A Note-Commentary on J. Barre Toelken's "An Oral Canon for the Child Ballads"
by George W. Boswell
Journal of the Folklore Institute, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jun., 1971), pp. 57-65
GEORGE W. BOSWELL
A Note-Commentary on J. Barre Toelken's "An Oral Canon for the Child Ballads"
In Toelken's very interesting article[1] he directed his efforts toward separating the Child ballads that have unquestionably been subjected to oral tradition from the ones whose occurrence in tradition is doubtful. Then he marshaled a number of symbolic "textural formulae" that occur overwhelmingly in the authenticated ballads and seldom or not at all in the remainder. In reverse, this paper seeks to contribute to the recognition of genuine, orally transmitted ballads. George R. Stewart Jr., took another step toward this end when he demonstrated that the prosody of folksong verse is less iambic than it is musically 4/4 meter:
x / x y x / x y
Through-out a garden green and gay.[2]
And John D. Allen counted respective uses of alliteration in ballads and nonfolk poems in an effort to show "that relative scarcity of alliterations in a version of a folk ballad may well be an index of its closeness to the folk, among whom it arose, and to its hypothetical ancestor."[3] For his study Professor Allen checked the incidence of alliteration in four classes of poems: the A variants of sixteen early Child ballads, from "Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight" through "Sweet William's Ghost"; the A variants of sixteen later or "minstrel" Child ballads, from "King Arthur and the King of Cornwall" through "The Earl of Westmoreland"; sixteen American-collected ballads in Mellinger E. Henry's Folk Songs from the Southern Highlands; and sixteen medieval songs selected from Chambers and Sidgwick's Early English Lyrics.
His numerical averages of alliteration are as follows:
Early Child ballads 12.2
Later Child ballads 17.1
American ballads 12.1
Medieval lyrics 19.1
He concludes that "folk ballads and contemporary folk songs average significantly lower in frequency of occurrences than do minstrel ballads, and still lower than do early lyrics. ... A folk ballad version containing numerous alliterations might well be suspected of having been mid-wived by a perhaps deft, self-conscious, professional bard. A modest array of alliterants, on the other hand, might well indicate a relative closeness to the folk, a relative purity of ballad blood."[4]
Probably it will remain impossible objectively to discriminate securely in every instance between traditional ballads and the products of individual authors that have not been subjected to musical and communal transmission. Judgment has been primarily subjective, although consensus seems general that if anyone has been able to distinguish with 99% infallibility his name was Francis James Child; but even he confessed doubt on occasion, notably in connection with "Kinmont Willie,"[5] and he died before he had time to reveal the secrets of his insights to the world. It has long seemed to me that a distinction exists in the way the syntax of a folk ballad behaves, especially in the fourth line of each stanza. If this could be demonstrated impartially and objectively, an instrument might be forged that, applied to a doubtful text or cluster of texts, might at the least serve to indicate traditionality. Accordingly, I elected to test the part of speech of the second stressed syllable in line four of each stanza of a mass of known folksongs in ballad-stanza verse and compare it with the congruent syllable in a sizeable number of poems in the ballad stanza by conscious literary artists.
The folk materials used are all folksongs collected by me in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi plus an occurrence or two from among each of the earliest ballads (Sharp 2, 3, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, and 20) in Sharp's Appalachian c ollection.[6] They are as follows, 138 variants:
Child 4, 6 variants Greenback
Child 7 Homespun Dress
Child 49 I Had a Dream
Child 62 Jim Bobo, 2 variants
Child 68, 3 variants Jock of Hazeldean
Child 73, 10 variants John Hardy
Child 74 Johnny Morgan
Child 75, 5 variants Johnny Sands
Child 79, 2 variants Knoxville Girl
Child 81, 2 variants Lee Bible
Child 85 Little Black Mustache,
Child 95, 4 variants 4 variants
Child 122 Little Boy
Child 125 Little Darling
Child 226 Little Joe
Child 243, 5 variants Little Turtle Dove, 2 variants
Amazing Grace Little Willie
Bleeding at the Nose Longest Day I Ever Saw
Blind Child, 7 variants Mary and Willie
Boy Who Wore the Blue Model Church, 2 variants
Did Ever You See? Mountain Dew
Don't Stay After Ten My Big Black Dog
Drummer Boy My Irish Molly-O
Drunkard'sC hild My Mary Anne
Drunkard'sD ream,2 variantsN o Home, 5 variants
Dying Girl Once I knew a Little Girl
Farewell Orphans
Farmer's Boy, 3 variants Over Jordan Is a Hard Road
Fatal Wedding, 2 variants Oxford Girl, 4 variants
Father Grumble, 2 variants Prisoner at the Bar
Girl I Left Behind Red Rosy Bush
Give My Love to Nellis Sailor's Plea
So Long, Liza School Days
Gooseberry Pie Shoe Little Feet, 3 variants
Slavery Days Union Man
Soldier, Soldier Waterfall, 2 variants
That Bloody War White Pilgrim, 3 variants
Time Draws Near White Rose, 2 variants
Tullahoma Laundry Blues William Owen
Turtle Dove William Taylor
The poems to which the above folksongs have been contrasted are taken from several anthologies,e .g. Aldington's and Untermeyer's.[7] They are as follows, 104 poems:
Baker, Let Me Grow Lovely
Blake, Divine Image
Motto to the Songs
Bronte, The Old Stoic
Browning, Confessions
Bruce, To the Cuckoo
Burns, Banks o'Doon
Red Rose
Carroll, The Crocodile
Father William
Chesterton, The Donkey
Elegy in a Country Churchyard
Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner
Congreve, Song
Cowper, John Gilpin
Light Shining Out of Darkness
Daniel, Ulysses and the Siren
Davies, Door-Mats
The Dream-Bearer
Dekker, Drinking Song
Deloney, Song
Dickinson,A pparentlyw ith No Surprise
As Imperceptiblya s Grief
Because I Could Not Stop
Brain Is Wider Than the Sky, The
Chariot, The
Heart, We Will Forget
"Hope" Is The Thing With Feathers
I Died for Beauty
I Felt a Funeral
I Heard a Fly Buzz
I Like to See It Lap
I Never Hear the Word "Escape"
I Taste a Liquor
I Took My Power
I'll Tell You How the Sun Rose
Immortal Is an Ample Word
Mountains Grow Unnoticed, The
My Life Closed Twice
Narrow Fellow, A
Of All the Souls That Stand Create
Pain Has an Element of Blank
Remorse Is Memory Awake
She Rose to His Requirement
Success Is Counted Sweetest
There Is No Frigate
Two Swimmers Wrestled
We Outgrow Love
Emerson, Duty
Finch, The Greater Trial
Frost, Loneliness
The Oft-Repeated Dream
Gilbert, The Yarn of the "Nancy Bell"
Goldsmith, Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog
Graves, Apples and Water
Greene, Old Grimes
Hardy, Epitaph on a Pessimist
The Oxen
Hemans, Casabianca
Henley, The Blackbird
To A.D.
Herbert, The Elixir
Mad Maid's Song
Herrick, To Anthea
Holmes, The Height of the Ridiculous
Housman, Farewell to Barn
Into My Heart
Jones, Sometimes
Landor, Fate! I Have Asked
Lawrence, Cherry Robbers
Lewis, From Feathers to Iron
Longfellow, Hymn to the Night
The Wreck of the Hesperus
Lovelace, To Lucasta
Malloch, Be the Best of Whatever You Are
Mickle, The Mariner's Wife
Otway, The Enchantment
Pope, The Universal Prayer
Pryor, A Reasonable Affliction
Rochester, Love and Life
Mistress, The
Sedley, Song
Song
Song
Service, My Madonna
Shakespeare, from All's Well
from Hamlet
Smart, A Song to David
Stanley, Song
Suckling, Siege, The
Song
Swinburne, An Interlude
Turner, Lion, The
Romance
Vaughan, Song to Amoret
Watts, Against Idleness and Mischief
Wickham, The Tired Man
Wordsworth, I Travelled
Lucy Gray
She Dwelt
Slumber, A
Strange Fits
To the Cuckoo
Two April Mornings, The
The following double columns record the figures. Read them, e.g., as follows: in the 919 fourth lines of stanzas of the folksongs, a one-syllable verb occurs in the second accented syllable of 159 lines.
[table upcoming]
A close comparison of the columns will show that whereas the bulk of the figures are quite similar, a few are notably different. That is to say, with respect to syllable of part speech on accent #2 of line #4 of each stanza, folk and literary ballads do behave recognizably differently. Verbs predominate at the chosen syllable of the folksongs, nouns in the art poems. There are more adjectives, first stressed syllables of verbs, and pronouns in the possessive case among the folksongs, more second
stressed syllables of verbs, and third syllables of nouns among the poems. Among the folksongs, the first stressed syllables of prepositions, the second stressed syllables of subordinate conjunctions, and for to stressed are uniquely dominant; among the literary poems, there are far more middle stressed syllables of adjectives, coordinate conjunctions, second stressed syllables of nouns, third syllables of adjectives, subordinate conjunctions, and, surprisingly, to as the sign of the infinitive. Perhaps a contrastive list, as follows, will tabulate these findings in more usable form.
RELATIVE DOMINANCES
Folksongs Poems
Verbs, most Noun, most
Pronoun in the possessive case, 5 times The third stressed syllable of noun, 5 times
more numerous more numerous
The first stressed syllable of preposition, The middle stressed syllable of adjective,
15 times more numerous 3 times more numerous
The second stressed syllable of subordinate Coordinate conjunction, 7 times more numerous
conjunction, infinitely
Adjective Preposition
The first stressed syllable of verb The second stressed syllable of verb
For (for to): unique The second stressed syllable of noun
Subordinate conjunction
The third syllable of adjective
To (infinitive)
There remains to test the efficacy of this instrument on a series of known or suspected ballads. We shall try only one. I should like to have tried "Kinmont Willie," Child ballad 186;16 but as "Kinmont Willie" is in tetrameter instead of ballad stanzas, it does not match the model to which we have confined ourselves. Accordingly I have selected "Robin Hood and Maid Marian," Child 150, suspected of an inkhorn origin. Child said of it, "Through Maid Marian and Robin Hood had perhaps been paired in popular sports, no one thought of putting more of her than her name into a ballad, until one S.S. (so the broadside is signed) composed
this foolish ditty."[17] The second accented syllables of the last lines of its twenty-two stanzas are to be described as follows:
First Stressed Syllable of Adjective 8
First Stressed Syllable of Noun 5
Noun 3
Adjective 3
Adverb 2
Verb 1
total 22
Checking this description against the instrument, we find t hatt he evidence of nouns, adverbs, and the paucity of verbs indicates art, whereas only the adjectives point to folk quality. We conclude that Child 150 is more dominantly art than folk. Surely enough, it is a ballad omitted as not genuinely traditional by Toelken.[18]
It is to be hoped that the touchstone we have thus crudely forged will prove to be of some assistance in distinguishing b allad-stanza verses from genuinely traditional ballads.
University of Mississippi
Footnotes:
1 J. Barre Toelken, "An Oral Canon for the Child Ballads: Construction and Application," Journal of the Folklore Institute 4 (1967), 75-101.
2 "The Meter of the Popular Ballad," PMLA 40 (1925), 933-962, esp. 946.
3 "Alliteration as an Index to 'Folkishness' in Folk Ballads, "Appendix IV of Quantitative Studies in Prosody (Johnson City, East Tennessee State University Press, 1968), pp. 140-148.
4 Ibid., p. 147.
5 See Bertrand Harris Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, vol. III (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 168.
6 Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, collectors, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917).
7 Richard Aldington, ed., The Viking Book of Poetry (New York, Viking, 1946 [1941]), and Louis Untermeyer, ed., A Treasury of Great Poems (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1942).
8 For example, seventeenth.
9 E.g., mama.
10 E.g., within.
11E.g., subterfuge.
12 E.g., perchance.
13 E.g., visionary.
14 E.g., Chpeaside, syllable, ivory.
15 Eagerly.
16 The reason being that Child suspected Sir Walter Scott's hand to have lain heavy on it. See The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. by Francis James Child, III (New York, Cooper Square Publishers, 1962 [1889]), p. 472.
17 Ibid.,p.218.
18 Journal of the Folklore Institute 4 (1967), 90.