From Journalism to Gypsy Folk Song: The Road to Orality of an English Ballad

Recent years have seen the discovery of something as wonderful and unexpected as an authentic English oral tradition, persisting into the last quarter of the twentieth century: authentically English in being performed in English and in England; authentically oral in being performed by largely illiterate singers, who have received this heritage from the preceding generations of their families and communities without the intervention of writing or print. Authentic also in that although there of late was a sense that times were changing, for the generation concerned the performances remained a living and vital part of the social life and culture of their community.

This tradition comprises the "folksongs" of the English Gypsies, as represented for example by Mary Ann Haynes, "Queen" Caroline Hughes, the Smiths of Kent and the Smiths of Gloucester, and the Brazil siblings Lementina (Lemmie), Tom, Hyram, Alice, Harry, Danny, and Weenie. From one scholarly perspective it might be regretted that they were not the object of the same intense scrutiny accorded to the Scottish travelers by the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh a decade or two earlier (Gower 1968; Gower and Porter 1970, 1972, 1977; MacColl and Seeger 1986), not least because there is no analogous School of English Studies in London.¹ But by the same token their singing has been spared the disturbance and distorting effects that the associated celebrity on the "folk" scene had on the Scottish singers (Porter 1976). And quietly and steadily many performances have been collected in England, along with much information on the lives of the singers and the relationships between those lives and the songs (MacColl and Seeger 1977; Hall 1998; Richards 1987; Stradling 2000 and 2007; Yates 2003).

While the singing was manifestly part of the singers' sense of their own cultural identity, apart from a few songs rather self-consciously deploying Romany idioms the tradition is effectively an English oikotype, most of the songs also recorded from non Gypsy—gorgio—singers, and indeed like most English "folksongs" deriving ultimately from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century broadsides. The difference is that Gypsy subculture sustained into our times the English folksong tradition recorded by Cecil Sharp and others at the beginning of the twentieth century, but which in the meantime has been abandoned by the ambient culture. This is good for our knowledge of this particular sub-tradition, since with a few exceptions (Gillington 1911; cf. Yates and Roud 2006) the early collectors rather neglected Gypsy singers, but it is also a major opportunity for the study of English folksong tradition as a whole, which has in this way been sustained into a period when technological advances enabled the making, preservation, and dissemination of "live" recordings of performances, offering scholarship a more direct, accurate, and comprehensive access to the material than the field notebooks of the earlier collectors. With a folksong noted down by Cecil Sharp we are never certain just how much the repeated singings, necessary to get all the words, affected those same words; this is not a problem when we can ourselves transcribe the words from a tape-recording reissued as a compact disc. And the tradition thus documented in the second half of the twentieth century is paradoxically more oral than it was around 1900, since the broadsides from which many of the songs were originally learned have long ceased to be available to the singers, who have accordingly passed the songs on by word of mouth over two or more generations.

Like most discoveries, the exact dating of this one depends on who is concerned: As with the Victoria Falls, the people who lived with the songs knew they were there all the time. Of the outsiders, folksong collectors such as Peter Shepheard, Mike Yates, and Gwilym Davies (to mention those to whom this study is most directly indebted) were recording Romany singers from the mid-1960s onwards. More recently, and with gathering pace, the recordings have been made available on LP's, tapes, and latterly CD's (notably Gypsies 1998; Smith 2000; Gypsies 2003) whose publication has technically speaking been commercial, but in reality inspired...