The Maine Folklife Center did a great service to ballad scholarship, when, in 2011, it issued British Ballads from Maine, Second Series, the collaborative effort of Phillips Barry, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, and Mary Winslow Smyth. This work awakens fresh admiration for the thoroughness and erudition of these scholars—but, especially, of Phillips Barry—which remains unsurpassed. The book is comprised of an editor’s introduction by Pauleena MacDougall, Barry’s essay entitled “The Popular Ballad Redefined,” a main section of thirty-two ballads with multiple versions, an appendix with Child ballads not included in Barry’s 1929 work, references, and an index. There is also a CD of sixty-three of the ballad tunes, some played on the fiddle and some on the recorder.
As we learn from the editor’s introduction, the first series, published in 1929, consisted solely of Child ballads, which were then privileged by scholars. However, Barry and his colleagues came to realize the importance of ballads that were not in “the canon,” and they set about to produce a second volume consisting of British broadside ballads that were circulating in oral tradition in Maine. The premature deaths of Barry and Smyth cut the work short, as Eckstorm, who had turned her papers over to Barry, could not access them after his demise. Eventually, the Barry collection, including Eckstorm’s papers and material for the second volume of British Ballads from Maine, found its way to the Houghton Library at Harvard, where it languished until folksinger Jim Douglas set to work to match texts with tunes, to update the table of contents, and to add or complete missing citations. In 1996, he contacted Pauleena MacDougall about the possibility of publishing the work. Fred Gosbee reproduced the music transcriptions digitally. Even with the painstaking work of Douglas, Gosbee, and MacDougall, there were items that could not be pieced together, including untitled music transcriptions. Some of Barry’s introductory essay is missing, and it seems to end in the middle of a thought. It is convoluted and hard to follow.
The essay, “The Popular Ballad Redefined,” provides insights into Barry’s thinking as of 1935, about ballad origins, the nature of tradition, and the processes of re-creation. He was responding to the so-called Ballad Wars that had only recently concluded. Ballads do not write themselves, as Barry quotes William Grimm, “though a man and not a people has composed them, still the author counts for nothing, and it is not by mere accident, but with the best reason, that they have come down to us anonymous” (18). Nor is ballad-singing or ballad-making a closed account, as contemporary fieldwork attests (2).
Barry then seeks to tease out the distinctions between the terms “popular” and “vulgar” ballads, as conceived by Percy, Jamieson, and, ultimately, Child. Barry notes a parallel distinction in the writings of Montaigne, who “sought to make clear that he saw in natural poesie the honesty of the peasant and the noble savage, in artificiall poesie, the honesty of the philosopher” (2).
Percy was the first ballad critic to distinguish between “popular” and “vulgar ballads.” Barry quotes Percy, who saw the popular ballad as “having favor with, or circulating freely among the common people.” The popular ballad had had minstrel origins and was then “banished from the grand hall, [where it] sought refuge in the hut. The inevitable result was that [the] songs should pass into the tradition of the common people” (5). On the other hand, “vulgar ballads” were “artless productions” of “poets who wrote for fame and posterity” (2).
Child’s early writings were influenced by the work of Percy, and he had reservations about including material from a cultured New England family. Ultimately, though, Child opted for inclusion, basing his criteria on three benchmarks: 1. authorlessness; 2. traditional currency; and 3. the story or plot must have some grounding in folklore. Barry, and Child before him, recognized that the popular/vulgar dichotomy often broke down: some ancient ballads had a literary character, and “popular” ballads often appeared on broadsides.
The main section of the book consists of thirty-two distinct ballads, with multiple versions and variants. Sources include the family notebook of Eckstorm’s source Susie Carr Young. Other key informants include Annie Marston, J.P. J. A. Nesbitt, Horace Priest, and James McGill. In each case, Maine versions are interspersed with broadside reprints, whether with US or British imprint. Music transcriptions are provided for at least a few versions of each ballad, and the amount of detail varies according to who transcribed the song. Barry worked a lot with George Herzog, a trained ethnomusicologist, who rendered the nuances of the singers’ performances in great detail. A number of Herzog’s transcriptions exhibit multiple changes in meter, to convey the rubato nature of the performance; likewise, tunes that might show variations in a given verse are noted. I would have liked to know whether “recorded by” Herzog meant that he was using sound recordings or was taking them down from dictation. This is not made clear. By contrast, tune transcriptions sent in by informants tended to be fairly basic.
What is striking about this song collection is the erudite commentaries on each ballad. Often, we are given information about an informant that goes well beyond his or her name, the date and place that the ballad was recorded, and from whom the song was learned:
“Mrs. Henry Cotton of Blue Hill, Maine, informed us that she heard “Young But Growing” sung once in Blue Hill, at an entertainment, at least fifty-eight years ago. It was sung by the adopted daughter (aged eight) of Mrs. Annie (Cross) Butler, of California, on a visit of Mrs. Butler, to her sister, “Aunt Henrietta” (Cross) Snow of Bluehill. Mrs. Cotton was sure that the child had been adopted in California, and had, prior to the visit, never been East. While the song may have been learned by the child in California, it is quite as likely that Mrs. Butler herself had learned it in her youth in Maine, and had taught it to her daughter. Mrs. Cotton recognized the song at once, when Mrs. Young sang it, the melodies must have been the same or else very closely related to sets of a single air. The extent to which folk-singers recognize close relationships between sets varies very much in different individuals.” (88-89)
As was mentioned earlier, broadside texts, whether bearing US or British imprint, appear in the book alongside the Maine versions, and Barry subjects them to close comparative analysis. In addition, Barry shows a thorough grasp of the works of the major ballad scholars of his day, including Broadwood, Gilchirst, Beldon, and Vermonter Helen Hartness Flanders—whom he would mentor.
Barry’s extensive commentaries also draw from comparative mythology, including Greek and Roman mythology, Irish epic, and medieval romance. The ballad, “The Maid on the Shore,” according to Barry, has antecedents in siren lore, and “The Bold Fisherman” he traces to Old or Middle Irish sources. He begins his argument by taking issue with Lucy Broadwood’s “theory that [“The Bold Fisherman”] is a mystical song of the ‘fish and Fisher’ symbolism, the wooing of the soul by Christ. We cannot accept this view” which “imposes too large a strain on our faith if we are obliged to leap across a wide gap of centuries with no intermediary stages” (51). Rather, Barry says that “The Bold Fisherman” “is based on the Celtic motif love of a fairy prince for a mortal woman. The actual source of the ballad can be traced to ‘The Conception of Bres,’ a late Old Irish or early Middle Irish narrative embedded in a fifteenth-century text of ‘The Second Battle of Moytura.’” Here are some of the parallels to the ballad in that text: the man of “fairest form” who landed his ship near the maiden, was wearing “a mantle with bands of gold thread… around him…. On his breast was a branch of gold with a sheen of precious stone therein,” and “five circlates of gold [were] on his neck.” These, no doubt, were symbols of royalty (52).
The ballad “Rinordine” Barry finds to be rooted in folklore and popular literature concerning the Italian outlaw/hero, Rinaldo Rinaldini. He cites a sixteenth-century romance in which Rinaldini carries off a young maiden who is a willing victim. He also cites an eighteenth-century German novel by Vulpius who based his work on traditional sources. “All Italy,” wrote Vulpius, “speaks of him. The Appenine Mountains and the Sicilian vales resound with the name of Rinaldini. It lives in the songs of Florence and Calabria, and in the ballads of Sicilians.” The novel was translated into English and was a best-seller which was known to Herman Melville and referred to in Moby-Dick (115-116). Before reading Barry, I had been completely unaware of the ballad hero’s antecedent, Rinaldo Rinaldini.
I sometimes wonder whether maintaining that the source of a ballad is X, or that it is based upon Y, may be overstating the case, as in Barry’s note to the B version of “The Banks of Old Bardine/Ob/Obadie,” which appears to be a version of “The Banks of the Ohio.” Barry writes: “The source of this lyrical ballad is clear: it is an adaptation of ‘The Lexington Miller’” (149). “The Lexington Miller” and “The Banks of the Ohio” are treated as distinct ballads by Laws and Roud. Yes, both are sweetheart murder ballads, but, as ballad indexer Robert Waltz wrote in a private communication to me: “The Oxford Tragedy”/”The Lexington Miller” is clearly older, and of British origin. “Banks of the Ohio” is firmly American. I could imagine some American songwriter, upon hearing a version of “The Oxford Tragedy,” deciding to create a more local version. The distinction between “inspired by” and “based upon” is subtle, but Barry overstates his case.
Needless to say, problems of ballad classification remain thorny, and Barry and his colleagues obviously could not have anticipated the work of Laws and the current crop of indexers. Nonetheless, British Ballads from Maine, Second Series, stands out as a work of exemplary scholarship, and the singer can find in this work wonderful material, well worth learning.
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[Review length: 1687 words • Review posted on September 24, 2013]