The Ballad Hunters

                                                      Francis James Child

 

            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.

                                       Cecil Sharp with his lead singer

 

  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.

A Patriot in Song

Professor Francis James Child (1825-1896)

The sense of the word “hero”—once limited mainly to famous warriors, explorers, and self-sacrificing patriots--has apparently expanded so considerably as to include any member of our armed forces and most civilian “first responders”, at least the ones who are not racist pigs, another category of the lexical growth industry.  I do not begrudge the generous instinct to create more heroes.  Indeed, I want to add yet another subspecies: the academic hero.  That is the category to which one could plausibly assign Audubon, to whom I devoted a recent post; and it is certainly the category for Francis James Child.  Child was born in Boston in 1825.  The Republic was not yet half a century old.  Though he would become a famous Harvard professor and the bosom companion of Brahmins like William James and Charles Eliot Norton, he was born into modest circumstances and was a product of those democratic and meritocratic impulses that continue to animate our higher education at its best.  I, of all people, can “relate” to a nation that values the pursuit of old Germanic philology as well as the pursuit of the almighty dollar.  If you can believe Thomas Jefferson, he was not less proud to be president of the American Philosophical Society than to be President of his country!

Child was of a scholarly generation that treasured the primary text.  That is, literature itself was more important to him than the ingenious prolusions of professors upon it.  Therefore he was first of all an editor.  But it was impossible to do groundbreaking editorial work on Chaucer from America in 1850.  He therefore brought out five annotated volumes of Spenser—no trivial task.  Then, both as scholar and as patriot, he designed a vast project of unique American significance.

Most of us know something of the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England.  We tend to be less knowledgeable about succeeding generations of British immigrants, mainly from the North of England, from Scotland, and from Ulster, the so-called “Scotch-Irish” whose arrival antedated the large Catholic immigration of the potato famine.  They were mainly no-frills Protestants used to very plain living, and they swarmed westward through Tidewater Virginia and the Carolinas to the Appalachians and the Cumberlands, into the Ohio Valley and the lush forests of Kentucky and Tennessee.  These pioneers travelled light: a Bible, a gun, agricultural tools, spindles and sometimes even a spinning wheel.  More than a few, though, had musical instruments, and practically all carried within their memories an invisible inner treasury of popular song passed on to them by family elders and hayseed bards from the time of the War of the Roses to the Battle of New Orleans.  In the Faerie Queene Spenser had deployed one kind of epic.  In his huge edition of the transplanted English and Scottish Ballads (8 volumes, 1857-59, later 5 volumes of larger format) Child laid out another: the epic poetry of the young American republic a-making.

The cultural importance of folk music, real folk music, not its pallid contemporary simulacrum, is impossible for us to understand today.  The commodification of popular music, and the big business that generates and distributes it, were unknown before the Civil War, and hardly known before the twentieth century.  Child, though a polyglot, was a native speaker of American English and a scholar of early English dealing primarily with printed texts; but his enterprise inspired, and sometimes provoked, those field-workers who eventually would be called ethno-musicologists to try to preserve native Amerindian traditions and to study the musical archaeology of large and disparate American populations of African and Iberian origin, among others.  The English musicologist Cecil Sharp, an early twentieth-century heir of F. J. Child, went ballad-hunting in Appalachia during the First World War, recording a vast repertory of songs to be returned, marvelously preserved, to the crofts and cottages whence they had migrated a century earlier.

The old ballads are about everything under the sun: battles, sea voyages, hunting parties, public executions, country fairs, and supernatural events galore.    Chevy Chase, based in a half-remembered anecdote about an obscure fourteenth-century battle as reduced to a brawl between two great Border chieftains, is a tale of a great slaughter of deer that turned into a great slaughter of men.  Yet what power it has.  It was already old in the sixteenth century, when one of that age’s most elegant poets, Sir Philip Sidney, said this about it: “Certainly I must confess mine own barbarousness; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?”

But mostly the old ballads are about the two great themes of world romance: Love and Death.  “Would you, my lords”—so begins Bédier’s reconstruction of the medieval Tristan and Isolde—“would you hear a fine story of love and death?”  And, boy, do we get one.  “Set me as a seal upon thine heart,” says the Song of Songs, “for love is as strong as death”.  My grandfather Fleming used to sit on his porch in Arkansas half mumbling, half crooning “Barbara Allen”.  I wish I had paid more attention.  “Barbara Allen” is apparently the most recorded song in musical history.  I could wish to have added to the repertory.  I don’t know whether any two singers have agreed as to its words.  Like many old ballads it is an at times inchoate verbal quilt.  Yet a discernible plot forces its way like a red cord through the song’s peripheral incoherencies and shifting points of view; and it is the plot of tragic love.  Cruel Barbara Allen makes all the lads sing “well away” or “lack a day” or, presumably, any trisyllabic bit of verbal stuffing that could rhyme in -ay.  All that is the noise.  The signal is that cruel beauty must come to know the everlasting sorrow of love and death, must find indeed that they are the same.  “My true love died for me today,” she tells her distraught mother. “I’ll die for him tomorrow.”  Though she spurned him in life, they will lie till Judgment Day in contiguous graves in the old churchyard; yet even now the bard is not finished, for “out of his grave grew a red, red rose, and out of hers a briar.”