Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song: From the Blues to the Baltic (review)

What are we to make of a novelist's use of a single line of a song, or a singer's performance of three verses of a classic ballad that is often found in versions of ten or twenty verses? Fragments and Meaning overturns the widely held assumption that these "dog-ends of oral tradition" (p. 3) are somehow lacking, incomplete, or, in short, second rate. "Almost all the songs discussed," maintain Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter, "are only incomplete by outside standards: to the singers and informed listeners they are perfectly sufficient" (pp. 3–4). In practically inventing and developing this field of study, Constantine and Porter take to a radical conclusion Roger deV. Renwick's 2001 appeal (Recentering Anglo/American Folksong, University Press of Mississippi) to recenter song scholarship on texts. The central notion here is that "people, guided by culture, will make sense, or senses, out of what comes to hand, [and that] even the most disconcerting forms never hang meaningless: there is no such thing as context-free space" (p. 231). To performers, authors, and their insider audiences who deal with traditional song material, the fragment has long occupied a very different space than it has for the scholar.

As Kenneth Goldstein maintained, for many performers, big is best: the largest repertoire, the longest story, the longest song ("Notes Toward a European-American Folk Aesthetic," JAF 104(412):164–78, 1991). Singers I know have often expressed similar sentiments: "Ah, but I sing the full fifty-four verse version," they might say, implying, in passing, that others might be less well endowed. I also know singers who will perform material they consider incomplete, but refuse to have it published, perhaps aware that a more "complete"—that is, longer—version exists. Despite this aesthetic, "dislocated texts and imagery" (p. 225) are inevitable, even desirable; their existence demonstrates activity, creativity, and change within tradition. Fragments have also been sources of commercial success, as many collections attest, most spectacularly James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760). Nevertheless, fragments' meaning and function have seldom been a matter for serious study or even comment, apart from a recurrent threnody on the death of tradition that their existence might imply.

The key point, as Constantine and Porter assert, is that singers, writers, readers, and listeners often, perhaps usually, perform material that, according to literary criteria, would be considered incomplete. Perhaps a plot twist is unexplained, a character disappears partway through a story, or a major plot thread is left undeveloped or unresolved; perhaps a song does not conform to the standards we expect from the patterned art forms that structuralism tells us to expect. In my experience, the user of song material (either performer or author) responds to such materials in one of two ways, either bracketing the piece with narrative context, or simply being perfectly comfortable with, or unaware of, the lacunae that we as scholars may perceive. Inspect a Monet too closely and see smudges of paint; a Seurat, mere dots of color. Perhaps the performer is content with dots of color, and the scholar is too well versed in those very writers for whom fullness and size are paramount. Audience response is an important issue here as well. Either they may be at ease with fragments, not even perceiving them as such, or, as reception theory suggests, they may behave in accordance with Barre Toelken's theory of the "active audience" (The Anguish of Snails, Utah State University Press, 2003) and instinctively bring appropriate contextual and cultural experience to the event.

This latter interpretation overlooks the fundamental point that most of the time traditional singers do not perform for an audience at all. They perform for themselves, and they are entirely comfortable within themselves as to meaning, function, structure, and form (challenging, incidentally, definitions of folklore that are centered on...