Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions ed. by David Atkinson, Steve Roud (review)

The question addressed by this collection of essays is not new. It is now more than forty years since Robert Thompson, in a much-cited PhD thesis, attacked the supposed orality of traditional folk song by arguing that as much as ninety percent of the material could be traced back to printed sources. Subsequent research called into question both the meaning of authenticity in the repertoire and the very existence of a distinct oral tradition in post-Reformation Europe. In his lucid introduction to this volume jointly edited with David Atkinson, Steve Roud surveys the growing critical response to the certainties that informed the work of the early collectors, particularly Francis Child. The following eleven essays by specialists in the field on both sides of the Atlantic seek to determine whether a new frame of reference can now be established.

Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America has two general virtues: firstly, its spatial coverage. The London-centric nature of much of the existing scholarship is challenged by contributions not only on non-metropolitan England—particularly Birmingham and the North East—but on Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and on the United States and Newfoundland. This permits discussion of whether and in what form national markets existed, of how—particularly in the Welsh case—the issue of language affected the mode and form of transmission, and of time delays as technological and commercial forces differently impacted local markets.

The second virtue of the volume is the sheer depth of expertise of the contributors. Some are inside the academy and others not, some perform and others don’t, but all are writing on the basis of a deep immersion in the field and with an infectious enthusiasm about the material they are discussing. Even Roy Palmer’s essay, “Birmingham Broadsides and Oral Tradition,” which pays only nominal attention to the questions raised by Roud, is an immensely lively and well-informed account based on a lifetime’s work in the culture. Ashgate has assisted the endeavor by high production standards, allowing frequent reproduction of texts, illustrations, and music. The book is a pleasure to read.

There are, however, significant methodological obstacles to the enterprise. The discovery and cataloguing of more and more printed ephemera, now often digitized, inevitably tilts the field toward the written word. It is impossible to re-interview nineteenth-century singers and ask them questions once avoided by Child and his fellow collectors. There are difficult questions about what survived in the debates between what was published and what may have begun and ended as oral performance. While it is often possible to identify written influences on collected songs, it is less easy to know what was done with the mass of printed sheets themselves, which may have been bought to sing, or just to read, or merely for the enjoyment of the frequent illustrations. The published material deflects attention from the tunes, which are generally referred to by name rather than printed as musical notation. In an intrinsically multimedia popular culture, account needs to be taken not just of the aural but the visual element of the material. And there is a constant danger, not avoided by some of the contributors, of analytical argument being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of ballads and broadsides which can now be described and discussed.

The contributors seek to overcome these problems by narrowing their focus to specific bodies of material. These tend to be either framed bodies of evidence (such as Samuel Lowe’s Tour of Dublin of 1830, or the Robert White Collection of Newcastle chapbooks, or Sabine Baring-Gould’s lifetime of collecting), or a small number of specific songs which can be traced through a range of media over a long period of time. There is a...