Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths

Introduction

I N T R O D U C T I O N "I have yet to find an approach to folksong from which I have not learned something/7 D. K.Wilgus first wrote over thirty-fiveyears ago (1964: 39). Only someone who found folksong deeply absorbing would have made that claim, and Wilgus indeed was such a person: he possessed a huge collection of field tapes and sound recordings of Anglo/American folksong that he seemed to know intimately and exhibited just as much detailed familiarity with published collections. He also labored for years constructing two thorough, wide-ranging databases, one of anglophone Irish ballads, the other ofballads from the whole British/North American English-speaking continuum. Believing folksongs to be worthy in their own right, therefore, he was naturally drawn to any analytical perspective that revealed something of serious interest about them, whether the insight was to their history, to their form, to their significance, or to their purpose. He illustrated majestically the depth and breadth of his attachment as well as commitment to the subject with his definitive intellectual history of Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (Wilgus 1959). Wilgus wasn't the only scholar deeply loyal to the study of Anglo/ American folksong when he wrote the above words. At the Universityof California at Berkeley,BertrandHarris Bronson was bringing together in a four-volume work, decades in the making, a huge number of Englishlanguage texts-with-tunes of a Pan-European genre we call the "Child ballad" (Child [1882-98] 1963,- Bronson 1959-72). Tristram Potter Coffin had just updated his British Traditional Ballad in North America delineating patterns in story-change that New World singers of traditional songs made in their versions of the self-sameChild ballads, as indicated mostly by the published record (Coffin 1963). G. Malcolm Laws Jr. had just revised his Native American Balladry, which along with its compan- x I N T R O D U C T I O N ion American Balladry from British Broadsides, codified the AngloNorth American repertoire of folksongsexhibiting a different set ofcompositional conventions, those characterizing a newer "broadside ballad" type (Laws 1957,- [1964] 1975). Wilgus and his mid-twentieth-century contemporaries like Bronson, Coffin, and Laws exhibited a common purpose in constructing their folksong reference works: they expected their publications to facilitate a host of detailed, focused, analytically rich case studies, comparable to what, beginning more than half a century earlier, Child's own volumes had stimulated. To that end each tried to encompass the whole populationof his subject matter and so canvased an enormous number of song texts, eventually bringing them—or at least synopses of them, or references to them—together in a single, accessible location, saving future scholars much time in simple example-gathering. More than that, though, each tried to systematize the vast, scattered, even piecemeal data by constructing categories, templates, paradigms, unique code letters and numbers , all of which would constitute a common frame of reference for folksong scholars. Such an apparatus was considered essential for the continued growth of a shared, corporate, ongoing, accumulative, disciplined enterprise, the study of Anglo/American folksong. The effect of all this devoted work was the legacy now at folklorists' command. Today we not only have huge inventories ofAnglo/American folksongs, published and unpublished, that even earlier generations of data-gatherers produced over a roughly two-hundred year span—at first in the British Isles (starting as early as the first half of the eighteenth century but gaining real momentum after the publication of Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765), later in North America as well (starting in the early twentieth century)—but we also possess systematic frames of reference organizing those data banks into databases for serious, coordinated analysis and interpretation. But those folksong data banks and databases, which by 1970 were set to enable a flood of productive scholarship similar to that let loose by Child's work in an earlier generation, instead found themselves very quickly cold-shouldered and unused. Certainly, some fine case studies that probably couldn't have been completed without them have appeared—for example, David Buchan's Ballad and the Folk (1972), Flemming G. Andersen's Commonplace and Creativity (1985), William I N T R O D U C T I O N xi Bernard McCarthy's The Ballad Matrix (1990)—while Britain's Folk Music Journal continues to publish shorter...