"Hinkie Dinkie Parlevous"
by Louise Pound
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 36, No. 140 (Apr. - Jun., 1923), pp. 202-203
"HINKIE DINKIE PARLEVOUS."
-A recent issue of The American Journal of Folk-Lore (No. 134, PP. 386-389) contains an article entitled "Communal Composition in the A.E.F." by Mr. Atcheson L. Hench. The article blandly illustrates the vitality of certain misconceptions concerning ballads and their composition. These misconceptions arose without valid evidence behind them and they linger only through the weight of tradition. Despite his heading, Mr. Hench's lyric material has nothing to do with ballads, i.e., songs that tell a story. His article might better have been called "Folk- Improvisation in the A.E.F., " since it has to do with improvised ephemeral songs, not with ballads.
Mr. Hench writes that in the summer of 1918 there appeared in the American army in France a "childish ditty" known usually by the name of "Hinkie Dinkie Parlezvous." "The tune," he says, "was always the same; but the subjects were of all sorts." Its existence was entirely oral and new stanzas were constantly improvised. It is not shown that the ditty ever developed a plot or story, or, indeed, that it developed unity of any type other than that arising from the persistence of the tune to which the words were sung. Yet Mr. Hench's concluding paragraph is as follows:
Such material confirms, in part at least, the conception of ballad composition as stated by Professor G. L. Kittredge in his introduction to F. J. Child's "English and Scottish Ballads." " Different members of the throng, one after another, may chant each a verse, composed on the spur of the moment, and the sum of these various contributions makes a song. This is communal composition, though each verse taken by itself, is the work of an individual. A song made in this way is no
man's property and has no individual author. The folk is its author."
Now the English and Scottish traditional ballads are not " Hinkie Dinkies." Each tells a vivid story and the variants for each ballad are recognizable variants of that story. Mr. Hench's folk-improvisations are not like the Child ballads but resemble folk-improvisations everywhere. Improvisations by groups of singing soldiers were frequent in the United States, as well as in France, during the war period. I have collected group-improvisations for years, to see what they are like and what happens to them; but I have never found a single instance of their developing into song-narratives or ballads. They are never sung to original airs, are generally satires or lampoons, are simple and structureless in character, and are not a very important
or durable type of lyric. To connect "Hinkie Dinkie" with the English and Scottish ballads, Mr. Hench would have to show:
(I) that it developed plot, i.e., turned into a narrative song;
(2) that it improved remarkably in structure and quality; and
(3) that it achieved permanence and diffusion in its developed story form.
Yet, no doubt, it has been as short-lived as the shifting improvisations of Texas cowboys, or of negroes
at religious meetings, or of groups of singing students. In other words, if
"Hinkie Dinkie" proves anything, it proves that the English and Scottish
ballads were composed in no such way. No one has yet been able to bring
forward a body of folk-improvisations achieving anywhere, through any
kind of process, story form and high lyric quality and lasting diffusion.
Yet how often, when someone improvises a few simple stanzas in public, or
adapts some older song, or adds a few lines to something sung by others, we
are told that this is "proof of communal origin" for that distinctive and
much higher type of lyric, or lyric-epic, the English traditional ballad.
In general, I think it time that the term "communal" be dislodged from
inevitable association with the composition of folk-ballads, whatever be the
sense in which the term is used. Ballads or songs in oral tradition differ
from ballads handed down in printed form in that they are in a state of flux,
while ballads of the other type are static, their form fixed by the printed
page. This is the only dependable distinction to be made between traditional
ballads and other ballads. Genuine folk ballads are continually
modified in the mouths of individual singers. But the modifications of
individual singers do not permanently "represent a community," though
some of them may originally have been made on a public occasion. As
time goes on, one singer in a community makes one set of changes; another
makes another set; indeed, the same singers do not always sing the same
songs in the same way. There are no "communal changes" for there is no
static communal ballad. Nor does it help much to say instead that ballads
are "of composite authorship." It is the refashioning of the original text
in the mouths of a succession of individual singers that deserves the emphasis.
A permanent communal text, the result of composite authorship, or representing
in any valid sense some community, is never achieved.
LOUISE POUND.
UNIVERSITYO F NEBRASKA