The Flowering Thorn
International Ballad Studies
Publication Year: 2003
Published by: Utah State University Press
Contents
Introduction
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pp. 1-16
The flowering thorn expresses the dual nature of the ballad: at once a distinctive expression of European tradition,2 but also somewhat tricky to approach from a scholarly perspective, requiring a range of disciplines to illuminate its rich com- position. ...
Now She's Fairly Altered Her Meaning: Interpreting Narrative Song
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pp. 17-21
Songs have an infinite range of potential symbolic and functional meanings to both their singers and listeners. Scholars, like any other proactive ballad audience, bring a world of unique referents and a range of individual background information to the study of traditional song. ...
Healing the Spider's Bite: "Ballad Therapy" and Tarantismo
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pp. 23-33
In 1959, Ernesto De Martino, ethnologist and scholar of comparative religion, led what has become a near-legendary expedition to the Salento (southeastern-most tip of the heel of the Italian boot) to study the phenomenon of tarantismo.1 ...
Music, Charm and Seduction in British Traditional Songs and Ballads
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pp. 35-53
In this essay, I want to explore certain themes and intertextual elements in popular and traditional songs that circulated in Britain and Ireland, and wherever people from these islands went, roughly in the period from 1600 to 1850. ...
"Places She Knew Very Well": The Symbolic Economy of Women's Travels in Traditional Newfoundland Ballads
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pp. 55-66
My earlier work has focused upon “outings” as the recognition and examination of lesbian/gay/queer possibilities in traditional ballads in North America (1995, 1997a, 1997b). Here I will consider a rather different kind of outing, associated with individuals’ movements from place to place: travel. ...
A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Positive Masculinity in the Ballads Sung by Scottish Women
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pp. 67-75
This essay looks specifically at the way ballads popular among female singers construct masculinity, focusing on the intersections of gender, class, and power. Since large-scale ballad collection began in the eighteenth century, at least, both men and women have learned and passed on these traditional songs, so we may...
Jesting with Edge Tools: The Dynamics of a Fragmentary Ballad Tradition
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pp. 77-89
Carpenters and Joiners are not hard to find in English traditional song. James Madison Carpenter is beginning to be recognized as one of the most significant collectors of English, as well as Scottish, song, while one of the best traditional singers at the beginning of this century was Mrs. Joiner of Chiswell Green in Hertfordshire (we do not know her first name) (Bishop 1998). ...
The Servant Problem in Child Ballads
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pp. 91-99
The central characters in most Child ballads are members of the gentry, often the nobility, and are even, in some cases, royalty. Because they own property, enjoy substantial income, possess unlimited leisure time, and wield significant power over others, they tend to live interesting lives—that is to say, they enjoy experi-...
May Day and Mayhem: Portraits of a Holiday in Eighteenth-Century Dublin Ballads
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pp. 101-127
What could be more enthralling for someone involved in calendar studies than finding ballads that appear to recount events occuring during a major holiday— May Day, in this case—and, to add to the pleasure, to hear from the source that they were sung and resung as an integral part of the holiday’s celebration? ...
Malign Forces That Can Punish and Pardon: Structure and Motif
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pp. 129-134
Since the publication of key texts on structure and form in traditional narrative,1 ballad scholars have sought to apply their methodology to the similar genre of narrative song. The resulting studies have concentrated on two main areas of research: the re-creation of songs using formulas or commonplaces, and Propp’s...
An Oddity of Catalan Folk Songs and Ballads
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pp. 135-142
Catalonia lies on the Mediterranean coast, straddling the Pyrenees. Its people are very musical, and dancing in the streets is still commonplace. Anyone who has observed its national dance, the sardana, however, will have noticed a most peculiar feature: the dancers do not seem to dance in time to the music, yet the...
"Barbara Allen" and "The Gypsy Laddie": Single-Rhyme Ballads in the Child Corpus
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pp. 143-154
One summer, not long after graduating from college, I worked as assistant director of a YMCA camp in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. The camp nurse, Ida Lanning, was a local mountain woman retired from regular nursing practice. ...
The Motif of Poisoning in Ukrainian Ballads
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pp. 155-160
Poisoning for infidelity is a motif found throughout European tradition in both narratives and songs. One of the most popular ballads on this theme, "O Do Not Go, Hryts," is considered the classic example of its type and is found not only in the Ukraine but also in the ballad traditions of many other, particularly Slavic, ...
Contexts and Interpretations: The Walled-Up Wife Ballad and Other Related Texts
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pp. 161-167
In Cântecul epic eroic, the catalog of Romanian verse narratives, Amzulescu listed no fewer than 211 types of heroic song and 173 of the "family ballad" (1981, 1983). Including the so-called oral journals, Fochi arrives at a total of 401 types, "the second largest stock, after Denmark, in the field of folk-epic poetry" and concludes that Romania should be added to the seven main "ballad areas" of ...
Recapturing the Journey: Cruxes of Context, Version, and Transmission
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pp. 169-173
Historical investigation is one of the classic ways of reading between the lines of ballad texts. Outside the contexts of performance and the text itself, a wealth of detail can be gained about the composers, their milieu, and, through interpolation, about the audience as well. ...
The Life and Times of Rosie Anderson
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pp. 175-181
In his note on the ballad of “Rosie Anderson,” twelve versions of which appear in his collection, Gavin Greig makes the following observations: ...
Scholar, Antischolar: Sir Alexander Gray's Translation of the Danish Ballads
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pp. 183-192
Sir Alexander Gray is already one of the most important translators of Danish ballads with his existing books, Four-and-Forty (1954) and Historical Ballads of Denmark (1958). ...
"George Collins" in Hampshire
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pp. 193-204
Shortly after George B. Gardiner published texts of “George Collins” collected in Hampshire (Journal of the Folk-Song Society 1909: 299–302), Barbara M. Cra’ster (1910) argued that the ballad should be considered more or less cognate with the Scottish “Clerk Colvill” (Child 42). ...
From France to Brazil via Germany and Portugal: The Meandering Journey of a Tradition Ballad
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pp. 205-218
During research on the popularity of the Middle Ages in nineteenth-century Portugal, I read a book published in 1848 by Gomes Monteiro, a translated anthology of German romantic poetry with a wide sampling of poems with medieval or folk themes, among which was the following by Ludwig Uhland (Text 1): ...
"The White Fisher": An Illegitimate Child Ballad from Aberdeenshire
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pp. 219-244
The James Madison Carpenter Collection was made principally in England and Scotland during the period 1929–35. This vast unpublished field collection contains a large number of ballads and other songs from the North East of Scotland, including some rare texts and tunes. ....
Regions, Reprints, and Repertoires
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pp. 245-248
Ballad and song collection had its main origins in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century search for regional and cultural identities in the face of sweeping political and cultural change; there is no better barometer of this trend than the song tradition itself. ...
Ballad Singing in New Deer
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pp. 249-256
In ballad scholarship and folk-song research in general, scholars often focus on the songs themselves and their collectors, rather than the singers who contributed them. This is especially true in historical research, where it is often difficult to gather sufficient information about singers. ...
Old Flemish Songbook Reprints
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pp. 257-264
In 1989 the reprint of Jan Frans Willems’s collection Oude Vlaemsche Liederen [Old Flemish Songs] appeared, the first in a new series of Old Flemish Songbook Reprints. Volume five in this series appeared in 1998. The decision to reprint these old collections was made by the Koninklijke Belgische Commissie voor...
Chants Populaires Flamands (1879): A Scholarly Field Collection and an Early Individual Repertoire
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pp. 265-284
The research project introduced here deals with performance and repertoire. While this prominent concern in modern ballad and folk-song research de facto mostly relates to synchronic tradition, personal fieldwork, and knowledge of the singer’s background and personality, the Flemish repertoire described here was...
The Corpus of French Ballads
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pp. 285-294
This essay aims simply to highlight some of the difficulties I encountered when trying to assess the range and importance of French traditional balladry, so I will mainly raise questions rather than suggest answers. ...
The Slovenian Folk and Literary Ballad
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pp. 295-305
For European folklorists, the definition of the term "ballad" has been more or less fixed since 1966, when it was codified by researchers in Freiburg as a narrative song with dramatic emphasis, irrespective of the ending, tragic or otherwise (Kumer 1998: 31). ...
Scotland's Nordic Ballads
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pp. 307-317
That traces of Scotland’s Nordic ballads could still be found in the last days of the nineteenth century is surprising, but there is nothing “commonplace” about the story of their texts, contexts, and what we know of them more than one thousand years after the Northmen came to Scotland. ...
Simon Fraser's Airs and Melodies [1816]: An Instrumental Collection as a Source of Scottish Gaelic Songs
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pp. 319-336
From the Highlands and Islands of Scotland to Nova Scotia, collectors of Scottish Gaelic1 songs, such as Francis Tolmie (1998), Margaret Fay Shaw (1955), and John Lorne Campbell (1990), had the singer and the song as the focus of their attention. ...
"Purement scientifique et archeologique": The Mediating Collector
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pp. 337-340
The work of ballad collectors is many faceted and, answering F. J. Child’s aspiration that he “should wish to sift that matter thoroughly” (Hustvedt 1970: 248), this section addresses their diverse legacies. ...
The Case against Peter Buchan
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pp. 341-351
It is a well-known fact that the North East of Scotland is particularly rich in traditional songs and ballads. In The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, almost one-third of Child’s A texts—those he considered the oldest and best examples of a specific ballad type—come from this area. ...
Ballad Raids and Spoilt Songs: Collection as Colonization
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pp. 353-362
I would like to start this discussion of collection as colonization with a quote from Jock Duncan, a singer from North East Scotland, talking about local songmaker Geordie Thomson and Gavin Greig as a collector: ...
The Contribution of D. K. Wilgus to Ballad and Folksong Scholarship
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pp. 363-375
D. K. Wilgus was a staunch member of the Kommission für Volksdichtung for many years. Donald Knight Wilgus died on Christmas morning, 1989, in Los Angeles, where he had served as professor of English and Anglo-American folk song at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1963 till his retirement on June 30, 1989. ...
Acknowledgments
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pp. 377-
Notes on Contributors
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pp. 379-382
General Index
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pp. 383-386
Song Title Index
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pp. 387-388
E-ISBN-13: 9780874214918
Print-ISBN-13: 9780874215687
Publication Year: 2003
