The English Traditional Ballad. Theory, Method and Practice

Folklore, April, 2004 by Ian A. Olson

The English Traditional Ballad. Theory, Method and Practice. By David Atkinson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. 326 pp. 45.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 07546-0634-1

Unsurprisingly, the author cannot really demonstrate that there is a purely "English" (in the geographical sense) traditional balladry to analyse. So why did he try? He is an editorial board member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which has recently turned its back on its international past and membership and shrunk into "putting English tradition into the hearts and minds of the people of England" (imagine us becoming an English Folklore Society). Could this book be a result?

It just predates the final volume of the Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection. Had he read it, or its related scholarship, he would have encountered Gavin Greig's firm conclusion that folk-song "admits of no delimitation either in a geographical or a secular way." Collecting in the same period as Cecil Sharp, Greig and Duncan quickly realised that their great haul of over three thousand texts and tunes consisted of traditional song that (with a few exceptions) had ended up in the North-East of Scotland. Although their corpus of songs was much the same as Sharp's (from "The Seeds of Love" on), this did not prevent Sharp determinedly marketing his findings as "English Folk Song."

Although Sharp, despised in the Folk-Song Society as a commercialising opportunist, is now being hailed as the "founder," Atkinson is far too honest to follow him, and the thorough and informative "Introduction: Accessing Ballad Tradition" warns that the final chapter will "take issue with the idea of a 'national' tradition." Although the book's target audience is unclear, for it will be too expensive for ordinary folk, the introduction will be vigorously photocopied, for it provides a comprehensive overview of ballad studies to the present day.

Unfortunately, it also demonstrates the unfortunate state of present-day studies that, as the General Editor's preface ominously states: "may draw upon methodologies and theories developed in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology and sociology." One problem is that all these great guns are brought to bear on what is really a very small corpus of balladry, and portentous theories are regularly elaborated from statistically trivial samples that would be accepted in no other field of studies. Never can such great meals have been made from so little corn The second problem is that totally unnecessary jargon and tortuous expression have also been imported from these fields; both he freely employs (often subverting the plain English of other writers in the process). Why bother, for example, converting "impossible task" into "adynaton" (p. 43)? Far too many of his passages have to be read over and over again to extract any meaning. Try:

   So there is a theoretical basis for a group of ballads popular in
   England to signify collectively by virtue of their collective
   difference from popular ballads elsewhere, while at the same time
   signifying by virtue of a collective difference from other kinds of
   song which is shared by ballads from elsewhere (pp. 247-8).

Another serious criticism is that the "practice" (or indeed the "method") in the title does not refer to that of the singers. Everyone agrees that ballads must be considered as "words plus tunes"; his Preface contains the let-out that there is no "critical vocabulary" to treat such combinations and, anyway, singers match different tunes to songs. Are there scholars earnestly studying opera libretti, minus their music? The fact that singers choose which tunes carry their stories makes the study of those combinations crucial but, as ever in this field, this book remains a largely textual study (with valiant scattered attempts to touch on melodies and existing recordings).

Modern ballad scholars search earnestly for textual "meaning," both for singer and audience, with often ludicrous results, especially where pseudo-Freudian interpretations are preferred to historical ones. Atkinson is prone to such unverifiable nonsense, considering that when a singer sings of "deep dungeons," he/she is implying "vaginas" or "wombs," or that knife thrusts, especially with "phallic" pen-knives, are really rapes. Perhaps the family scene described in 1874 by Walter Gregor might reassure him that "meaning," sexual or otherwise, is not always at the forefront of singers' minds: "Many of the inferior songs [sung by father, mother, neighbours, children] were of a questionable morality, and some of them were even obscene. Yet they were sung with a kind of naivete and unconsciousness" (An Echo of the Olden Time, p. 23). Atkinson presumably has the modern miniature in mind when he queries the effectiveness of the ballad "penknife" (a lethal six inches to get between the ribs, in fact) and is unaware that inheritance laws--not his ubiquitous, over-heated "incest"--easily provide the motive for the Cruel Brother's knifing of his soon-to-be-married sister (who is carrying off her entitlement to half the estate's "moveables"--money, cattle, corn, furniture, securities, investments, the lot--to become the "unapproved" husband's property. And if she dies before producing a son, all her personal estate reverts to her brother).