Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths

4. "Oh, Willie": An Unrecognized Anglo/American Ballad

4 "Oi, Willie" An Unrecognized Anglo/American Ballad The most important step in the establishment and legitimation of folksong as a scholarly field was to amass a substantial body of data. In Britain , proponents of the emerging discipline "did fieldwork" as early as the mid-iyoos, meeting with and listening to men and women who sang songs organically related to ongoing social life, both in when they were sung and in what they were about, their topics ranging from ordinary, quotidian experiences (songs of work or conviviality, for example) to rarer, life-critical ones (ballads of love relations telling ordeal-filled tales of courtship and perhaps marriage). The visitors recordedthese folksongs, building up "collections" that would outlive both themselves and their singers and eventually constitute a large enough body of data to allow serious and sustained study. Of course, not all folksong investigators did fieldwork: some ferreted out such songs as preserved in other contexts and for other reasons—in handwritten diaries and personal song copybooks (often called "ballet" books), for instance, or in self-published autobiographies and local histories, and especially in ephemeral commercial publications like broadsidesand chapbooks that interacted so intimately with oral tradition. All these sources and more provided material for the growing folksong data bank. Bythe early twentieth century, we began to follow suit in North America, contributing our share to theever-increasing storehouse of Anglo/American folksongs. When eventually a large enough body of raw material had accumulated , the need for overviews arose. Overviews may take several forms, but a critical one is the organizing and codifying of a data mass, not only to bring order to the materials but also to encourage some consensus in "OH, WILLIE" 93 scholarly approachtowardthem, some sense of engagingin a shared,productive , evolving enterprise. For Anglo/American folksong, the most successful example of such an overview was obviously Francis James Child's work on a particular subset of anglophone folksong data:narrative songs employedin everyday,face-to-face domestic performances and based on a common set of compositional principles that coalesced somewhere in late medieval Europe. Child accomplished his task so skillfully that his Englishand Scottish Popular Ballads was responsible for professionalizing the study of the folksong genrewe now call, in his honor, the "Child ballad" (Child [1882-98] 1963). When G. Malcolm Laws Jr.took his overview and published American Balladry from British Broadsides in the early 19505, his motive was essentially the same as Child's. Although by the time he did his work, Laws—unlike Child—didn't have to legitimate his data as fit for serious study, like Child he sought to identify and organize a distinct corpus: all British Isles-born songs of a certain type that had been collected from American domestic singing tradition and published by trustworthy investigators, mostly under the aegis of university presses. Laws too chose narrative songs as his subject matter, but narrative songs rooted not in the compositional conventions informingthe Child ballad (a genre of trans-Europeandiffusion that became firmly entrenched in British Isles folk tradition some time in the fifteenth century)but in those of the broadside ballad, a later compositional model that didn't really jell in the oral tradition of Anglo/Americanquotidian performances until the eighteenth century (Laws 1957). While his work does not have the epic quality of Child's, Laws did a very thorough job within the confines of the task he set himself. Consequently , it's hard to find a song in reputable collections available to him that he did not include in his syllabus, as long as it clearly fit his criteria for inclusion (that it exhibit a strong narrative quality and "exist in folk tradition" [Laws 1957: 1-2]). In other words, Laws seldom left out a song in error, or misidentified a ballad with its own traditional history as a version of some other item. These qualities of thoroughness and accuracy , while not manifested to the magisterial degree attained by Child, are still strong enough in Laws's work to have made his system for codifying the Anglo/American folksong repertoire ofbroadsideballads a standard of reference that later scholars automatically employ.1 Laws system- 94 "OH, WILLIE" atized both the typical topics anglophone North American folksingers have preferred in songs they accepted into their performancerepertoires (songs of Sailors and the Sea, for instance, or of Lovers7 Disguises and Tricks) and the identity of individual songs that kept...