To what extent does folklore reflect historical events? Can folk songs be used as a source of historical information? We know that ballads are sometimes based on real personages as John McDowell’s work in Costa Chica, Mexico, has shown. Ballads which are not about outstanding individuals can be historical in the sense that they reflect the specific circumstances of the time and place in which they are performed. Thus the ballads recorded by Robert Klymasz among Ukrainians in Canada, while derived from ballads sung in Ukraine, often talk about situations specific to Canada. One particularly striking song tells of a young woman who brews a potion to lure the man she loves. But, because Canadian flora are different from plants in Ukraine, her efforts prove disastrous and she poisons the man instead of charming him.
Going on the principle that ballads do reflect the circumstances in which they were composed—and preserve the memory of important events for many generations after the time of composition—Joanna Brooks uses American ballads to examine life in England and to determine the circumstances that drove ordinary people to leave their homeland for the Americas. As Brooks explains, her interest arose from events in her own life. She spent some time working with Paula Gunn Allen, a scholar of American Indian literature. This experience taught her to look to oral traditions for information and to cast aside her view of Europeans as heroic colonizers. She then began wondering about her own Brooks ancestors. She knew that they were laborers, simple folk. Investigating what records she could find, she learned that her ancestors were poor and landless, moving westward across the United States in search of economic opportunity. There were no documents in England that could be reliably linked to the author’s family. Then, by chance, Brooks came across the recordings made in Appalachia by Alan Lomax and had an epiphany of sorts. Ballads were the key, she decided, to uncovering the real story behind the departure of so many people from England for the New World. That decision led to the book under review. Using the Lomax recordings and comparing them to ballads collected in England and to available historical information, Brooks seeks to tell the story of the ordinary migrant. Her goal is to challenge the official view of America as the “land of opportunity” by providing the folk view, one expressed in songs that speak of injustice, betrayal, and suffering.
Brooks begins by looking at the profound economic changes occurring in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As forests were converted into leased land, as land was cleared or drained for agriculture, what had been available for everyone’s use came under strict control. Those in power called the expansion of farmland economic improvement. For the peasant it was a disaster. Without access to forests, subsistence became impossible. Unable to survive as they once had, peasants became migrant laborers. They moved to cities, increasing the number of the hungry and desperate. In official histories, it was the poor who were blamed for their lot and accused of sloth and “wickedness.” Some of the poor were lured onto ships to settle the British colonies. Both the passage across the Atlantic and the first years in the new land were horrible, and many died. But the poor were illiterate and the only records of them were not their own, but the few accounts written by the elite. The poor did have their songs, of course, and using these Brooks seeks to tell their story.
After this general introduction, Brooks turns to specific ballads and what they tell us about migration to the Americas. In the first ballad examined, a man questioned by his mother eventually admits that he has killed his own brother for cutting down a tree. While some scholars have interpreted the tree-cutting as a metaphor for an illicit sexual act, Brooks suggests that sometimes a tree really is a tree and that this balled reflects precisely the catastrophic deforestation described in the previous chapter. In all of the versions of this ballad recorded in the Americas, the loss of a tree leads to migration, and the man who killed his brother concludes the narrative by telling his mother that he must leave his family and sail across the sea.
Chapter 3 starts with a ballad that tells of the murder of a young woman by her sister. Jealousy is the killer’s motive, and what she cannot abide is the fact that a young man gave her sister a beaver hat. This prompts a discussion of the fur trade and the growth of British consumer culture, which made an increasing variety of goods available but also led to mounting disparity between social strata and progressively greater financial insecurity for the bottom tiers.
Next comes a story of betrayal. A young lad is promised riches and a prestigious marriage if only he will sink a rival ship. He does what was requested of him, but when he swims back, the captain refuses to let him on board. The youth considers avenging the captain’s treachery by sinking his own ship, but decides to die rather than kill his shipmates. This ballad leads Brooks to talk of the callous treatment of the people who worked the vessels that enlarged the British empire, including a discussion of the ignoble deeds of Sir Walter Raleigh.
The story of the house carpenter’s wife tells of a married woman who abandons her family to follow her lover on a sea voyage to the Americas. In many versions she is not a wanton woman who runs away with a new-found beau. The man who talks her into sailing away with him is the man to whom she had pledged her troth many years earlier, a man who went off to sea and was gone so long that she thought he would never return. Thus the carpenter’s wife is forced to choose between her obligations to her family and a solemn vow made long ago. She decides to honor her earlier vow and does set sail, only to drown with her lover at sea. The discussion here is about the plight of women, both those who had to endure abandonment by men who were forced to go off to sea and the ones who themselves made the perilous journey across the Atlantic. A brief conclusion about the laboring poor and their songs brings the book to a close.
Why We Left uses ballad successfully. The author does not imply that songs collected in Appalachia many years after colonization are accurate reflections of seventeenth-century England or of actual travel to the Americas. Rather, she uses them as a springboard for an exploration of a variety of texts. Her goal is to show colonization from the point of view of the disenfranchised and the poor, and she does this successfully. The book is well-written and is enjoyable reading. I would recommend it to anyone interested in looking at the “other side” of colonization.
Works Cited
Klymasz, Robert B. 1989. The Ukrainian Folk Ballad in Canada. New York: AMS Press.
McDowell, John H. 2000. Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
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[Review length: 1202 words • Review posted on April 2, 2014]