The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, Method, and Practice, and: Folk Song: Tradition, Revival, and Re-Creation (review)

David Atkinson is an English scholar who has been publishing articles on Child ballads from searching new perspectives for many years. His work reflects his involvement with the English Traditional Song Forum in increasing the awareness and availability of the great song collections. He is currently involved in work to catalogue and eventually publish the vast James Madison Carpenter collection. In The English Traditional Ballad, he wisely avoids attempting new definitions of any of the elements of his title, which he deliberately makes a widely inclusive one. His central proposition is that study of the full extension of collections of English folk song, many only recently made public, has made it possible to speak of an "English tradition" of narrative song in every sense as diverse and complex as the better-known traditions of, for example, the northeast of Scotland, Newfoundland, and the Appalachians. This tradition is characterized by its singing style, "dry and understated, reflective, undramatic, but nonetheless direct, sparing in its use of decoration or ornamentation" (p. 236). Though not including musical examples, he gives circumstantial descriptions of the singing and cultural milieu of singers such as Harry Cox and Walter Pardon of Norfolk and Cyril Poacher of Suffolk. It is an eclectic tradition: although many Child ballads are discussed, Atkinson's attitude to them is practical rather than reverential, and he treats them, as he must, as part of a continuum that reaches into the popular song, the parody, and, of course, print culture. He emphasizes, for example, the importance of broadsides, which may exhibit the same structural features and variations as versions collected from singers.

Atkinson's main interpretive tools are reception theory and intertextuality, particularly in the form of John Miles Foley's concept of traditional referentiality (Immanent Art, Indiana University Press, 1991). This is seen, for example, in the way boundaries are collapsed between song types, so that "The Wife of Usher's Well" has overtones of the romantic night visit and "Sir Hugh," a song of ritual murder, has many of the signifiers of the love ballad. This has important implications for the comic ballad. Atkinson challenges both Child's and M. J. C. Hodgart's assumption that comic narrative songs have little to do with the traditional ballad: on the contrary, "they are linked into a ballad world that pits men, and especially women, against the opposite sex, against seducers and suitors, and against supernatural visitors" (pp. 80–81). In particular, they pit mortals against the Devil, a figure who gets almost as many references in Atkinson's book as Child himself. He shows how those comic ballads that feature the Devil do not, like medieval popular drama, invariably subordinate the humor to Christian theology but rather participate in the construction of social "normality."

One aspect of the English ballad to which Atkinson repeatedly returns is its preoccupation with the liminal. In a discussion of "The Broomfield Hill" and "The Outlandish Knight," he emphasizes that the greenwood functions, not to facilitate transgression (the usual role of the wilderness), but actually to enforce society's double standard. Liminality is also found in courtship where riddling takes place, because "the presence of the supernatural shadows sexual negotiations, and . . . the electricity of sex is present even in encounters with the supernatural" (p. 60). By considering songs in context, Atkinson often challenges the assumption that the narrative ballad is disengaged or removed from historical conditions. In considering the prevalence of rape, incest, and the double standard in traditional song, he shows how the cultural function of such songs is more significant than either their internal logic or their place in a singer's repertoire. Informed by recent critical discussion, these chapters are an...