Educator, collector, author. The Ballad Tree (1950), an outgrowth of Wells’ popular
ballad class at Wellesley College, was the first comprehensive ballad study to enliven
accurate library scholarship with astute field experience. Wells had supplemented her
years of collecting while on the staff of Pine Mountain Settlement School in Kentucky
(intermittently from 1915 to 1930) with fieldwork in the Northeast and in Britain. An
anthology, history, and critique, the volume includes ballads well beyond the Child
canon, highlights the American tradition, analyzes aesthetic issues, provides detailed data
about singers, treats even-handedly the creation-memorization issue, and devotes an
entire chapter to context. Its portrait of Cecil Sharp as fiefd collector is based on firsthand
observation.
Like Bertrand H.Bronson, Wells considered tune integral to the ballad. The Ballad
Tree features carefully annotated tunes. And a 1958 review article in the Journal of the
English Folk Dance and Song Society hails Joseph W.Hendren’s analysis of the
interdependence of text and tune in Study of Ballad Rhythm while lamenting the
inaccuracy of Vance Randolph’s transcriptions and the separation of texts and tunes in
the Frank C.Brown collection.
At Pine Mountain, Wells discovered the singing Ritchie family, later bringing two of
the daughters to study at Wellesley. Like Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell, she was
interested in social and recreational uses of folk dance and folksong, and she taught them
at Pine Mountain, during her tenure at Wellesley (1935–1956), and at the Country Dance
Society camp at Pinewoods, Massachusetts. In 1961 she received the Gold Medal of the
English Folk Dance and Song Society.
William Bernard McCarthy