Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths (review)

Roger Renwick's new book opens and closes with words by his teacher and mentor, D. K. Wilgus, and there is no question that the five essays in the book are animated by his ideas, particularly those expressed in the title of his well-known article, "The Text is the Thing" (Journal of American Folklore 86:241-52, 1973). The back of the dust jacket makes the point with a large "in-your-face" message to the browser: the book represents "an attempt to wrest folksong from contemporary theorists and return it to textual study." The object of study is not singers nor contexts but rather the great data banks of song texts collected by fieldworkers, which are hardly ever disturbed, still less discussed. Such an appeal to the inductive is unexpected in a professor of English, or perhaps not, in light of the critical turmoil in his own professional field. In any event, Renwick's methods are more eclectic than this inductive manifesto would suggest: he does not turn his back on other approaches. He contrasts the musical fingerprints of "The Butcher Boy" and "Oh, Willie," and, in an exemplary chapter on the many possible ways of catching "The Crabfish," he gives a bravura account of the dynamics of Cecil Sharp's first two meetings with the irrepressible Emma Overd in the west of England. In fact, the idea of a woman performing subversively a "'lads' song" like "The Crabfish" is not as uncommon as Renwick appears to believe: there is a long tradition of women in groups singing bawdy songs, and the Irish traveler Nora Cleary and the English singer Charlotte Renals have both recorded it for collectors.

In the opening chapter, Renwick questions some aspects of Roger Abrahams's use of the term "creolization" to describe the assimilation of Anglo/American folksongs into the West Indies (the slash form is used "to denote a cultural continuum or network," [p. 152]). Abrahams maintains that conversion to a cante-fable format is a sign of Caribbean assimilation, but Renwick points out that it is a long-established practice in Europe. He takes Abrahams to task for too readily identifying the St. Vincent "Matty Glow and Garoleen" with the Child ballad "Matty Groves," even though Matty Glow is the name of the amorous wife. Though a good example of the pitfalls of too much theorizing, this was not a good choice for an opening chapter. It reads as an ad hominem attack and is more confined in scope than the other chapters.

One of Renwick's main preoccupations in the book is the question of genre, which he unfashionably defends even to the point of making a case for a new one, the catalogue song, which will hold its own against the all-devouring (and masculinist) focus on narrative. By "catalogue" he does not mean a Homeric listing like "Jack-of-All-Trades," but a song that establishes a pattern (of sexual metaphor, for instance, or the characteristics of named individuals) and then keeps to it for verse after self-contained verse. They are typically "songs of good company," such as bothy ballads, dialogue songs, and, of course, bawdry.

In addition to genre, he welcomes Barre Toelken's concept of "generic context" (Morning Dew and Roses, University of Illinois Press, 1995), because "what a folklorist should be able to do better than anyone is situate a text not only in relation to its many examples (versions) but also in relation to the traditional song corpus with whose members it shares motifs, themes and commonplaces" (pp. 49-50). To this end, he makes a careful study of the "Oh Willie"/"Butcher Boy" family of songs. It is a welcome feature of the book that Renwick includes the words (but regrettably not the music) of entire songs—no less...