Dramatic, solo, oral performance of prose or poetry spoken from memory or read from
manuscript. Recitation is a major Anglo American folk and popular tradition that traces
back to the British Isles. Many of the items performed derive from written sources; other
recitation texts were composed by their performers and are known only to a small group.
Perhaps for these reasons, there are no indexes to American (or British) recitations, and
the widespread distribution of recitations in Anglo American tradition, their status as
traditional performance, and die value they share with other folklore as a source of
information for understanding people and cultures were seldom recognized by folklore
research until recently.
Recitation was frequently encountered and occasionally noted in the British Isles from
at least the 17th century; the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the word
“recitation” in the sense of spoken oral performance of memorized or read material was
in use in England in the mid-17th century.
The popular-culture history of recitation in the British Isles is intertwined with its
popularity in folk culture. The Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats described
the career of a “gleeman” who recited as well as sang in Dublin during the late 18th and
early 19th centuries, and the clear implication was that the gleeman was part of a
widespread, ancient tradition. Recitation was an important aspect of the musichall and
pub performance traditions of the British Isles, and it is still very much a part of popular
entertainment there. Stanley Holloway is well known in Britain for his many years of
professional recitation performance; books of recitation texts made famous by his
performances are widely distributed, and recordings of his—and a number of other well
known, cherished performers’—recitation performances are still occasionally broadcast
over radio and provide a major source of inspiration, and parody, for British folk and
popular entertainers.
The recitation-performance tradition was part of the oral tradition that the early British
settlers brought to America, and the status and interactions of recitation in folk and
popular culture in America are similar to the role it fills in Britain.
Although the folk recitation-performance tradition was seldom accorded the same
stature or attention as folksongs or ballads, it was frequently noted by travelers, local
historians, and folklorists. Many references to recitations were made more or less in
passing by early American folklorists. John Lomax, in fact, not only observed recitation
while he was collecting cowboy songs, but also learned the classic cowboy recitation
“Lasca,” written by the English popular poet Frank Desprez, and performed it at the 1911
Modern Language Society of America convention. From similar scattered evidence, it
seems clear that recitation has long been a part of Anglo American folklore.
The importance of recitation in American popular culture is much more easily and
completely documented. In the early years of the 20th century, a series of pamphlets
titled Werner’s Readings and Recitations were sold in great numbers to provide texts for
reciters. Recitations constituted a relatively high percentage of the total record sales in the United States during the first quarter-century of the medium. The popular entertainer Cal
Stewart, who billed himself as “The Talking Machine Storyteller,” recorded thousands of
recitations during the 1890s and the early decades of the 20th century. Hank Williams,
Johnny Cash, Perry Como, Tex Ritter, Joan Baez, Tom Mix, and Andy Griffith are
among the many American recording artists who have made records featuring recitation.
Popular-culture recitation fed and reinforced the folk recitation tradition. Folk and
popular reciters alike relied upon Werner’s collection, and many of the recitations
recorded by Stewart—or, for that matter, Cash—passed into oral tradition and underwent
the same sort of variations and reworkings as other folk forms such as ballads and tales.
Still, recitation was largely ignored by folklorists until well after World War II.
Even an incomplete history of Johnny Cash’s recitation “The Stars and Stripes”
demonstrates the complex interaction between popular culture and folk culture. The
original version of Cash’s poem—using the flag as a symbol for the nation in lines such
as: You see, that flag/Got a hole right there, /When Washington carried it/Across the
Delaware—was disseminated primarily by television and ended in the Vietnam War
period. But a recent public performance by St. Johns, Arizona, reciter Delbert Lambson
included a new stanza he had added that brought the poem up to date by mentioning
Operation Desert Storm.
The first major folklore collection and analysis of recitation in America dealt not with
Anglo American forms, but with the related African American form, the “toast.” With the
exception of scattered research and occasional mentions in folksong and ballad
collections—particularly those of Henry W.Shoemaker, (see Shoemaker 1919)—there
was almost no significant scholarly work directed toward the Anglo American recitation
until the 1970s. A description of a recitation, a reciter, and a recitation performance was
published in a regional American folklore journal, (AFF) Word [Aiizonz. Friends of
Folklore], in 1972 and was followed a year later by more description in a Journal of
American Folklore article. Asession of the 1974 American Folklore Society annual
convention was devoted to the topic. Revised versions of the session papers, along with
four others, were published in a special issue of Southern Folklore Quarterly in 1976.
These seminal articles were in turn followed in 1978 by a special sixty-three-page issue
of Southwest Folklore, which served as extended liner notes for a documentary record,
Uncle Horace’s Recitations (1987 AFF [Arizona Friends of Folklore] Flagstaff, Arizona),
featuring twelve recitations by one performer and transcriptions of the rest of his
repertoire. Yet another article on recitation, concerning a bawdy text (Baker 1987),
appeared in the Journal of American Folklore in 1987, and in 1990 the first book devoted
completely to the subject of Anglo American recitation was published (Cunningham
1990). With this research, a picture of Anglo American recitation and its place in folklore
is beginning to emerge.
It is clear that the oral tradition of America and the British Isles has long included
individuals, families, and communities for whom the dramatic oral performance of poems
and stories is as natural as speaking. Programs as varied as the ceilidh held at Bunratty
Folk Park in Shannon, Ireland, and the Old West Show at Mesa, Arizona, continue to
feature recitations in the 1990s. These performances utilize stories and poems from a
variety of written and oral sources circumscribed by a broad range of performance
conventions that govern their scripted, fixed-form, nonextemporaneous performances.
The same sort of performances also take place as a part of the folklore of both groups.
Some performers memorize their recitations, others read their’s. In either case, both the
reciters and their audiences have a clear concept of a script, a correct form of what is
being performed. The reciters recite and the audiences provide the attention essential to
the form’s survival because that which they create and that which they adopt and adapt
alike embody their values and beliefs while entertaining and fulfilling expectations and
emotional needs.
Texts recited in the 1990s may be taken from traditional ballads or popular poetry
(Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” is probably the single most popular and
most widely distributed such text in America, and “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow
God,” by J.Milton Hayes, holds the same position in Britain), or they may be written by
performers themselves in the manner and form of traditional ballads or popular poetry;
what makes recitation a folk genre is that it is a traditional oral performance. Elements of
performance run through all presentations of recitation texts. Most of them are actually
performed before an audience, and those that are not (such as those collected by
folklorists outside of normal contexts) adhere to performance characteristics of the genre
and could be so presented. The size of the audience ranges from a few family members to
fairly large groups that are a part of family or community gatherings; they all share a
basic familiarity with the conventions of recitation performance, which are introduced,
indicated, and communicated in various subtle or more obvious ways. Performers are
frequently formally introduced to their audience by a “master of ceremonies,” or, in less
formal situations, performers introduce themselves. Reciters stand while their audiences
remain seated. By their performances, the reciters create and command an invisible stage
so that their audiences recognize recitation in progress, enter the performance, and play
their roles, too. A theatrical or a subtle gesture, a twinkle in the eye, words that tumble
over each other, a shout, a whisper, the rising or falling of pitch, sometimes the tinkling
of a piano or the sobbing of a violin, and even silence—all call into being a world of
imagination wherein the audience becomes a part of the performance and shares the
performers’ evocation and evincing of joy and sorrow, laughter and tears.
Recitation is not as common in popular or folk entertainment in either the British Isles
or America in the 1990s as it was in the 1890s, but wherever there are opportunities for
reciters to perform, and wherever their performances are valued by their audiences, the
tradition of recitation continues.
Keith Cunningham
References
Baker, Ronald L. 1987. Lady Lil and Pisspot Pete. Journal of American Folklore 100:191–199.
Cunningham, Keith, ed. 1990. The Oral Tradition of the American West: Adventure, Courtship,
Family, and Place in Traditional Recitation, with an Introduction by W.K. McNeil. Little Rock,
AR: August House.
Shoemaker, Henry W. 1919. North Pennsylvania Minstrelsy. Altoona, PA: Times Tribune.