the end of his career, “that communal re-creation must include not merely the cumulative effect of accidental and pardy conscious change made by many folk singers over a long period of time, but also sudden, marked and perfectly intentional changes by folk singers who are also folk composers, and have…retold an old ballad story in more or less new wording of their own.” A number of Barry’s other contributions are at least as far reaching, and perhaps of greater significance. Fieldwork with singers stretched his understanding of the genre, and he daringly followed their lead in shaping both his conclusions and his methodology. His was a sophisticated understanding of structural and aesthetic aspects of folksinging. For him, folksongs were the union of text and air (the whole text and the whole melody), completely interdependent. Although Barry’s analysis of texts “actually outweighs his analysis of tunes” (Wilgus 1968), his pioneering discussion of traditional singing style and sets of tunes anticipated the great musicological treatments of folksong melodies published by the subsequent generation of folk-tune scholars. He insisted that other collectors search for tunes and treat them properly. Furthermore, he remained faithful to his early declaration that “to a folk-singer, words and music together make the ballad he sings. The one is not felt to exist without the other.” As evidence accumulated, Barry saw ballad tradition as a mixture of old and new pieces, all subject to communal recreation. He edged toward including older popular pieces of known authorship into the rubric of folksong, stating boldly that whatever a folksinger sings “from memory” and “for the sheer joy of singing” is traditional. The idea was abhorrent to purists among his contemporaries, but Barry asked, “Why make a distinction when the folk makes none?” The effect of communal re-creation on such songs of commercial origin as “Casey Jones” supports his claim. Just as prescient was his assertion, ventured in a discussion of Irish folksongs, of the “fact that folk-song is in reality an idea,” of which, by tracing its history, “we can get but the process of actualization.” This is a revoluntionary shift in understanding the nature of a ballad. Elsewhere, he clarified his meaning: “No longer is a ballad a static narrative of an event or situation,” but it is a “process…one by which a simple event in human experience of subjective interest, narrated in simple language, set to a simple melody is progressively objectivated.” Barry also challenged the pervasive attitude that folk tradition is the product of illiteracy, pointing out that the printed ballad often stimulated tradition. He went so far as to claim “illiteracy” to be “a negative factor in ballad tradition…inhibit[ing] its survival,” thereby including the ballad printer among the folk engaged in re-creation. Late in his life, Barry wrote of an “instinct” he had felt when he started collecting, “to go to the folk-singers…[for] evidence in solving the…problems of balladry.” It is entirely possible that the incidence of a few folksongs in his own familys tradition gave him a glimmer of the process of transmission he later articulated, thus accounting for the intuition that more than thirty years later he reflected upon as “instinct.” Barry was a scrupulous editor who wrote in a style accessible to a general audience, and his mentorship of talented amateur collectors, some of whose work he greatly enhanced by outright collaboration, is also noteworthy He shared his prodigious learning, introduced the resources of other scholars, provided models for documenting and archiving, and gave editorial guidance. A number of exceedingly well-edited midcentury New England collections of ballads and folksongs bear his stamp. Barry mentored and collaborated extensively with Fannie Hardy Eckstorm and Mary W.Smyth in Maine and Helen Hartness Flanders in Vermont, among others. Eloise Hubbard Linscott paid him posthumous tribute in her Folksongs of Old New England, published in 1939. Of all New England collectors who were his contemporaries, only Edith Sturgis makes no mention of a significant debt of gratitude to Barry, and her Songs from the Hills of Vermont was a parochial effort unconnected to any ballad studies network. A long interest in starting a separate professional American society for folksongs led Barry to found the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast. From 1930 on, he published the greater portion of his collections and commentary under its aegis in the Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast, which ceased publication at his death. (There is an annual of broader scope, Northeast Folklore, the publishing arm of the Northeast Folklore Society, which, in turn, was founded in the 1960s as a tribute to Phillips Barry by Edward M.Ives at the University of Maine, Orono.) Linda Morley References Barry, Phillips. [1930–1934] 1960. Ed. and principal contrib. Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast. Introduction by Samuel P.Bayard. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society. ——. 1939a. Folk Music in America. New York: National Service Bureau. ——. 1939b. The Maine Woods Songster: Fifty Songs for Singing. Cambridge, MA : Powell. Barry, Phillips, Fannie H.Eckstorm, and Mary W.Smyth, eds. 1929. British Ballads from Maine. Critical Notes by Phillips Barry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Flanders, Helen Hartness, Elizabeth Flanders Ballard, George Brown, and Phillips Barry, eds. 1939. The New Green Mountain Songster. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wilgus, D.K. 1959. Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.