Ballad Recreators
Even though this deals primarily with the ballad in North America, ballad recreation has been made on both sides of the pond. Bishop Percy (1729 –1811) rewrote many of the ballads from manuscripts for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Percy never notated the changes he made or allowed his manuscripts to be examined in his lifetime. Peter Buchan (1790-1854), a Scottish ballad collector, was notorious for reworking ballads and adding stanzas to traditional versions so that his ballads are longer than those found by other collectors. Sir Walter Scott (1771- 1832) in his 1802-03 The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, reworked many ballads. Although Scott may not have re-written them wholesale he added stanza, inserted the names of local places and reworked phrases to present a more complete ballad -- the problem was, they were presented as being authentic from tradition (The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott; Fiona Robertson, p. 28).
It was largely through Francis James Child (1825-1896), an Harvard scholar and educator who published The English and Scottish Popular Ballads in ten volumes (1882-1898), that ballads were investigated by original sources and preserved in an authentic way.
By definition ballad recreators are individual informants, performers, arrangers or collectors who for whatever reason, change the ballad text, melody or sometimes the informants name and by doing so present a ballad as being authentic and traditional that has been changed and is no longer traditional. Sometimes this is done to deceive the public and present rare and unusual versions. Recreation is a polite way of saying the ballad is fraudulent of a "forgery." Sometimes ballads are changed slightly by informants to improve them because they don't understand what they've heard. This is the folk process and is different from an informant getting the text of a ballad and reworking their version with material they have never heard before.
Changing the informants name has been done to either prevent the tracing of the ballad to a real person or to present the same or similar text in different publications. For example Patrick Gainer has presented the exact same text in three different publications with three different informants!!! And I assume that none of them are real people!!!
This deception has been made by a number of well-known performers, who simply run out of traditional material to record but need to present the material as traditional- from them as the source. Sometimes it's done to prevent problems with copyrights. This began to be important in the 1920 when copyrights became big money. Usually the title would be changed to prevent copyrighting the same title. Vernon Dalhart sang the same song under a variety of titles and pseudonyms. Most of the copyrighted songs by The Carter Family and others were songs they heard and collected but did not write. Ralph Peer became wealthy on the copyrights alone. The same thing happens today with songs that exist before 1923. A new title will be created and some of the text will be changed. The melody may be slightly changed.
The number of informants that have been recreators is large. In some cases they don't understand that the collector wants traditional material or they think it's fine to recreate the ballad to improve it. Then the collector who may or may not know the ballad has be recreated accepts it without question because they want this rare ballad in their collection. They'd rather not find out the details. This has happened for example, the The Edwards Ballad, thought to be a version of Child 13. It was ironically recreated by George Edwards an Englishman who moved to Vermont and was an informant for Flanders and Barry in the 1930s (This is not the George Edwards from NY that was an informant for Cazden). This has happened with a few ballads by Edith Fish , a traditional singer from New Hampshire.
The problem is: most of Fish's ballads are traditional. Informants simply like to add to their repertoire but they are adding to it from print sources. This is the case also of the traditional singer Almeida Riddle, who never stopped learning ballads. Her Braes of Yallow is brilliant but it is not traditional. No example is more obvious than the case of Aunt Molly Jackson of Kentucky and her Robin Hood ballads. Jackson claimed she heard the ballads sung in Kentucky (where certain Robin Hood ballads had ever been found there or elsewhere in America) when she simply re-wrote them with folk-style words from books (see: Aunt Molly Jackson and Robin Hood: A Study in Folk Re-Creation by John Greenway; The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 69, No. 271 (Jan. - Mar., 1956), pp. 23-38). My friend, the late great Jean Ritchie, had a few ballads that simply couldn't have come from her Uncle Jason. The problem with Richie and MacColl is they came from a family of traditional singers and as they became successful and educated it was easy to arrange the many version of ballads they had access to- and it was nearly impossible to do cover versions of traditional ballads. They became prisoners of their own and others traditional expectations. So their ballad sources became their family; their parents, her uncle, his father.
So is tradition or traditional folk songs and ballad limited to word of mouth? After all, the world is evolving. The grandson of an itinerant Appalachian singer in the 1950s is probably texting on his phone and sending emails across the globe. He may be listening to youtube on his ipad and he may still play one of the songs his grandma taught him when he was 8 years old (yes, 70 year olds text and listen to youtube!!!). Tradition may exist within a family and close neighbors but largely it is dying out. It was dying out when Cecil sharp was collecting in 1918. People just weren't singing the old love songs anymore. Today, for all practical purposes, the word-of-mouth tradition is gone. We are talking about ballads in the past tense. I'm not saying that ballads aren't sung, just that the traditional passage is gone.
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Who are the recreators?
The collectors: Vance Randolph investigated a version of Child 218 collected by John Robert Moore. By talking to the informant he discovered that the ballad was a fake. Even Randolph, who I find to be above reproach, has done things which are questionable. We all know about John Jacob Niles, who has had the reputation as a recreator, although a talented one. Wilgus reports (p. 213 AAFSS 1898): "In recent program and album notes he (Niles) has confessed personal interference raging from tune alteration to complete composition." A good example is Niles, 'I wonder as I wander" which was written from a fragment of a carol he learned from a little girl. The text is embellished with folk vernacular that Niles was so familiar with. The telltale signs are there. Niles ballads are complete, no lines are missing[1], no stanzas are amiss. Some of Niles ballads have never been found in North America and have elements from Child ballads that are not in tradition but in print
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The Smith Brothers (Thomas P. Smith and R.E. Lee Smith of Zionville, NC).
Thomas P. Smith, born June, 1876 in Watuaga County (Cove Creek) NC contributed to Brown Collection of NC Folklore by 1913, and is included in Volume 2, Ballads published in 1952 and both brothers, Thomas P. and Robert E. Lee (born June, 1880 in Watuaga County) contributed to Davis, More Traditional Ballads of Virginia, 1960 after they moved together to Palmyra, Fluvanna, Virginia. The 1920 Census and 1930 Census lists them living together in Virignia, with no other family members. Most is not all of the Smiths contributions to Davis are recreations. This can be proven by their "Twa Sisters" version which was previously submitted to the brown collection and is still there in MS form. It was never accepted because it clearly is a rewrite of Child A. It was changed slightly and submitted to Davis, who published it.
Thomas P Smith; 1900 United States Federal Census
Name: Thomas P Smith
Age: 24
Birth Date: Jun 1876
Birthplace: North Carolina
Home in 1900: Cove Creek, Watauga, North Carolina
Race: White
Gender: Male
Relation to Head of House: Son (Child)
Marital Status: Single
Father's name: Bernie Smith Oct 1853 in North Carolina
Father's Birthplace: North Carolina
Mother's name: Martelia J Smith
Mother's Birthplace: North Carolina
Thomas P. June 1876
Robert. E. Lee June 1880
Carrie (daughter) 1882
charles 1883
Bertha 1888
Joseph 1890
Bessie 1897
Isenhour were neighbors
Thomas P Smith in the 1920 United States Federal Census
42 years old
Birth Year: abt 1878
Birthplace: North Carolina
Home in 1920: Palmyra, Fluvanna, Virginia
Street: Old Stage road
Lives with Robert
1930 Census
Thomas P Smith (53)
abt 1877
Birthplace: North Carolina
Marital Status: Single
Relation to Head of House: Brother
Home in 1930: Palmyra, Fluvanna, Virginia
Robert E. Lee Smith (49)
From Davis:
Lamkin p. 216 --MORE TRADITIONAL BALLADS OF VIRGINIA
of collectors. Indeed, though the two brother collectors (who were also singers) attribute the song to two different singers of the same surname and locality (plus a third singer of a nearby town), and though a period of some fifteen or twenty years and a change of residence intervened between the two contributions, it seems quite possible that the two texts represent two transcriptions of essentially the same song, perhaps even the same song.
The North Carolina ballad was originally sent to C. Alphonso Smith, then Archivist of the Virginia Folklore Society, by Thomas P. Smith, then of Zionvllle, Watauga County, N. C., in March 1914, for the Virginia Collection. C. Alphonso Smith, being also a loyal North Carolinian, sent the ballad (and others from the same source) to his friend, Frank C. Brown, of Trinity College, N. C., from whose papers the ballad was published in the Brown Collection in 1952. Its headnote reads, "As sung by Mrs. Emma Smith and Mrs. Polly Rayfield, both of whom heard it when children, probably forty or fifty years ago" (in 1914).
Some time after 1914 and before the late twenties, the two Smith brothers, Thomas P. Smith, who was an accomplished singer as well as an intelligent collector of ballads and the better educated of the two, and R. E. Lee Smith, also a singer and collector but not of the class of his brother, moved to Virginia, bringing their songs with them, and eventually settled near Palmyra, in Fluvanna County. From there Thomas P. Smith wrote to the present editor, who was then Archivist of the Virginia collection, in succession to C. Alphonzo Smith, offering to sing and to present the ballads he knew and had collected. Unhappily, the elder brother Thomas died before contact was made with him, but R. E. Lee Smith who also knew and (in a fashion) sang the songs and who had custody of his brother's or their joint collection, offered his help. This was the beginning of a very fruitful correspondence and association, including one or more personal visits, between R. E. Lee Smith and the present editor, some details of which have been told elsewhere. On May 21, 1931, the Archivist [Davis] received from Mr. Smith the present fifteen-stanza text of "Beaulampkins." On a corner of the clear penciled manuscript (now before me) is written, "Sung 30 years ago B. Snrith, Zionville, N. C. M. A. Yarber, Mart, N. C." The singer of Brown A version, it will be recalled, was Miss Ellen Smith, and her tune, recorded as manuscript score in Zionville, Watauga County, in March, 1914, appears in Brown IV, 74-75.
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Carey Woofter
Here's some what Wilgus wrote. From: Folk-Songs of the Southern United States; Excerpt from The Forward by Wilgus - 1967:
On the other hand, a number of Woofter's contributions merit distrust. Louis W. Chappell pointed out variations in printings of "The Yew-Pine Mountains," which Woofter supplied to both Combs and Cox. [18] The variations are slight, and Chappell was using them to attack Cox's editing, pointing out also that Cox apparently made alterations in printing Comb's text of "John Henry."[19] But we note that Woofter contributed to Cox a text of Child No. 275 credited to Mrs. Sarah Clevenger of Briar Lick Run, near Perkins, Gilmer County. "She learned it from her grandmother, Mrs. Rebecca Clevenger, who came from London County, Virginia, seventy-eight years ago, as the date in the family Bible gives it." Woofter contributed to the Combs
Collection a text identical but for a transposition in one line, and indicated the source as David Chenoweth, Gip, Gilmer County, West Virginia (Appendix, No. 38). To Chenoweth is also credited the unique textual form of "The Cruel Brother" (Appendix, No. 5), which Woofier annotates as "doctored by one Daniel De Weese."
To prove an alleged traditional text fraudulent (i.e., deliberately altered or re-created to deceive the student of folksong) is not always easy. Unless one can obtain from the alleged informant a denial that he furnished the song to the alleged collector- as Vance Randolph was able to do when investigating John Robert Moore's collecting of a version of Child 218[20]- he can judge the validity of the variant only by relating it to the known history of the song, which can be established largely by a study of its variants. The process is indeed almost circular. But, despite a memorat even more convincing than that supplied for the text of Child No. 275 quoted above, I believe I have demonstrated that the Woofter text of "Edward" is a clever conflation of Child's A and B texts.[21] In a similar study, to be published in Western Folklore, Bernth Lindfors has shown that the West Virginia text of Child No. 2 in the Combs Collection (Appendix, 1A; not identified as a Woofter contribution, but alleged to be from a Gilmer County informant) is a palpable fraud-palpable only to the student who has made a meticulous study of the tradition of the ballad.
When a song text has little traditional status, one must be wary of an alleged recovery from a folksinger. We therefore must at least note that the Woofter text of "Ranting Roving Lad" (p. 149) is almost identical to that printed in Allan Cunningham's The Songs of Scotland (pp. 208 f.). One swallow does not make a summer- but Woofter also contributed "The Old Wife" (pp. 135f.), which is quite similar to "The Auld, Wife Beyont the Fire" in Allan Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany (1571, ed., f, 103ff.), where it was published as an old song with additions. For the Scots euphemism for sexual intercourse, snishing, the Woofter text substitutes spruncin. Aside from a version of "The old wife" on a recent recording[22] certainly derived from Combs' printing, the only other notice of spruncin' (sic) is in a localization of "The Gypsy Laddie" (Child No. 200; Appendix, No. 33B) contributed by Carey Woofter.
We must grant at this point that many Woofter texts must be accepted as traditional variants. But the literary connections and internal "rrid"rr.u of some of Woofter's dubious texts furnish touchstones for a
number of items not credited to Woofter yet possibly from his collection. (Items possibly attributable to Woofter are those assigned to informants in Gilmer and adjacent counties.) The geographical pattern of contribution to the Combs Collection automatically suggests as Woofter contributions "The Rantin Laddie" (pp. 127 f.) and the two
texts of "Bonnie James Campbell" (pp. 126 f.). The fact that recoY-
eries are unusual (as is certainly true of these texts) proves nothing,
except that it adds to the stature of Woofter as a collector of texts rare- almost unique in the United States. But from within Woofter's collecting area comes "The Gowans Grow Guy" (pp. A2 f.), uncomfortably close to the Tea Table Miscellany text (IT,21+ ff') ''u Certain
17 For discussion and reference see Tristram P. Coffin, The British Traditional Ballad in North America (rev. ed., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1963), pp. 86f.
18 lohn Henry (Jena, Germany, 1933), pp. 3 f.
19 lbid.,pp.2 f.Cf. Appendix, No. 81'
20 Journal of American Folklore,Lx (194'7) ' 117.
21 See Appendix, No. 7.
zz PauI -Iayton, unholy Matrimony, Elektra 747',72" LP'
2s It is indied ironic tirat "the gowans grow gay" is the unique refrain of the Buchan "Lady Isabel and the EIf Knight" (child-No. 4A) which-Holger-!. Nvggrd
has demonstrated. to be a "forgery"- (The BaIIad of Heer Haleuiin [Knoxville,
Tenn., lgd8], pp. 311tr.).Onels ieminded of John Pinkerton's "discovery" of the
,*.ord partif-;Hardyknute" (see Siguril Bernhard Hustvedt, Ballad Criticism in