Traditional sung verse that exhibits characteristics shared by other kinds of folklore. Its
natural performance settings are customary occasions of group work, leisure, ritual, and
play; its participants’ social identities remain overwhelmingly those of neighbor, kin, or
workmate and are not displaced by the personae of singer and audience member; it is
social rather than personal in meaning and function; it enjoys a strong and direct
relevance to “real life”; it displays continuity over time along with adaptability to each
context of performance; and it relies heavily on stylized form and reusable content. Song
traditions matching this depiction have decreased enormously in vitality since the late
19th century, particularly in Anglo American culture, as we have handed over what was
once a kind of everyday practice to professional surrogates and become chiefly
consumers of song rather than users of song, seldom participating in singing occasions
keyed to the habits of daily life. Consequently, the picture sketched here is largely a
historical one.
In their portrayals of the genre, folksong scholars have embraced a number of
categorical schemes: by topic (for instance, songs about war, songs about thwarted
lovers), by geography (folksongs of Indiana, folksongs of the South), by origin (imported
songs, indigenous songs), and by culture group (songs of the cowboys, of the
lumbermen), among others. For an overview of the present sort, however, the most
frequently employed distinctive features have been the verses’ poetic conventions,
without reference to the music of songs, to the circumstances of their performance, or to
singing style. In such an overview, folksong is a way of articulating a topic in sung verse,
and over time several such “ways” have jelled into fairly distinct—but not mutually
exclusive—models. We can recognize three such ways or models as dominant in Anglo
American folksong tradition: the catalog, the lyric, and the ballad.
Even though probably the oldest of the three, the catalog has been least analyzed by
folklorists. Indeed, we do not even possess a commonly agreed-upon name for the type,
usually subsuming it under more empirically observable categories like lullabies, playparty songs, local songs, and so on, thereby masking the commonality of such pieces
under a mishmash of disparate traits—functional, situational, and geographical, among
others. But there is great formal unity throughout the type that these more parochial
divisions disguise: In essence, the topic is held suspended in time and space and its
component parts inventoried or listed (hence catalog). For example, members of a team
of lumbermen are named and portrayed one by one (a common kind of catalog song, and
not confined to occupational groups either, that are often called “moniker songs”), or if
the topic is an individual rather than a group, his or her most salient traits are menued:
I wouldn’t have an old maid;
I’ll tell you the reason why:
Her neck’s so long and stringy
I’m afraid she’d never die.
I wouldn’t have a preacher;
I’ll tell you the reason why:
He’s always in the pulpit
A-preachin’ chicken pie.
I wouldn’t have a lawyer
I’ll tell you the reason why:
He’s always in the courthouse
Swearin’ many a lie.
Similarity and/or contiguity among parts is a striking feature of catalog songs, not only in
the portrayal of those parts (as in the consistently unfavorable depictions above), but even
in actual verbal repetition. Indeed, some catalog songs, especially the cumulative (like
“Old MacDonald Had a Farm”) and dialogic (like “Soldier, Soldier Will You Marry
Me?” or “Where Have You Been All the Day, Billy Boy?”) kinds, depend for much of
their effect on repetition. As these examples suggest, whenever song is linked with
physical action, especially in group activity—game playing, dancing, manual labor, ritual
custom—more dian likely die catalog will be the preferred model.
The second major genre of Anglo American traditional song is die lyric, the most
recognizable surface feature of which is its subject matter: the emotional reaction of a
protagonist (often the song’s first-person “speaker”) to a past experience rather than the
nature of the experience itself. The lyric song articulates its topic by linking its images in
a more sophisticated way than the catalog’s listing method: Topic-parts are interrelated
by imaginative associations of shared mood, texture, implication. For example:
Come all ye fair and tender ladies,
Be careful how you court young men.
They’re like bright stars in a summer morning,
They first are here and then they’re gone.
While many sacred songs follow the format, secular songs predominate in the traditional
lyric repertoire; in these songs, sorrow and bitterness at a failed love affair are by far the
most common emotions. Lyric songs in general, but particularly lyric love songs, are
deeply symbolic in that their images connote strongly contrasting ideas like superfluity
and dearth, amplification and abatement, movement and stasis:
Oh, love is sweet and love is charming
And love is pleasant when it’s new.
But love grows cold as love grows older,
And fades away like the morning dew.
The third folksong model common in Anglo American community-singing tradition is
the ballad. The ballad is like a tale in sung verse: It tells a story, and so links its stanzaimages, or topic component parts, in a narrative way—actions result in reactions; causes
are followed by effects; decisions lead to their implementation, and so on, all unified by a
small cast of interacting characters and a chronologically unfolding “plot.” Folksong
collectors have found four ballad subtypes prominent in American folk tradition, two
inherited from Old World culture, one homegrown, and one whose flowering was more
or less transatlantic. These are, respectively: the medieval, or Child, ballad (so called to
honor Francis James Child, the great 19thcentury authority on the genre), the broadside
ballad, the blues ballad, and the parlor ballad. The Child type is the oldest, emerging in
Europe in the late medieval period and remaining a usable model for new songs up to the
late 1600s. More than 100 songs of this type have been found in 20th-century American
singing tradition, all diffused to this country from die British Isles and more often than
not retaining their premodern ambience (they often feature dramatis personae who
possess titles, live in castles, and ride finely accoutered steeds). Child ballads are most
notable within the ballad model for their internally symmetrical, balanced, parallelistic
form, often very like the catalog but, of course, telling a story rather than just listing parts
of the topic’s anatomy:
She had not been on sea three weeks,
I am sure it was not four,
Until fair Ellender began to weep,
And she wept most bitterly.
“Oh, do you weep for your house carpenter,
Or do you weep for your gold,
Or do you weep for your sweet little babe
Whom you never will see any more?”
“I neither weep for your gold,” said she,
“Neither do I weep for your store,
But I do weep for my house carpenter and sweet little babe
Whom I never will see any more.”
She had not been on sea three weeks,
I am sure it was not four,
Until the ship sprang a leak
And sank to rise no more.
The broadside ballad, is of more recent vintage, its emergence associated with the issuing
of songs (invariably just the words) on single sheets of paper for sale on street corners,
and at market stalls and country fairs. As folklorists use the word, “broadside” denotes
primarily a style of song that coalesced in 18th-century Britain (though, once again, it
was a pan-European form and followed European culture’s diffusion to other continents).
It tells its simple tale more concretely than its older relative, the Child ballad, specifying
the journalistic variables of who, what, where, when, how, and why; it is more linear,
sequential, and not as repetitive in its plot development; and it betrays its relatively
modern history by portraying a more varied society in which working- and middle-class
people are invariably the main protagonists:
My name is Daniel Martin,
I’se borned in Arkansas;
I fled from those base rebels
Who fear not God or law.
I left my aged father
And my beloved wife;
I’se forced to go to Rollie
For to try to save my life.
I jined in Phillip’s regiment—
I’m not ashamed to tell—
My colonel and my officer
They treated me mighty well.
I served four months at Rollie
Through sleet, snow, and ice,
And next received my orders:
Go meet old Sterling Price.
The third ballad type is of American origin, though similarities to its way-of-telling-astory-in-sung-verse can be found in other cultures. We call this type the blues ballad, and
it fuses traits from African American song traditions, especially catalog and lyric types
like worksongs and spirituals, widi Anglo American song traditions, most notably (but
not exclusively) the broadside ballad. The blues ballad holds up in sharp relief striking,
dramatic scenes selectively chosen from its topic at large, unifying them with a common
mood of celebration or lament, but, in ballad-like manner, the images generally follow a
chronological sequence, though in a more fits-and-starts than causeand-effect
progression. And like so many broadside ballads—especially the indigenous American
ones—a blues ballad is invariably based on an actual event in the region’s immediate past
and does allude to people, places, and actions in a quasijournalistic way, though so impressionistically and elliptically that someone unfamiliar with the historical event
would be quite unable to reconstruct it in any detailed way from the song:
My father was a gambler, he learnt me how to play,
My father was a gambler, he learnt me how to play,
Saying, “Son, don’t go a-begging when you hold the ace and tray,
When you hold the ace and tray.”
Chorus:
Hang me, O hang me, and I’ll be dead and gone,
Hang me, O hang me, and I’ll be dead and gone;
I wouldn’t mind the hangin, it’s bein’ gone so long,
It’s layin’ in the grave so long.
They took me down to old Fort Smith as sick as I
could be,
They took me down to old Fort Smith as sick as I
could be,
They handed me a letter saying “Son, come home to me,”
Saying, “Son, come home to me.”
The fourth ballad type is the parlor (or sentimental) ballad. Ballads of this type collected
from American folk tradition often (but not always) date from the late 19th century and
are traceable to known composers, many of whom copyrighted their compositions and
issued them on sheet music. Parlor ballads exhibit a self-consciously “literary” style of
more formal—and less formulaic—diction, greater unity and continuity of plot, stricter
regularity in meter and rhyme, and especially more extravagant expressions of sentiment
than do other ballad types, even the broadside ballad:
Oh, the sun was setting in the west,
And it fell over the lingering way,
To the branches of the forest,
Where a wounded cowboy lay
Neath the shade of a palmetto
And beneath the sultry sky,
Far away from his loved old Texas
They laid him down to die.
His comrades gathered round him
To hear what he might say,
And the tears rolled down each manly cheek
As his life-blood ebbed away.
One loved friend and companion
Was kneeling by his side
Trying to stop the life-blood flowing,
But alas, in vain he tried.
In sum, parlor ballads, like the parlor songs in general that entered folk tradition,
apparently exemplify bourgeois sensibility, worldview, ethic, and taste.
We must remember that, like all folklore, folksongs were constantly being adapted by
those who sang them to their children, their playmates, their neighbors, their comradesinarms, and so forth in the course of everyday life. Thus, a song may have followed
chiefly ballad conventions in one enactment, chiefly lyric in another. The models, in
short, are not mutually exclusive straitjackets; indeed, most songs invariably draw upon
not just one way, but two and even more ways, of articulating their topics, even though
one way will generally predominate. It is that quality of variability more than any other
that has consistently stimulated scholarly interest in folksong.
Roger deV.Renwick
References
Abrahams, Roger D., and George Foss. 1968. Anglo-American Folksong Style. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: PrenticeHall.
McNeil, W.K. 1988. Southern Folk Ballads, 2 vols. Little Rock. AR: August House.
Posen, I.Sheldon. [1988] 1993. For Singing and Dancing and All Sorts of Fun. Ottawa: Well Done
Books.