Naomi Wise: Creation, Recreation, and Continuity in an American Ballad Tradition (review)

Once upon a time, in mossy academies of higher education, grave men posited elaborate, if strained, theories to explain the origins of ballads. How, they implicitly asked, could the most common of the common folk create such lyrical tales as to swell the heart of an Addison or Pepys? (Never mind the raw bias equally apparent if unspoken in their initial theory: how could the folk—mean, nasty, and brutish as sheepherders and cottagers—create anything whatsoever?) The genteel debate, if it can be said to rise to such a level, paused when Louise Pound, in a series of articles in the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association during the 1920s and 1930s, demolished the "communalists" and their romantic ilk.

Ninety years later, Eleanor Long-Wilgus resumes the debate. How could the folk—no longer mean, nasty, and brutish, but now gifted with an aesthetic sense that had enthralled the cultivated likes of Goldsmith, Cunningham, and Scott—fashion such an enduring narrative as "Omie Wise"?

Here is an American murder ballad (Laws F4) apparently sprung from an execrable 239-line "true account" set down on April 5, 1807, sometime after the murder of Naomi Wise by John Lewis in Randolph County, North Carolina. Out of this primordial, moralistic epistle oozed a narrative, a "stereotypical cluster of thematic elements" (p. 16). Some of these elements are essential to the story, some not, yet they persist, even dominate the tale, Long-Wilgus notes, while "replacing elements which do not conform to the ballad type's thematic concept." In short, the redaction of "A True Account of Nayomy Wise" as set down in a commonplace book by Mary Woody (born in 1801) conforms to the process of myth making as we know it contemporaneously. Starting with the Woody text, or something like it, subsequent ballad makers discarded the inconvenient, the nonheroic, the less than socially acceptable. In short, they fashioned a legend in song form, an American story of the murdered innocent, one every bit as culturally valid as any Serbian epic analyzed by Albert Lord.

Naomi Wise, in life the mother of three children by three different men, is recreated as the innocent seduced, then murdered by her lover. The tale is refashioned, as Long-Wilgus details, line by line, with borrowings from the older broadsides, "The Berkshire Tragedy" and "James M'Donald." Naomi the slattern becomes Omie the innocent. What makes Naomi's transformation all the more convoluted is Long-Wilgus's discovery that one Braxton Craven, in the Greensboro Patriot of April 29, 1874, refashioned the earlier story into a much-reprinted ballad. It is Craven's retelling, she stipulates, that inspired the 134 recoveries of "Omie Wise" in oral tradition and revival recordings alike.

So much for a "pure" oral tradition. But then, it has been clear—at least since Norm Cohen's 1969 New York Folklore Quarterly article on "The Persian's Crew"—that the unlettered folk were lettered enough to incorporate the printed into their oral tradition: "The relationship between print and orality," Long-Wilgus concludes, "is sometimes a complex one" (p. 37). I give her that truism—as well as her postulate that there exists a tension between oral tradition and "professional romancers" (p. 39).

In the case of this very popular ballad, there are three layers of independent composition that transform "Naomi" into "Omie." Eventually the result is a ballad with one foot grounded in truth, the other in myth or legend, and the whole of it shaped by two broadside ballads so as to conform to the image of the idealized. Ultimately, it might be argued, there is not one ballad of "Omie Wise," but three or four recountings of the murder of "poor, sweet Naomi."

This reviewer, a passing acquaintance of the author, can hardly peruse Long-Wilgus's essay without noting that it is, in effect, an offering to the memory of...