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Oral Formulas in the Country Blues John Barnie In an effort to discover whetherthe IliadandOdyssey originatedas written literature or began as oralcompositions, Milman Parry set out to recordthe living oraltradition ofcontemporary South Slavic epic singing. Yugoslav epic singers sang epics composed oftens ofthousands ofmetricallines. Parry and his student Albert Lorddiscerned that these enormous poems were not memorized as wholes, but that individual singers learnedthe structure ofthe songs, the sequences ofincidents andepisodes, andalarge vocabulary of verbal formulas-poetic phrases and expressions-appropriate to the description of these incidents and episodes. In effect, when a singer came to sing, he recomposed his song as he sang it, utilizing his knowledge of the organization of incidents and descriptions and his large stock ofpoetic formulas. Analysis of recorded Yugoslav songs revealed striking similarities with the Homeric texts, thus suggesting the oral origins of Greek epic poetry (Lord 1960). Parry and Lord's oral formulaic composition theory reconceptualized oral expression as a creative act. In oral cultures, the production of oral poetry is not a matter of rote memorization and mechanical recall. Composition, performance, and transmission must be conceived as a single phenomenon. These ideas were soon brought from epic to the analysis of poetic expressions that ranged from the ballad (Buchan 1972:51-173) to the sermon (Rosenberg 1970, Davis 1985). In the following essay, John Barnie applies them to the analysis of the blues. For more on the techniques of blues composition see Evans (1974). Blues texts can be found in Oster (1969), Oliver (1963), and Taft (1983). Further textual, musical, social, and culturalanalyses ofblues can also befound in Charters (1963), Titon (1977), and Evans (1982) as well as in the journal issue in which Barnie's article originally appeared. Fora history of oral composition theory see Foley (1988). Anyone listening to a number of country blues songs will have noticed that they share certain basic linguistic and thematic features. Most noticeably, half-lines, lines, and stanzas will be found to recur in the songs of a great many singers. These may be modified, sometimes radically so, but they bear a recognizable relationship to lines and stanzas in other songs within the tradition. A similar correspondence exists at the thematic level, since the country blues singerdevelops acomparatively limited range of themes. Yet it is rare to find one singer reproducing exactly the blues of another. A Reproduced by permission of the publisher, from Southern Folklore Quanerly42(1978):39-52. Not for further reproduction. 254 Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader close relationship exists between many blues, but it is not that of a copy (even an imperfectly remembered one) to its original. An explanation for these features may be sought in the theory of oral-formulaic composition, first propounded by the American classical scholars Milman Parry and A. B. Lord in relation to the Homeric poems and Jugoslav folk epics.l The results of their research have received a wide currency in recent years, and the theory has been applied with varying degrees of success to such diverse material as Old English alliterative poetry and black American chanted sermons.2 Its relevance to the blues, however, is only now being appreciated by scholars in the field; and unfortunately, with the exception of Jeff Titon's exposition in Early Downhome Blues and the important research-in-progress of Michael Taft,3 most attempts to apply the Parry-Lord thesis in this area have been far from satisfactory. William Ferris, Jr., for example, refers to the theory in Blues from the Delta, but fails to take into account the difficulties caused by the lyric rather than narrative structure of the blues.4 Likewise, John Fahey, in his study of blues singer Charley Patton, alludes to Parry and Lord's thesis, but is confused as to the nature and significance of formulas in Patton's blues. He identifies formulaic lines which he refers to as "traditionalcommonplaces,u but goes on to assert that, HIn no case does the use of a particular commonplace play an integral or even especially important part in one of Patton's texts.u5 Yet in a later characterization of his blues Fahey claims that they are "an extreme case of oral-formulaic creativity in which the singer, if he does not (and Patton probably did not) actually make up the stanzas at the time of the performance, simply selects stanzas and verses at random from a large storehouse of them in his mind.U6 Unfortunately, Fahey never defines exactly what...

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