Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths

Folklore, Dec, 2004 by David Atkinson

Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths. By Roger deV. Renwick. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. 183 pp. $40.00 (hbk). ISBN 1-57806-393-0

Recentering Anglo/American Folksong is a reassertion of the unique contribution that folksong research has to offer to folklore studies, to academe, and to cultural and intellectual understanding. The discipline of folklore, Renwick maintains, has come to draw on a shared body of terminology and sources that can be loosely grouped under the heading of "cultural studies," but in doing so has succeeded not in achieving a share of the cultural studies cachet but merely in threatening the loss of its own identity. (This, of course, is from a North American perspective; folksong scholars in England have nothing to lose.) Instead of what Renwick terms "hypertheorizing"--a euphemism for forcing data into the mould of a borrowed theory--his book is a plea for a return to inductive scholarship and to the great and distinctive strengths of the discipline that were built up over decades by earlier scholars: the "data banks" of "material available-for-study," and the incomparable reference sources available for systematising their study.

The five chapters, to which it is scarcely possible to do justice here, constitute free-standing studies in themselves, each illustrating the merits of the comparative, inductive approach. For example, the study of variation in "The Wild and Wicked Youth" or "The Rambling Boy" demonstrates convincing differences between the British and southern US (blues ballad) strains of the song. Once these have been established, it is possible to describe divergent systems of reference in folksongs that reinforce these distinctions. These can be tentatively related to their respective contexts: class in Britain versus American democracy; interest in the social whole versus individualism. Handled with tact, and a fair degree of generalisation, this works well as an approach to the presence of the "same" songs in different contexts.

The chapter on Child ballads in the West Indies arose from a dispute with Roger Abrahams over the identity of a Caribbean cante-fable, which belongs to the same type as a ballad otherwise thought to exist in a unique text from eighteenth-century Scotland, "The Bonny Birdy" (Child 82). This identification means that the cultural referentiality of such a song can scarcely derive from a preconceived process of "creolization," as Abrahams claimed. Instead, local artistry and epistemology function in less transparent ways. Far from being incompatible with synchronic study, contextualism, and performance, Renwick presents textual analysis as a key methodological tool for such pursuits.

Possibly the most important chapter is that on what Renwick calls the Anglo/American catalogue song. These have relatively slight narrative or emotional content and are built around an additive "way of articulating images," as opposed to the linear way of ballads or the expressive way of lyric songs (pp. 60-1). Indeed, Renwick posits the "catalogue" song as a third subgenre of anglophone folksong. In doing so, he provides a conceptual and theoretical framework for the study of a whole batch of songs, such as "The Everlasting Circle," "One Man Went To Mow," "Green Grow the Rushes-O," "The Twelve Days of Christmas," even "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." Unquestionably part of the traditional song repertoire, these have often been treated rather cursorily in scholarly discussion--largely, one suspects, because of the lack of such a framework.

An additional strength of Renwick's approach is that it is not prescriptive. Rather, he is arguing that generic boundaries in folksong are essentially fluid (he even has a Venn diagram to illustrate the point on p. 61). So while many songs can be readily classified as lyric or ballad, there are ballads that approach lyric and largely lyric songs that imply an element of narrative. And there are ballads with an incremental "catalogue" structure, like "The Maid Freed from the Gallows," as well as bawdy songs, like "The Furze Field," that convey a lyric emotion but do so precisely through an additive way of articulating images. It seems reasonable to predict that for its very neatness and flexibility of application, the catalogue song will prove a beneficial concept for folksong study and help to bring some much-loved songs in from the academic cold.

Elsewhere Renwick makes a fair case (including the evidence of tunes) for the song he calls "Oh Willie" to be considered as a distinct item, albeit one closely related to the whole "Butcher Boy" (Laws P 24), "Died for Love," "Love Has Brought Me to Despair," "In Sheffield Park" family, evidencing a tendency among American singers to separate out the strand of family opposition to lovers from that of unrequited love. The final chapter is a tour-de-force survey of the "Crabfish" story as song and tale. The comparative approach is deployed at length to enable some culture-specific observations about the forms of the story in different contexts, achieving a degree of congruence between psychological and ethnographic paradigms (p. 141), and also to mount a contextual analysis of Mrs Overd's encounter with Cecil Sharp when she sang the song to him in Langport in 1904.