The expression “fabled in song and story” nicely combines the twin impulses out of which our earliest literature grew, the union of music and crafted verbal narrative. Since ancient times Homer, the great source of our epic tradition, was called the “blind singer.” The manifestly musical aspect of lyric poetry is in the term itself, the lyre being the ancient stringed instrument to the strumming of which verse was recited. I have been thinking about the union of music and verse in some of our older and too often neglected poetry in relation to two men—one a traditional literary scholar and the other a musicologist—who did so much to preserve it for us.
Harvard, the world’s greatest university, has been subjected to some hard knocks of late, and though some are unfortunately well merited they are, viewed in historical perspective, mere blemishes on the noble academic scutcheon. Today I want briefly to remember Harvard’s very first English professor—both the man and his work. I refer to Francis James Child (1825-1896). He was named Professor of English only in 1876. The president of Harvard offered him the title as a bribe, to keep him from being captured by head-hunters from Johns Hopkins, which was in the process of becoming the first German-style graduate school in our land. That date may seem rather late. It is not that nobody wrote, read, and even studied literature in the first century of our Republic. But belletristic cultivation was taken for granted as a feature of general education. You might study Latin, Greek, French, or German, but you simply read your own language. As someone who devoted his working life to teaching literature, I came to believe that literary study—usually beginning with that in your native tongue--is the natural gateway to humanistic study writ large.
Child was a Bostonian, but by no means a Brahmin. He was a genuine democrat in the best American spirit. His father was a skilled craftsman, a sailmaker, whose handiwork allowed such mighty Yankee whalers as the “Pequod” of Moby Dick to sail the seven seas and back. The history of scholarship is punctuated by the appearance of great savants of modest social background, but nineteenth-century America was pre-eminent in that regard. It was also a philological age. The study of “English” at that time included a good deal of attention to excellence in speaking as well as in writing, and Child’s professional brief included rhetoric, logic, and oratory. And Child developed a special interest in the language of English-speakers, in the dialects of the Old Country but also the emerging distinctiveness of the American language. He studied, taught, and wrote about all the giants of English literature—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and others; but his democratic instincts led him to give significant scholarly attention to the popular literature of the ordinary stock of the early English immigrants to America: their folk music. Only a few specialists are likely to have consulted his ideas on the great writers of the English tradition. What he is famous for is his industry, skill, and erudition in seeking out and recording traditional “folk songs”. His work has appeared in many editions, including his own five-volume collection (1882-1898); but it has been most widely read in the single (very fat) volume in the “Cambridge Edition of the Poets” series edition directed by Bliss Perry: English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Cambridge: the Riverside Press, 1904) as edited by his daughter, Helen Child Sargent, and an eminent Harvard colleague, G. L. Kittredge). This edition includes, often with several variant texts, about two thirds of the three hundred plus ballads Child had collected. This fascinating body of song is often referred to as the "Border Ballads,” as they flourished particularly in the eastern counties along the border between England and Scotland.
Many of the ballads are ancient, and many have been written down only in uncertain or clearly garbled form. But they have exerted their power over writers of the highest genius, including Sir Philip Sidney who said in his Art of Poesy (1579) that he always thrilled upon hearing sung the old song of “Chevy Chase.” The subject of this song is aristocratic deer poaching—a hunt (chase) in the Cheviot hills. The ballads do show ancient folk culture warts and all. It’s not all church bells and May poles. Child himself expressed his disgust at the anti-Semitic blood libel in the confused and confusing ballad about Hugh of Lincoln—the same subject as that in Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale.”
Child was a literary scholar with no particular musical expertise; but the old folk songs are in fact music, and they fortunately have attracted the attention of musicologists as well as literary historians. The second hero of this essay, accordingly, is Cecil Sharp (1859-1924). He was born into a modest English family in which both parents were amateur musicians. As a young man Sharp spent a crucial decade in Australia, where he established a reputation as a musician both in ecclesiastical and secular circles. He then returned to England, and it was from England that he made his musical pilgrimages to the backwaters of the southern Appalachians in search of the old folk songs so rapidly disappearing in industrialized Britain. Recently Sharp has been semi-cancelled in some advanced circles for his “ethnocentrism,” apparently a particularly rubricated sin for an ethnologist. This was perhaps just payback for the attempted cancellation of Pete Seeger and some other left-wing folk singers for “Communism” by some American superpatriots of the 1950s. But the aesthetic world that could pardon Leni Riefenstahl for the brilliance of her “Triumph of the Will,” a rank Nazi propaganda movie of 1934, is unlikely to cancel the transcriptions of the words of ancient ballads that Sharp wrote down in log cabins in Madison County, N.C. during the First World War.
Many English writers have been keenly aware of the marriage of words and music that is a song. Sharp’s parents were both musical amateurs, and they seem to have regarded it as highly propitious that their child was born on St. Cecelia’s day—that is, the day ecclesiastically dedicated to the patron saint of music. So at the baptismal font they imposed upon him the masculine form of the name of that saint. They may well have had in mind, as well, a passage in one of our language’s greatest verbal paeans to music—Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast, or, the Power of Music--A song in honour of St. Cecilia’s day, 1697”. In popular Christian mythology Cecelia was supposed to have invented the pipe organ (the “vocal frame”) of the following lines.
At last, divine Cecilia came,
Inventress of the vocal frame;
The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store,
Enlarg'd the former narrow bounds,
And added length to solemn sounds,
With nature's mother wit, and arts unknown before.
Let old Timotheus yield the prize,
Or both divide the crown:
He rais'd a mortal to the skies;
She drew an angel down.
Celebrating what can rightfully be called his epic victory over Xerxes and the once mighty Persian Empire in the fourth century BCE, or, alternatively, one of the most wanton acts of cultural vandalism known to history, the sack of Persepolis, Alexander the Great sits with Thais, his favored courtesan—so much nobler a term than today’s lackluster and all-purpose girlfriend—"Their brows with roses and with myrtles bound:/ (So should desert [prowess] in arms be crown'd.)” Timotheus is Alexander’s court musician. Ostensibly the feast is celebrating Alexander’s stupendous military victory. But the real display of power is the display of music’s power, a power that overwhelms the conqueror of the world himself. What might be called the super-power of music is made perhaps even more evident in G. F. Handel’s musical orchestration of Dryden’s poem in his “Alexander’s Feast,” a concerto grosso (1736) that has been described as “neither opera nor oratorio, yet both.” Yet the marriage of song and story is never more thrilling than in some of the old ballads studied by Child and Sharp, two deeply learned men from the highbrow world without whom we would have been unlikely to have had Country and Western or Bob Dylan.
