Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths

Notes

NOTES F O R E W O R D i. I use "Anglo/American" throughout this volume to denote a cultural continuum or network; I reserve the more usual "Anglo-American" to denote Americans of British (anglophoneEnglish, Scots, Irish) ancestry. CHAPTER i 1. Actually, even within the terms of creolization theory's own linguisticsinduced vocabulary, insofar as I understand it, "creole" does not seem to me the applicable concept for Nora Bristol's adaptation. "Ideolect" would seem more apposite, or perhaps even "pidgin," a pidgin being an ad hoc language with no "native speakers." 2. Also resonant is a Bahamian version in which, while each relative is appealed to only once, the lover stanza is repeated twice, since he was too far away at the first call (Bronson 1959-72,: 2: 472-3). It is highly unlikely that these three versions possessed any direct historical link with each other, however. 3. One might also argue that as the ballad becomes more subject to lyric conventions it becomes correspondingly more subject to transformation from third person to first person, since first-person point of view is an integral feature of the lyric genre. Artistic unity and convention, therefore, becomes as much a determinant of textual change as more general cultural forces. 4. Two other essays on African American songs related to "Barbara Allan," both of which are influenced by "creolization" concepts, are Doyle and Kelley 1991 and Minton 1995. 5. For examples of talking birds in British West Indian cante-fables, see fekyll [1907] 1966: nos. 3, 31; Beckwith 1924^ nos. 71, 730; Roberts 1925: 154-5; Parsons 1918: no. 113 (Child 274; Roud 114). For talking birds in postcolonial Jamaican tales (most entirely in prose) see Dance 1985: nos. 22, 57C,75, in, 146, and 157. 6. Again, there is a theoretical concept in creole linguistics scholarship that 154 NOTES claims to explain this kind of different-contexts/similar-texts phenomenon in language. It posits polygenetic origins and physiological causation, incompatible with the premises of the "relexification" model underlying the study under discussion . See Bickerton 1984. 7. I might also add that the name Matty Groves appearsonly in Americantradition , never in British. While American culture certainly diffused to the colonial Caribbean (especially through such channels as whaling and merchant shipping), British West Indian song traditions were more likely to have been influencedby British Isles song traditions than by American ones. 8. Yet again, if we follow Abrahams in looking to creole linguistic studies for conceptual models to apply by analogy to ballads, "decreolization" rather than creolization may be the more apposite concept here (that is, the Frenchballad was "creolized" in England, the English version later "decreolized" in the Caribbean). But the analogy would be very inexact. See Holm 1988: 9. CHAPTER 2 1. I will use "broadsheet" throughout this chapter to denote the (usually) single sheet of paper on which texts of "Wild and Wicked Youth" were printed and sold in major cities of England, Scotland, and Ireland; I'll reserve the synonym "broadside" as a modifier to denote the particular subgenre of traditional poetry we call the "broadside ballad." ("Broadside"and "broadsheet" may be distinguished in more technical usage; see Shepard 1962: 23-4.) 2. On the eighteenth century as the apogee of the highwayman era, see McLynn 1989: 68, 8i-2; on the explosion in housebreaking during the same period, see 87-9. 3. Madden Collection: London Printers 4, item no. 606; Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Microfilm Collection, reel no. 77. 4. It is of some interest, though, that bearers of tradition have other waysof resolving textual features they consider, for whatever reasons, unsatisfactory. For instance, two oral versions contain the two stanzas but donot have the redundant "went robbingon the highway" idea: instead, to maintain his wife "fine andgay," the narrator is "resolved that the world should pay" (Reeves 1960: 152,- BaringGould and Sheppard 1895: 39). One broadsheet version uses "highway" in one stanza, the presumably distinct "high road" in the second. 5. An addedincentive to the seeker of a historical referent comes from musical rather than textual evidence: the tune to which "Wild and Wicked Youth" is most often sung in tradition first appears as a traditional piece in Edward Bunting 's collection of Irish airs (no words are given) under the title "Charley Reilly, or the Robber," which provides an even more concrete and nonformulaic detail, N O T E S 155 an...