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  • Dating Orality, Thinking Balladry:Of Milkmaids and Minstrels in 1771
  • Maureen N. McLane (bio)

"Say that a ballad / wrapped in a ballad //
a play of force and play //
of forces . . .

Dark ballad and dark crossing / old woman prowling //
Genial telling her story . . ."

—Susan Howe, "Speeches at the Barriers"1

"There are two things that are interesting, history and grammar. History is historical."

—Gertrude Stein, History or Messages from History2

"There is no history without dates."

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind3

These epigraphs from Howe and Stein and Lévi-Strauss launch us directly into a balladeering orbit. Howe's lines evoke the mobility of ballads—their many "dark crossings"—and point to the ways a ballad might be "wrapped in a ballad," or in other forms and media: a progress poem, an antiquarian's notebook, a collector's headnote, a novel, a film, a singer's voice, a CD. Ballads may be seen as a mode of "speech at the barrier," in Howe's words, but also as a mode of crossing beyond, or at least confounding, barriers: between classes, genders, generations, nations, but also between historical period (say, fourtheenth- versus eighteenth- versus twenty-first-century poetries) and medial realizations ("orality" versus, say, "print"). It is also true that ballads and balladeering have long served to install rather than surmount barriers: barriers between, for example, "oral tradition" and "literary culture," between illiterate "old women" singers and male literati, between notionally primitive pasts and polemically progressive presents. Balladeering—a broad term encompassing everything from the singing, making, inventing, forging, collecting, editing, printing, and digital recording of ballads—offers us a striking trans-historical [End Page 131] test case: in Anglo-Scottish and American balladeering we witness the persistence and transmutation of a poetic and musical phenomenon as it encounters new media and new historical situations. In this essay, I will be talking not so much about ballads per se as about the way ballads could be put to work—to do a new kind of cultural work, a new kind of historical, intellectual, and poetic work—beginning in the late eighteenth century in Britain.

And so, to turn to the second epigraph regarding Stein's two interesting things, "history and grammar," we might add: poetry is interesting. Poetry is historical. How British poetries in the late eighteenth century found themselves to be historical, how they participated in the location of culture, how balladeering in particular created a space for such cultural inquiry, invention, and mediation: these are the questions this essay hopes to pursue.

As Stein's own work suggests, poetry might pivot us between History and Grammar, between the discourse of the past and the structure of language. History is historical, Stein tells us, in typically gnomic fashion. But how is history historical? Lévi-Strauss would remind us that history depends on a "chronological code." As he declared in "History and Dialectic," the ninth chapter of The Savage Mind, "There is no history without dates."

So let us begin with a date—a specific kind of date: a year, 1771. In 1771 innumerable things happened in Britain, more specifically in Scotland: in 1771 Walter Scott was born. In 1771 the professor of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen, James Beattie, published the first installment of his poem, "The Minstrel, or, the Progress of Genius." This poem appeared simultaneously in England and Scotland, published both in London and in Edinburgh4 ; and excerpts from the poem appeared in that dated compendium of British record, The Annual Register of 1771. Also in 1771, a ballad collector identified only as W. L. transcribed a milkmaid's rendition of the ballad, "The Bonny Hynd."

Beattie's minstrel and W. L.'s milkmaid both enter the historical record in Britain in 1771; they are preoccupied in different yet related ways with the problematics of dating cultures, of periodizing poetry as well as notional cultural epochs. These test cases will allow us to explore how poetry in Britain partook of and contributed to new ways of modeling the historicity of culture. In other words, we may begin to consider how poetry, and the ballad in particular, was made to think its own date...

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