A Small Bag Of Ballads From The Hills

A Small Bag Of Ballads From The Hills (With comments about origin and background plus musical notations by student musicologist, Richard Shelby) In our essay-editorial, "The Keepers of The Garden", we said all we felt necessary about ballad-pushers and folklore collectors. If we seem here to hedge on our earlier pronouncements, so be it. But, not so. For our purposes (longrange ) and for our anticipated readers these ballads have relevance. They prove that old "traditional" ballads still have sparse existence in true oral transmission and that the hill folk composed ballads of their own. Although they may provide the superficial interest of novelty, they also have relevance as historical and cultural artifacts. Later we expect to use more of them in more comprehensive, interpretive essays. During the summer we spent a great deal of time building a collection of folk songs transcribing and filing hoping eventually to have records and examples ranging from English and Scottish traditional ballads all the way up to Modern Bluegrass. We transcribed from tapes already made and added new ones. From this collection we elected to present three "murder" ballads, two American (one local) and one "traditional" for the first issue. Ballads, of course, tell a story and are songs, but often the "story" of the circumstances and events that inspired the ballads, the background, or the history of the ballad, especially when traditional, increases the interest of the ballads themselves. So, we include the words and tunes as we found them and some "story" material about them. "Floyd Frazure" (or Frazier) and the "Ballad of Charles J. Guiteau" were received from Mrs. Thelma Osborne and her mother-in-law, Mrs. Vada Smith Osborne of Maytown, Kentucky. Mrs. Vada Smith Osborne said she first heard 'Floyd Frazure'"sung at a square dance when Linvell Perkins sung it". She also said that when she herself was a child her mother, Lina (Linie) Tignor of Troublesome Creek in Knott County, sang the "Ballad of Charles J. Guiteau". Vada Smith Osborne was born in 1897. "Floyd Frazure" tells of a murder committed in Letcher County, Kentucky , at about the turn of the century. Legend has it that Floyd's mother and Ellen Flannery were courting the same man and that Floyd's mother hired him to kill her rival with promise of a new suit of clothes. Further, Floyd supposedly helped build the scaffold on which he would hang and picked the banjo seemingly without knowing the full extent of his crime or coming punishment. Today, we would probably say he was retarded. However, from the scaffold he is reported to have cried out: "Goodbye to everybody, forever and forever. My mother, oh my mother, oh Lord, oh Lord." The "Ballad of Charles J. Guiteau" had particular interest to the people along the Big Sandy River because James A. Garfield's first major assignment as a Union officer was to clear out the Rebels from the Big Sandy. He was remembered for his fairness and for forbidding his soldiers to do any looting. Shortly before his assassination he sent the man who acted as scout for him along the Big Sandy $100 for a visit to the White House, but the President was dead before the visit could materialize. As so often happens with murder and hanging ballads, in this case the convicted man is reported to have composed the ballad and sung it on the scaffold. "Lovin' Henry" is a famous old Scottish ballad, known to folklorists as Child 68, "Young Hunting". Many variants have been collected in the United States, of which this seems one of the better ones. But, as with the others, it has lost almost all of the supernatural effects that made it more interesting and exciting in the "old country". It came to us from Letcher County, Kentucky, under the shadow of Black Mountain; 31 APPALACHIAN HERITAGE but the tape does not make clear which of the old ladies sang it, and the students who did the taping failed to give identification before leaving. We turned the tapes over to Richard Shelby without comment for musical notation. Here is what he told us, and then the ballads. ./soocsocsoecsoacos«'* "Floyd Frasure...