Phillips Barry and Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship
by R. Gerald Alvey
Journal of the Folklore Institute, Vol. 10, No. 1/2, Special Issue: American FolkloreHistoriography (Jun. - Aug., 1973), pp. 67-95
[This is a great article on Barry. I've proofed it once but there are sure to be some typos. At some point I'll go over it again. The footnotes are at the end, instead of at the end of the page. R. Mattteson 2011]
Phillips Barry and Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship [1]
R. GERALD ALVEY
Introduction
The following essay represents a preliminary investigation into the scholarship of Phillips Barry (1880-1937) as it is relevant to a history of American folksong studies. Despite the fact that "many conclusions of modern folksong scholarship" seem either to have "grown out of or been anticipated by" the work of Barry,[2] his nascent formulations are not generally accessible to any but the specialist, and then only after several months of tedious searching and study. Reasons for the obscurity of Barry's work are several. First, he never published a book, or even a lengthy article, which explained in their entirety his theories concerning folksongs. Consequently, the "bits and pieces" of his theories must be gleaned from innumerable headnote articles (whether appearing in journals or books) - that is, articles in which one or more song texts are printed, followed (or preceded) by a cogent, but brief, discussion of such aspects as origins, re-creations, textual patterns, and singing styles.[3]
Complicating matters further, Barry's statements are, at times, seemingly inconsistent; consequently all his articles must be read to ascertain his overall general theories, in which light his specific statements must be interpreted. A second obstructiont o the easy access of Barry's ideas is his writing style which is overly terse and occasionally cryptic. A personal friend of Barry's, Samuel P. Bayard, notes:
Barry's writings were in most cases selections or excerpts from much more extensive notes, and the problem of how to squeeze in the greatest possible number of desirable observations w as always a bother to him. About each topic and item he always had much more important material to write than he ever ha d space in which to put it; and he once told me that at his rate of collecting data he might have to devises ome sort of scholarly short hand in order to c ommunicate merely what was needful. [4]
A third problem is that Barry was a private scholar of independent means; [5] he never taught in a university a nd thus he never h ad students to; whom he could impart his views; nor did he develop a "school" of followers in the generally recognized sense. However, his legacy to folksong scholarship remains, but too often his ideas are not associated with their progenitor. Barry, who nearly all his life resided in the Cambridge-Boston area, began his study of folksong while a student at Harvard in the early 1900s. At that time he was primarily encouraged in his work by three professors - George Lyman Kittredge, Kuno Francke, and Leo Wiener; the latter two were Europeans and seem to have permanently directed Barry's attention to Continental writers and theories.
Also influential upon the young scholar were the views of three folklorists: the American W . W. Newell, who also lived at Cambridge; the Englishman Cecil J. Sharp, who first influenced Barry through his writings and later met with him;[6] and the Germans cholar, John Meier.[7]
Barry joined the American Folklore Society,[8] and became a councilor for the Society in 1912, continuing in that capacity until 1929.[9] During that period, and until his death in 1937,[10] Barry was conversant with the folklorists of his era: George Lyman Kittredge, Franz Boas, Francis B. Gummere, Louise Pound, and others; special friends were Henry M. Belden and later George Herzog and Samuel P. Bayard, both musicologists.[11]
Although Barry was in continual contact with such scholars, there is little indication in his work that they directly influenced his ideas; rather, it seems that when agreements existed between Barry and other folklorists, they were instances of sharing, not borrowing. For example, he and Belden mutually agreed upon many subjects and lent valuable support to each other,[12] but seemingly each arrived at his conclusions independently. Pound, who was encouraged by Belden, seems not to have influenced Barry in any detectable way.[13] And Gummere's influence upon Barry was apparently only of a negative kind, as was much but not all of Kittredge's influence.
Barry became in his later years the recognized leader of folksong collecting in New England and, as a result, controlled to some extent the work of both enthusiastic amateurs and more experienced collectors, such as Mrs. Fannie Hardy Eckstorm [14] and Mary Winslow Smyth, with whom he edited the British Ballads from Maine (the two women did most of the collecting; B arry wrote the extensive headnotes).[15] He also aided Mrs. Helen Hartness Flanders in her work.[16] In 1930 Barry founded the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast and published its Bulletin almost single-handedly; unfortunately, however, when he died in 1937, both Society a nd Bulletin became d efunct. [17] B arry's extensive folksong collection was sent to Harvard, where it still resides in an atmosphere approaching anonymlty.
Finally, it should be recognizedt hat folksongw as only one, although the most predominant, of Barry's interests. He was also interested in early Greek music, philology and comparative literature (particularly of the classical and medieval periods),and New England history and theology (he held a divinity degree).[18]
In 1903 Phillips Barry- a Harvard-educated, aspiring young scholar of twenty-three- deserted the cloistered halls and the venerable academicians of his alma mater and embarked upon what was to become a lifelong study of American balladry and folksong. His philosophy for such a study was, from the beginning, ingeniously simple: first, he defined folksong simply as songs which were sung from memory by the folk; from this definition he concluded that to study folksongs e ffectively, one must necessarily go to the folksingers themselves, to sit "at their feet," and "learn from them.''[19] By this type of study he believed that evidence could be gathered which might eventually resolve what he called "some of the many - not the one - ballad problems."[20]
Such a methodology for folk song scholarship apparently was virtually unheard of within the academic community which surrounded Barry i n the early 1900s. Describing the reception of his ideas, Barry later wrote:
We were not surprised to meet with academic defeatism. It had been held that ballads were no longer recited - nothing was said about the singing of them, so firmly fixed was the notion that ballads were poems and not songs - hence there were no reciters to go to. True, it might be that occasionally a person would be found who could recite a ballad from memory, but there could be no escape from the supposition that he had learned it from print.[21]
Apparently the young scholar did not acquire his unusual ideas from his ballad teacher, George Lyman Kittredge (Child's successor, as Harvard's leading ballad scholar), who, in the Introduction to the one-volume abridged edition of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1904), pronounced that "ballad-making, so far as the English-speaking nations are concernedi,s a lost art; and the samem ay be said of ballad-singing."[22]
In fairness to Kittredge, however, as a ballad professor, he did encourage fieldwork among his students in the solving of their ballad problems, advice which Barry readily heeded. It seems that Kittredge's views - that for ballads of any literary merit, both the making and singing of them were essentially dead, and that the Child collection constituted a canon for balladry which contained the remaining corpses- were to some extent shared by almost every other American ballad scholar writing during the early 1900s. [23] It is not surprising, then, that few scholars became involved in field research or collecting, and that what was considered to be the "ballad problem" of the period - the problem of ballad origins - revolved around the brilliant but nonetheless sterile analysis of literary texts.[24]
One of the few early American folklore scholars who did not acquiesce to such academically popular ideas and procedures was another private scholar living at Cambridge, W. W. Newell, who, in 1883, had published "the first academic collection of American folksongs," gleaned from dynamic oral tradition: Games and Songs of American Children. [25] Later, in 1899 and again in 1900 Newell published several folksongs that had been collected from adults in oral tradition and which, he believed, substantiated the existence of native American balladry and supported his argument for the individual origin of ballads. Newell furthermore predicted that his publication of folksongs from a live tradition would "very likely ... bring to light a whole crop."[26]
Barry, of course, had read Newell's work[27] and the older scholar's points of view must have seemed much more realistic than were the prevailing Child-dominated literary orientations towards ballad-singing and ballad-making; consequently Barry conducted his studies according to concepts analogous to those suggested by the older man. Newell's early influence upon Barry became more apparent as tame passed and as Barry developed his own theories concerning folksong.
However, in 1903, when Barry first began collecting folksongs he carried with him more direct influence from two other scholars, who were neither folklorists nor native Americans: Kuno Francke and Leo Wiener, professors at Harvard under whom Barry had studied.[28] Both were Europeans (Francke was from Germany and Wiener from Poland); both conducted class1cal and medieval studies. Francke was generally acknowledged to be a German scholar of the "highest type" and was professor of the history of German culture;[29] his course, "History of the German Romantic Movement," deeply impressed young Barry.
Undoubtedly such a course included discussions of the Grimms' activities and Herder's ideas pertinent to nationalism and folk literature.[30] Wiener was a philologist, and professor of Slavic languages and literature; [31] with this orientation he conducted studies pertaining to the folklore and folksong of Slavic peoples, studies which included actual collecting from Russian Jews living in Boston.[32] Consequently, when Barry began his field research in 1903 he was following the tenets of at least two of his professors, Wiener and Kittredge. Significantly, however, Wiener's influence did not cease when Barry left Harvard, rather the two men later became friends and colleagues and collaborated on classical and medieval studies. A pparently Barry was especially attracted to Wiener's studies of literary effects on the development of language and tradition.
These studies corroborated Barry's later feeling that the idea of a purely oral folksong tradition, uninterrupted by print, was misleading, and that written and printed materials had for centuries affected oral tradition considerably.[33] It was under the influence of Professors Kittredge, Francke, and Wiener, then, that Barry seems first to have become interested in folklore, and especially folksong.
The first published results of Barry's sojourn among the folk, six versions of "Lord Randal" (including melodies for three of them), appeared late in 1903.[34] During the following year he announced the recovery of a lost version of "The Demon Lover";[35] he began publishing in earnest then, in 1905, the results of his two years of research whlch had been conducted mainly in Massachusetts (particularly the Cambridge-Boston area) and in Vermont (the towns of Newbury, Irasburg, Bradford, and East Corinth).[36] In introducing his collection of folksongs Barry stated:
"My researches.. . have been for the most part limited to a special field of activity- the gathering of the remains. . . of the older strata of the traditional folk-song, represented by the English and Scottish ballads."[37]
By concentrating thus upon Child ballads, Barry was, at this time, remaining well within the accepted procedures of ballad scholarship, which were of course Child-oriented and mainly supported by Kittredge and Gummere. However, Barry was already manifesting displeasure with such Child-invoked restraints. For example, he also published in 1905 along with nineteen Child ballads, four non-Child songs (including "Springfield Mountain" which Newell had published earlier), and these he termed "of interest to the student of folklore because of their "unique-ness" and "the authenticity of the tradition that has kept them alive."[38]
Furthermore, he was already attempting to "stretch" the Child canonin addition to his six "Lord Randal" ballads Barry printed a "version" unmentioned by Child- "Fair Nelson, my son"; [39] and, again, concerning the heretofore "lost version" recovered of "The Demon Lover," which he had from a rare broadside, he nboew added to the matter-of-factly stated that it "may eight v ersions in Professor Child's collection."[40]
Throughout his life, as a student of the folksong, Barry more and more resisted limitations imposed by the Child canon. As early as 1909 he wrote that a folksinger "makes no distinction between earlier and later ballad any good song with a good melody needs no further recommendation.... Why make a distinction, when the folk makes none?" [41] This democratlc view of balladry and folksong, which led him to study all kinds of folksong materials, Barry maintained throughout his life. He repeatedly stated that if songs were sung from memory by the folk (whom he called "a people" or "the plain folk," "the keepers of the tradition") [42] whether they be Child ballads or Tin Pan Alley ditties, they were folksongs, no matter their sources, or by what means they reached the singers:[43] 'the folk knows no ballad aristocracy; unconcerned about origins, it treats alike ballads old and new."[44]
Barry never deviated from this inclusive concept of folksong, and always insisted that "any definition by origin is beside the point."[45] As his research progressed, however, Barry did attempt to formulate a more theoretical definition of folksong, as his first definition was primarily a working definition promulgated by field research. Yet it is true that he never formulated a definitive, complete statement concerning folksong.
But that he should try at all was something of an anomaly for Barry's day especially since most folklore scholars thought that all worthwhile Anglo-American narrative folksong had already been identified in Child's 305 ballads; therefore, instead of defining their subject matter they seem to have spent all their working hours pondering the question of origins. No doubt they felt that success in discovering ballad origins would simultaneously define the material. Then too, they only dealt with an extant body of static material, already delineated by Child, whereas most of Barry's material was in dynamic circulation, neither collected nor defined.
Consequently, one of Barry's first modifications of his working definition was to incorporate into it the role of tradition: "folk-song is folksong solely by reason of its traditional currency among the singing folk"[46] and "it is tradition that makes the folk-song a distinct genre, both as to text and music."[47] He subsequently defined two kinds of tradition: a song could be traditional in terms of time, that is, it had "come down through the ages," "many generations of singers" had sung it; or it could be traditional in terms of space, that is, it was widely distributed - an unknown number of singers, over a large area, sang it. These two types of tradition- the first representing the tradition of the Child ballads, the second representing the tradition of native A merican ballads- Barry considered as "equally traditional." What was important was the effect of tradition, and the effects of the two singing traditions were the same:" The effect of tradition in space is to produce in terms of a plane, rather than of a line the same results for good or bad, that under similar conditions are due to tradition in time. A song need not be very old ... to pass through many hosts and acquirev ariations."[48]
Though Barry approved of the Finnish historic-geographic method, and thought he time and space factors in his definition can be seen as modifications of the Finnish formula, Barry nevertheless constructed his definition to enable him to work with dynamic processes rather than trace a hypothetical ur-form after the manner of the historic-geographic adherents. He said, "A folk song has texts, but no text, tunes but no tune."[49]
Barry illustrated his slightly modified definition, "a song traditionally sung from memory by the folk," with concrete, specific examples of folksongs. [n addition, he began to use the term "folksong" in a more theoretical context as referring to an "idea" (borrowing from W . P. Ker):
"Folk-song is in reality an idea, of which we can get but the process of actualization, traceable as a history"[50] [italics mine].
Presumably, the ballad is an idea; a ballad is an illustration of that idea. He believed that folksong themes were "ideas" which manifested themselves in various ways; he therefore felt that folksongs of identical themes should be classified under a single heading. Barry himself elaborated little on such a thematic classification, but his idea is certainly evident in the thematic catalogue of Anglo-American songs currently being produced by D. K. Wilgus who, perhaps more than any other contemporary folksong scholar, has recognized Barry's seminal contributions. It is also noteworthy that Professor Wilgus i including in his catalogue not only traditional ballads but also songs such as Tin Pan Alley ditties and broadside ballads, a position with which Barry would heartily agree.[51]
But in whatever context Barry examined folksong, as idea or illustration or by theme, he always saw it as a perpetually changing, alive phenomenon, affected by a dynamically evolving process. Barry never considered folksongs as static phenomena. He described the process as "one by which a simple event in human experience, of subjective interest, narrated in simple language, set to a simple melody, is progressively objectivated."[52] Furthermore, he contended that all folksong - whether it was a "sterling" Child ballad such as "Lord Randal" or a "sordid tale of gutter tragedy" such as "Frankie and Johnny"[53] was affected a like by the dynamic process of circulation. Therefore, he contended, how could a scholar, when defining folksong in terms of process, distinguish betweent he different types of folksong (of whicht he balladw as but one)
and allot to any one type the distinction of being "best"? Obviously he could not, and consequently Barry developed an extremely democratic and all-inclusive view of folksong which allowed him to study Child ballads, native American ballads, folk hymnody (including religious "experience" songs), Irish songs, "broadside detritus, shoddy homilies, sob ditties, ballads ... on which the ink was scarcely dry, [and] stage favorites old and new."[54]
Just as the same process could apply to the narrative content of all of these divergent types of folksong, so also did it apply to the entire folksong; Barry specified that "in studying the method of this process, the words and music of the ballad must be treated as a unit."[55] Concerning the unity of text and air Barry was particularly adamant:" Words constitute but one half of a folksong; the air is no less an essential part."[56] And he vigorously protected the rights of music against the textualists: "Music is the life of the ballad ... without music there would be no such thing as a traditional b allad."[57]
The first American folksong scholar to pronounce, and adhere to, the organic unity of ballad text and air, Barry was justifiably proud of his nascent postulations. In his last published article he wrote: "Since we cannot find that anyone anticipated us, we shall assume that the 'first shot' fired in the 'thirty years' war for the rights of ballad music,' was our statement in the Journal of American Folklore, 1905, that 'the words constitute but one-half of a folk-Song; the air is no less an essential part.' No one today would dispute this universallya dmittedf act."[58]
Before this "fact" was "universally a dmitted" however, Barry had been repeatedly critical of collectors (including Sir Walter Scott and Child) who ignored the music of folksongs and of editors who constricted traditional airs into rigid tempos.[59] The extent of his castigation is revealed in two separate book reviews, in one of which he called "tampering with the structure of folk-music" the "unpardonable sin" [60] and in the other stated: The editor is not very critical in his method. Under the head of old ballads are two Civil War songs, .... In the Introduction, ... he confuses Percy's Reliques with the Percy Folio Manuscript and calls F. E. (sic !) Child the "Englishman." But all this is not so sad as his sin of omission; he prints nor a note of ballad music. [61]
Barry's keen interest in the melodies of folksongs was the result of a number of influences. English folksong enthusiasts had been collncting and recording folk music for several years. Cecit Sharp had written that the words and the air of a folksong were both important; however, in practice he slighted the full relationship between text and tune. Newell also had given passing recognition to folksong music, for example, he presented a paper o n the melodles of Old English ballads at a local branch meeting of the American Folklore Society[62]a short time after Barry first stated publicly, in a Journal of American Folklore article, that music was as essentially a part of folksong as were words. And Professor Wiener, who was Barry's teacher, friend, and colleague, had taught languages at the Northeast Conservatory of Music before coming to Harvard.[63]
Another factor in Barry's championing of folk music was his personal orientation toward music- he appreciated its rarely beautiful melodies[64] and possessed the technical knowledge necessary to analyze them. One can appreciatet his all the more considering,a s one scholar-friend of Barry's suggests, that he was largely a self-taught musicologist; as a child he was not permitted to have the piano he so much desired, hence he had to teach himself music when he reached his majority. Evidently such a task was not overly difficult for Barry as he was seemingly a lways highly intelligent, even a precocious child; for example, he was an accomplished, botanist before age ten.[65]
Therefore, it is not surprising that Barry's musical accomplishments are sufficiently well known among ethnomusicologists that he is describeda s "a pioneer scholar in British- American f olk music."[66] However, the overriding influence upon Barry was always the experience of his field research, and from this work he concluded that "there are no recited ballads";[67] "all folk-ballads are sung, and always have been."[68] He was convinced that the folk not only shared his enjoyment and appreciation of folk music but that they also considered text and melody as one: "To a folk-singer, words and music together make the ballad he sings. The one is not felt to exist without the other.'[69]
"Recited ballads are the product of an accident. A folksinger may be unwilling to sing because of age or infirmity, or before strangers." [70] Late in his career (1933) Barry quoted Joseph Ritson who perceived "the organic unity of text and air" as far back as 1783:
A TUNE is so essentially requisite to perfect the idea which is, in strictness and propriety, annexed to the term SONG, in its most extensive sense, that every compilation of this nature which does not, together with the words or poetical part of the songs, likewise include their respective m elodies or tunes, in the characater appropriate to the expression of musical language, must necessarily be defective and incomplete.[71]
So its possible of course, that Barry had read Ritson many years earlier and had thus been influenced by him. However, no early reference to Ritson by Barry could be located and therefore it appears likely that Barry learned of Ritson later in life, after formulating his own theories. Consequently, even though others granted the importance of ballad tunes, theoretically at least, it was Barry who actually fought the textualists and won 'the thirty years war for the rights of ballad music.'
Barry wrote much concerning the collection and study of folk music. He emphasized that the melody for the entire song (all stanzas) should be recorded, just as every stanza o f the text should be recorded. "The air to a ballad consists of the music to which the whole text is sung," he wrote not of the form of the air to which a single stanza was sung. "The best folk-singers vary the rhythm and the tonal sequence of the air to fit the dramatic requirements of the texts "and even varied their performance of the whole ballad from time to time."[72] Barry acknowledged that recording folk-melodies by ear was difficult, but not impossible (Scott ando ther literary-minded predecessors" were not all by any means 'unable' to save the 'music') and he recommended (and used himself) "mechanical recording by dictaphone or electrical transcription" as the sine qua non of successful fieldwork.[73] Although it is possible that Kittredge could have prompted Barry to use recording equipment as he did John Lomax, it appears probable that Barry first used mechanical recording equipment following the example of British fieldworkers.[74]
And although in America Cecil Sharp did not use such equipment, it is here suggested that perhaps Barry used it in an endeavor to produce more meallingful data than did Sharp. Barry seems to have largely agreed with Sharp's dictates but not his practices, and it is not unlikely that Barry would use such equipment in conscious contradistinction to Sharp's usual field practice. In other words, Sharps insistence upon accuracy but his puzzling failure to use mechanical recorders, in effect, actually could have prompted Barry to use them. Use of such equipment was demanded by Barry's belief that the air of a ballad was extremely important as a means of preserving th e text: "Often it happens that persons who can sing a ballad of twenty or more stanzas, without a break, will be unable to recite, apart from the tune, more than three consecutive stanzas, and seldom these correctly"; for Barry, a well-preserved air was one indication of a ballad which was still alive and healthy.[75] In deed, he felt that the quality of the air might even determine whether a ballad lived or died:
"Not only have many ballads been kept alive by the rare beauty of their melodies; but it is not too much to affirm that certain ofthe best ballads . . . which have perished, failed to survive because they were set to melodies which were neither pleasing n or characteristic."[76]
Finally, Barry stressed that a study of folksong melodies was essential to the scholar who, in many cases, could discover the solutions to ballad problems only by an examination of the music.[77] That Barry's diligent efforts on behalf of folk music were extraordinarily fruitful is manifest in the many contemporary works dealing with folk music, perhaps the most conspicuous example being Bertrand H. Bronson's multivolume opus The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads.
Until 1909 Barry had confined himself to addressing ballad problems other than the one pertaining to ballad origins. He had published both Child and non-Child ballads in accord with his working definition of folksong and in the processh ad attempted to "stretch" the Child c anon, and he had fervently called for recognition of the unity of folksong words and music. However, he had not yet approached "the" problem of the day - the problem of ballad origins - and it was no doubt impossible for him to remaina loof indefinitely from the then raging feud over the communal theories championed by Gummere which maintained that ballads were composed spontaneously and collectively by a singing, dancing throng.[78] Therefore, in spite of his statement that "any definition of folksong by origin is beside the point,"[79] Barry entered the controversy and in an article about folk music, first briefly presented his theory of the origin of folksong, stating that it was a phenomenon of "individual invention plus communal re-creation."[80] Barry's ideas, of course, were not entirely without precedent. As earlier indicated, W. W. Newell had collected folksongs, including native American balladry, and had attacked the concept of the "closed account" in two Journal of American Folklore articles (1899-1900).[81]
Barry had read these articles as well as a third one by Newell, who, as a scholar holding individualist and diffusionist views, had outlined the comparative contributions of the individual and the community to the creation of folklore. In addition, Barry was also familiar with the work of Cecil J. Sharp, whose volume English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions is cited, significantly, in the very article with which Barry first introduced the term "individual invention plus communal re-creation." Still, if Barry's convinctions concerning the nature of folksong were never the result of armchair scholarship, neither we re they adopted blindly from another scholar; rather they inevitably grew out of his own New England field experience. Barry, then, agreed with certain ideas of Newell and Sharp because these ideas were empirically proven by his own research- not a surprising situation since Newell and Sharp(in contrast to Kittredge, Child, and Gummere) themselves collected in the field.
Barry based his theories of folksong origin on the assumption that ballad making was a living art of the present - not a dead one of the past - which was continuing by using the same processes which it had always used:
"The process of ballad-making has not changed, nor will it change....The subjects of our native ballads - simple events in human experience- are the usual ones in folksong, since people live, grow, love, and die, much as they did when the world was very young."[82]
Therefore, he reasoned, by ascertaining the facts concerning the conception and development of present-day folksongs, particularly native American ballads which could more easily be traced to their origins and their subsequent development pinpointed, the origins and developmental processes of all folksong could be discovered. Again, Barry echoed Newell who wrote:
"Theories of origin, whether of language or thought, are to be viewed with suspicion; the ethnologist and folk-lorist, confident that philosophical speculation can never enlighten his subject, but is certain to obscure and distort it, will keep himself as far as possible from any speculations which transgress the field of actual experience.... One fact is worth a thousand speculations." [83]
Barry subsequently applied his assumptions to field research and, finding the communal theory to be completely irreconcilable with the facts as he found t hem,[84] repudiated it and substituted his own hypothesis. He asserted that, in the first place, the original text of any one ballad (or folksong) was the creation of an individual author; furthermore, the ballad air was either created, like the text, by an individual composer, or more likely, borrowed from another song. This act he called "individual invention" and his description fit - maybe even the term itself - reflects comments made by Sharp in English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions:
The individual, then, inventst; he community selects.... Every line, every word of the ballad sprang in the first instance from the head of some individual, reciter, ministrel, or peasant; just as every note, every phrase of a folk-tune proceeded originally from the mouth of a solitary singer. Corporate action has originated nothing and can originate nothing. Communal composition is unthinkable. The community plays a part, it is true, but it is at a later stage, after and not before the individualh as done his work and manufactured the material. [85] [Italics mine]
To support his hypothesis of individual invention Barry published detailed studies of the historical development of several native American ballads, tracing each back to its emanating source, the pen of an individual author.[86] With some ballads Barry was successful in even naming the author or composer, but usually, as he himself admitted, "... the author of a folk song and the composer of the music are unknown."[87]
Expanding his theory, Barry hypothesized that at this particular stage in the ballad's life - the time of individual invention- the ballad was not yet a folksong; it was an "art song" because only the folk, or its many singers, could make the ballad a folk ballad; no single person could, least of all the original author. The process by which the ballad changes from an art song and becomesa folksong Barry called" communal re-creation," or "individual serial re-creation;"[88] that is, the art song, in the process of being transmitted throught he minds and voices of an indefinite number of individual folksingers, eventually became a folksong. (Barry criticized both Kittredge and his illustrious predecessor Child for not paying adequate attention to the cumulative e ffects of oral transmission upon folksong.)[89] Each folksinger, together with every other folksinger who sang the song in question, became a co-composer with the composer of the air and co-author with the author of the text.[90] Barry's concept of "communal re-creation" (and his concept of folksong as "process") is reminiscent of Sharp's statement that "the method of oral transmission is not merely one by which the folk-song lives; it is a process by which it grows and by which it is created."[91]
Barry's concept, however, although evolutionary, was not Darwinian as was Sharp's; moreover, Barry's included psychologicalc oncepts.[92] The creators of folksong were, then, the folksingers. Barry described these folksingers again and again as the "most passionate of individualists," as keepers of a tradition but never dominated by it: "They learn their songs, and in their interpretation of them do exactly what they please with them. The way a certain folksinger sings a certain song is, for him, the right way; it may be sung differently by other singers whose deviations from his way meet, now with kindly tolerance, now with bitter intolerance."[93]
The difference then, to Barry, between the latest song from a musical comedy and folksong, was that into the latter had gone not only the inventive efforts of the author and composer but also the "slowly transmitted re-creative influences of a larger number of folksingers, good, bad and indifferent."[94] That these "re-creative influences" did not always improve the text or air of the ballad, and that all folksingers did not succeed in being creative tradition bearers, Barry readily admitted. And although he often cited instances of poor ballad-making,[95] in general he emphasized the creative, artistic abilities of the folksinger, saying "communal re-creation ... improves as well as alters ballads"[96] and "all good folksong" is "superb art";[97] and he boasted concerning its peculiar qualities: "The inimitability of folk-song has long been the delight and the despair of poet and musician alike."[98]
He was particularly laudatory concerning folk music: "The percentage of tawdriness in folk-music is very small indeed. By far the larger part ... will be a monument to the critical discrimination and good taste of the singers who have transmitted it. Moreover, there will be ... more than a fair percentage of melodies, which, artistically judged, will be pronounced exquisitely beautiful." [99] At his opponents who considered folksong "artless" Barry directed the supreme rejoinder:" That the fiction of artless folksong should have endured so long is understandable in view of the fact that many of those who were writing learned treatises on it, including those who devised the theories of communal origins, never heard a folk singer sing in their lives.''[100]
But whether o r not the results of communal re-creation were always aesthetically pleasing, they were, Barry contended, highly predictable. To provet hat this was so, Barry devoted much of his research to showing that art songs, submitted to communal re-creation through time or space, would persistently develop (if they did not originally have them) certain attributes: impersonality of authorship; multiplicity of version (both as to words and melody); an incremental iterative style (both of words and music); unintroduced dialogue; and often a "leaping and lingering" effect. [101] Obviously these qualities were characteristics of the Child ballads; therefore Barry was saying that via the process of communal recreation, contemporary (or the so-called "vulgar" ballads) would eventually develop ( hough not uniformly or rapidly) the same attributes of the "popular" or Child ballads."
The ephemeral popular m elodies of the day ar e folk-melodies in the making. A composed tune of this sort, given time enough and folk-singerse nough, may remain in tradition so long, that is form and melodic structure will be more or less markedly changed" to that of the traditional ballad. [102] In these remarks Barry was no doubt influenced by the German scholar John Meier who observed that the development of a song in oral circulation d etermined its characteristics as a folksong, and whose book Kunstlieder im Volksmunde Barry had previously read. However, Meier used his concept in a purely negative sense, while Barry believed that such development could actually improve the song.[103]
To test his theory, Barry documented it with numerous examples, especially from American variants.[104] After thus ascertaining, at least partially, the results of communal recreation, Barry then asked why this process took place. His general conclusion was that ballad styles "arise by gradual development as a by product of the psychological laws of associationa nd memory."[105] Barry claimed as his own discovery the existence of such laws in folksinging, and maintained that in order to discover these laws at work not only songs but the singers themselves must be studied.[106]
Time and again he suggested research areas in which folklorist and psychologist might profitably work together in studying songs and singers: "Not the least fascinating of many possible theses is the opportunity to show how much of the re-creative process is due to chance, and how much to conscious artistry. We suspect the proportion of the latter may be larger than has been supposed." [107] In America, Barry's psychological approach to folksong was certainly unique and innovative in his day. That such an approach is valid has been established by several scholars, and is today perhaps b est exemplified in the works of Alan Lomax.
Near the end of Barry's life he adoptedt he German term zersingen to designate the re-creative process that was due to chance. Crediting Renata Dessauer, author of Das Zersingen (1928), with initial study concerning the psychological laws of traditional re-creation, Barry believed that Meier's book supplied" both textually and melodically, the clearest first-hande videnceof the working of these laws."[108] However, the "first critical writer to appraise zersingen at its just value in the transformation of art music into folk music" was not German but Irish - Patrick Weston Joyce in his book Ancient Irish Music (1872).[109]
Since Barry had read Joyce's book quite early in his career (before 1911)[110] it appears that he was conveniently attaching the German term zersingen to a re-creative process with which he had long been familiar. In addition to the re-creative process of zersingen, which was unconscious or only partly conscious, Barry believed that there was a re-creative process whichw as conscious, or which employed intentional alteration. The action of the two processes was "never quite the same in kind or in degree in any two instances"; it depended" largely on psychological factors; the operation of psychological as of modified memory which can be demonstrated to exist, but concerning the operation of which we are only very imperfectly informed."[111] Contrary to most folksong scholars Barry did not seem to place a necessarily negative connotation to the concept of zersingen; it was merely one process of communal re-creation, and as such could affect the ballad for better or for worse, depending upon the skill, or lack of skill, of the folksinger.[112]
Describing the process of zersingen Barry wrote about the folksinger: The song he sings is not his own by right of authorship, but his version of the song is to him the only correct one. Every other version is wrong.... At the same time the folk-singer is equally sure that he sings a song learned from tradition exactly as his predecessor sang it, and never varies his performance. In a large proportion of cases, this is doubtless true. Yet there are other factors which make variation inevitable. There is in the folk-singer the latent creative artist, who will re-create what he has learned: there are the tricks which memory will play. Changes in the text and air of a ballad, often infinitesimal, but at times appreciable even to the layman, w ill emerge a s expressionso f the singer's mood for the time being. Some may be permanent, others evanescent. The folksinger will not be aware of the changes,e speciallyw ith respect to the music.[113]
But whether he was studying zersingen, or conscious re-creative processes, or the psychological laws governing both, Barry always emphasized the necessity of field research, of going to the folk and learning from them:
"the final solution of the many problems that together make up the 'ballad problem' of the critics, problems which are hardly fewer than the ballads themselves, depends on the extent of our knowledge of the 'way of the folk,' or rather 'ways,' with its traditional songs.''[114]
Viewing w ith disdaln the "armchair" approach of many of his colleagues, Barry outlined three areas of research essential for a critical study of any currently traditional ballad:( 1) the folklore background of the ballad, including both the ballad's relationship or alignment with other versions, or with ballads of similar theme, and ancient folk motifs the ballad may share with other genres of folklore; (2) "the origin of the ballada s the artistic expression, through words and music, of a particular folk-complex," including "the factual basis, if any, of the plot," the locality in which it took place, and the routes through which it has been diffused; and (3) "the re-creation of the ballad of tradition," including "the development of textual-melodic versions and version-groups" (Barry criticized Child for not paying adequate attention to exact texts of ballads in their various languages), [115] " the interpretation of the psychological laws, in conformity with which the multiplicity of versions and the 'ballad styles' of text and air have grown up," and the relative contribution of conscious and unconscious authorship in the re-creation of popular traditions.[116] By consistently applying these three areas of research to individual ballad studies, and especially to comparative studies of ballad variants, Barry believed that solutions to ballad problems could be found.[117] He himself conducted several such studies and was in the process of completing an exhaustive, international study of "The Twa Sisters" when he died.
As has been stated earlier, Barry became convinced as a young man that the concept of the "closed canon" (that there existed exactly 305 traditional ballads) was completely untenable and irreconcilable with the facts. Unfortunately, he became caught in the complexities of the dogmas and diatribes of his age, and his articles are replete with ironic examples of his paradoxically accepting the concept of the closed canon in order to enlarge upon it. For example, having collected some ballads from singing Irishmen, and believing these singers to play a considerable part in the overall preservation of traditional ballads and songs in general, Barry desired that Irish versions of the Child ballads be included in the august canon. In arguing that Irish popular songs (not only English and Scottish) deserved to be considered traditional ballads, he was forced to accept the de facto existence and supremacy of the Child canon: "The ancient British ballad, in the strictest sense of the word,- that is, including only the three hundred and five items in Professor Child's English and Scottish P opular B allads,- is far better known to Irish folk-singers than has hitherto been supposed.''[118]
The outstanding example of Barry's attempts to "stretch" the Child canon, thereby falling into the trap of accepting it, was his creation of the term "secondary" ballad during the Child-chase race which so consumed American folksong scholarship duringt he first three decades of this century. This unfortunate term which has stubbornly persisted in folksong literatureh as seriously misrepresented Barry as a scholar, and consequentlyn eeds to be considered carefully.[119]
Barry's "secondary ballad" concept grew out of the competitive race for Child ballads which began soon after the appearance of the Child collection and which, as early as 1912, was alluded to by Barry. [120] During that race Barry apparently became irritated over the appearance of numerous statistical tabulations,[121] mainly from the South, which without fail, indicated that the North was inferior ballad ground (and also, by implication criticized Barry for collecting other-than-Child ballads).
Subsequently Barry entered he race to defend not only the reputation of his native New England, but also his own reputation as a collector and scholar. ln order to compete successfully in such a race, Barry had to adopt the guidelines of his opponents, guidelines which were dictated by the Southerner's concept of the ballad, as described by C. Alphonso Smith: "That there are three hundred and five English and Scortish ballads, neither more nor less, was first authoritatively e stablished by Professor Francis J. Child in his monumental work ... The English and Scottish P pular Ballads."[122] A long these lines, then, the ballad race between the North and South was conducted.
Both areas were preparing to publish their results when, in 1928, Arthur Kyle Davis of Virginia presented a paper at Harvard (Barry was in attendance) which opened the door for questionable "Child" retrievals. [123] Then, the following year Davis published Traditional Ballads of Virginia (significantlb eforeB arry BritishB allads from Maine)[124] and, no doubt to Barry's amazement and chagrin, the collection contained several questionable texts (Barry pointed out three of these in his review of the book), [125] some of them openly admitted to be dubious. Thus the entire question of versions and variants was seemingly left open to editorial interpretation.[126]
At that time Barry's b ook was almost ready for publication and although there is no documented proof about what was in Barry's mind, it is strongly suspected that, using Davis' book as license and in order to compete favorably, he hurriedly appended eight of his variants to his supposedly Child-only collection and termed them "secondary" ballads, ballads "derived "from those in the Child collection. In any case, Barry's definition and choice of the term "secondary" was extremely unfortunate. In attempting to insert new discoveries into the Child canon under t he designation" secondary, "Barry was only further underscoring the primacy or superiority of the 305 (as he had done earlier with Irish folksongs); the "secondary" classification did not expand the canon but rather more tightly sealed it off. In addition, Barry's own definition of "secondary," as "ballads derived from Child," cannot conclusively be applied to seven of the eight ballads, a situation causing much puzzlement to later scholars.
The difficulty, of course, lay in Barry's cursory definition. From his fieldwork Barry had concluded that certain older ballads (Child pieces) had either been retold in later times or had inspired offshoots, the resulting song retaining the same basic story, but in quite a different style and with different detail. These pieces which sometimes superseded the Child ballads in oral tradition, Barry called secondary ballads; he considered them separate from the Child ballads (they were not the Child ballads living on) and, under normal circumstances, Barry resisted strongly any efforts to associate them with the title of the older piece.[127] But for Davis' inclusion of questionable texts, Barry probably would never have appended his so-called "secondary" variants. The whole issue of secondary ballads was certainly not in the tradition of Barry's best scholarship, and has only served to becloud his reputation as a scholar.
A second concept which also developed during the heat of the Childchase race consequently must be scrutinized carefully: Barry's statement that "illiteracy is a negative factor in ballad tradition; it distinctly inhibits the chance of survival."[128] This statement, suggested in the "Acknowledgments" to British Ballads from Maine and formulated in its entirety in the thirties, directly contradicted Barry's earlier, though admittedly romantic, admonition to collect folksong from "the people who cannot read a note of music, and who neither know nor care more for the lore of scales, modes, or technique than do the winged minstrels of wood and meadow, whose melodies alone rival theirs.''[129] Barry's change of mind, according to his own testimony, was based on data collected during fieldwork for Child ballads; for example, Barry found that Maine and Vermont, with a population about one-half that of Virginia, and a literacy rate approximately three and one-half times higher, had a total of 72 Child ballad retrievals. which was exactly one and one-half times greater than the Virginia total of 48.[130]
Consequently his conclusion from such evidence was that ballads survived more profusely among the literate and that "the favorable results of tradition are in direct ratio to the intelligence and literacy of the singers.''[131] (This noted that state-wide s tatistics are misleading when used to support generalities about individuals and smaller samples of data.) To what extent that judgment was influenced by his irritation with the Southerners Smith and Davis is, at this point, impossible to say. Most definitely, though, he overstated his argument when he said that "no greater mistake was ever made than to suppose that ballads survive best among the most illiterate and ignorant.''[132]
Coupled with this issue- the effect of literacy u pon ballad re-creation was the problem of the effect of print upon ballad re-creation. In the course of his research, Barry had often utilized printed sources. In fact, he did a great deal of his collecting through ballad inquiries printed in newspapersin reply to which he received many written texts and melodies. [133] Barry then followed up the most promising of these letters with personal visits (they must have been numerous since his folksong collection includes 170 dictaphone cylinders).[134] Barry also recovered many ballads from broadsides and songbooks (unknown, he said, by Child) and even from magazinesa nd other printed sources.[135]
E arly in his career, it is true, Barry differentiated between tradition which was "pure"- unbroken by print - and that which was "contaminated"or interrupted by print,[136] and indicated that the latter was inferior. By 1911, however, he had elected to look at "contaminated" ballads with new eyes. In the manuscript for an article to be printed in the Journal of American Folklore - later entitled "The Ballad of the Broomfield Hill"[137]- he reproduced the text of that ballad from a printed songbook and then took the opportunity to discuss "direct" (his new term for what he previously called "pure") and "interrupted" (his new term for what he previously called "contaminated") tradition. He wrote:
The problem of direct tradition and interrupted tradition is rather more complex than has been supposed. Though one naturally expects to find, in song-books and on broadsides, such versions of popular ballads as have fallen under the influence of Grub St., it is nevertheless true, one not infrequently meets with a folk-singer's version, untouched by the pen of the shoddy minstrel. Furthermore the effect of print in any case is but to be understood as restoring for the moment, the conditions of subjectieriem pulse under w hich every ballad came to be. Once in circulation, however, the broadside version, whether or not representing pure tradition, is subject to the same process of objectivation which, applied in the first instance to the archetype, produced the phenomena of communal recreation, namely, impersonality of authorship, multiplicity of version, and parallelism of expression.
Folk-song is a history: the objectivation of a subjective product. The entrance of print into this history has made of it a Nietzschean circle of eternal recurrence. [138] [I talics mine] Unfortunately, at that time, Barry must have felt that folksong scholarship was not yet ready f or such a drastic d eparture from traditional ideas, and consequently he published the journal article on "Broomfield Hill" omitting the above statements. As an alternative, he chose merely to mention various facets of the above theories in succeeding articles.[139]
Generally, by 1913, Barry was consistently writing that "no ballad ...ever died of printer's ink,"[140] denying, by ignoring, the alleged superiority of "pure" ballad tradition. The one outstanding exception to this point of view appeared,s ignificantlyi,n the "Acknowledgments" to the British Ballads from Maine (Barry's "answer" to the South's allegation that New England was inferior ballad ground) in which he stated: "We know, because no libraries possess any printed texts from which they could have been devised, that these folk-songs of New England are as purely traditional a s those that have b een r ecorded i n the Southern Highlands"- another of several indications that Barry was not his usual objective self duringt hat regrettabler ace. To particlpate he yielded, necessarily, to the professed tenets of the Southerners, who initiated the race.
In his articles in the Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast (1930-1937), Barry discussed publicly, in detail, his ideas of twenty years before.[141] Contaminated tradition w as now termed "reinforced" tradition; print was "an accident in the history of a folk-song" but a text, so stabilized, would not remain static for long, rather it would undergo the same sort of changes as had the original text of the ballad. No one knew how many t mes the history of a particular ballad had repeated itself, that is, been re-created by the folk, then rephrased by a poet with or without originality, printed, then re-created by the folk once more, ad infinitum.
Thus, the "keeperso f the tradition "included" even b allad-printers" who constituted the "folk" in its widest sense. Perhaps retaining sentiments that "pure" tradition was still more desirable, or perhaps only trying to convince the scholarly "die-hards," Barry pointed out that the great majority of ballad airs were never printed for popular consumption and so were never stabilized; therefore the folksingers had been continually re-creating the melodies of folksong, and for the music there was "no question of anything but pure and 'unspoiled' tradition.'[142]
Ironically, in the final analysis Barry a pparently hoped that print could save folksongs. Fearing the "worst that cinema and radio" could offer and believing that the days of folksong were "numbered", he desired t hat books, such as Flanders' A Garland of Green Mountain Song and his own British Ballads from Maine, check the "downward revision in popular taste. [143] Fittingly, as though commemorating his memory and last hopes concerning folksong, The Maine Woods Songster, containing 50 traditional texts and airs, was published posthumously "to the end that the vanishing wood songs of Maine be preserved to be sung by sundry and all who like to sing.''[144]
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
---------------------------
Footnotes:
1 A version of this paper was delivered at the aual meeting of the American Folklore Society in Austin, Texas, November 17, 1972.
2 D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-AmericanF olksongS cholarshipS ince 1898 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1959), p. 282.
3 Ibid., p. 244.
4 Bulletin of the Folksong Society of the Northeast, with introduction by Samuel P.
Bayard (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1960), see Introduction.
5 According to Kenneth S. Goldstein and Tristram P. Coffin, both of the University
of Pennsylvania, Barry had an independent income. Although he was an ordained
minister he never served a church full time, but he did occasional preaching (he was an accomplished orator); however, these sporadic ministerial activities were not salaried. One could say, therefore, that Barry's vocation was that of a folklorist and his avocation involvedr eligious-oriented activities. It is interesting to note that one of his collaborators, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, was married to an Episcopal clergyman. See "Eckstorm, Fannie Pearson H ardy, "in The National Cyclopaedia o f American Biography, vol. 36 (New York: James T. White), p. 199. Some of the information in this paper (especially of a more personal nature) concerning Barry was obtained by interview with Mrs. Phillips Barry of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Barry's widow, now 94 years of age; I am very grateful for her time and her insights.
6. Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 139.
7. The influence of these six scholars upon the young BalTy will be more fully discussed later in the paper.
8. See the Folklore Arehives, University of Pennsylvania, wherein are housed the papers of the Ameriean Folklore Soeiety. Although Barry did join the American Folklore Soeiety, he did not join the Folk-Song and Dance Soeiety.
9. See Journal of American Folklore 25 (1912): 375; 26 (1913): 377; 29 (1916): 567; 32 (1919): 536; 35 (1922): 207; 39 (1926): 210. Hereafter eited as JAF.
10. That Barry was a member of the Ameriean Folklore Society until his death is shown by the following notiee: "The loss of two of our members through death was noted with regret: ... Phillips Barry, distinguished folklorist. A committee of G. Herzog and A. H. Gayton was appointed to frame a resolution to be sent to Mrs. Barry." See JAF 51 (1938): 102.
11. Herzog did the musical notations for some of the ballads in Barry's book British Ballads from Maine, and also addressed t he Folk-Song Society of the Northeast upon oecasion. See "Acknowledgments,"British Ballads f rom Maine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), p. xii; and Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast, no. 8 (1934): 2. Bayard was eonsiderably younger than Barry and was influeneed by him; after the older man's death, Bayard wrote the introduetion to the reprint of the Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast, hereafter cited as BFSSNE. Many of the points made in this paper were later explicitly corroborated by Professor Bayard in a lengthy and very helpful personal letter to this writer; I here wish to express my gratitude to Professor Bayard.
12 For example, Barry frequently referred to Belden in article footnotes, either eiting works by Belden or stating that Belden had sent him eopies of a partieular song (Belden taught and eolleeted in Missouri); see Barry, "An Ameriean Homiletie Ballad," Modern Language Notes 28 (1913), passim; "The Transmission of Folk Song," JAF27 (1914): 67; "William Carter, the Bensontown Homer," JAF 25 (1912): 164. Belden also frequently mentioned Barry, either in articles or their footnotes. For example, Belden's artiele "Balladry in America," JAF 25 (1912), has the following footnote coneerning the entire paper: "This paper in its original form was read as the President's address at the Annual Meeting of the American Folk-Lore Soeiety in Washington, Deeember 28, l911. As here printed, however, it has been earefully revised and eonsiderably supplemented by Mr. Phillips Barry, to whom the author is indebted for much of the bibliographicalm atter both in the text and in the notes" (p. 1).
13. Wilgus, p. 175. Apparently, Barry did not influence Pound much either; in her Poetic Origins and the B allad (New York: Russell & Russell, 1921) she mentions Barry only in passing and lists him as among the "leading collectors" (p. 193).
14 See biographical sketch of Mrs. Eckstorm as referred to in note 5; also Wilgus, p. 177.
15 Most of the materials in British Ballads from Maine were the result of four and one half years of collecting by Mrs. Eckstorm and Mary Winslow Smyth. Barry contributed only about twenty-two texts. However, the scholarship incorporated into the book, in the form of headnote articles, was solely Barry's, and nearly every note is a cogent study of both text and tune, including comparative examples; see Wilgus, pp. 202, 243.
16 For example, Barry wrote the critical notes for Flanders' New Green Mountain Songster (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939).
17. Wilgus, pp. 176-177; BFESNE no. 1 (1930): 1.
18. See Barry's article on early Greek music, "Greek Music," The Masical Quarterly 5 (1919): 578-613; see Bayard's Introduction to BFSSNE; Herzog wrote that a "large share of his activity was devoted to classical and medieval studies," in "Phillips Barry," JAF 51 (1938): 439. Barry was proficient in Latin and Greek, and Bayard states that it was "a matter of course" for Barry to learn a new language in order to study an international ballad.
19 Phillips Barry, "American Folk Music," Southern Folklore Quarterly 1 (1937)3: 0.
20 Phillips Barry, "The Part of the Folk Singer in the Making of Folk Balladry," in The Critics and the Ballad, ed. MacEdward Leach and Tristram P. Coin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), p.61. The "one" ballad problem of the day was, of course, the question of ballad origins. However, Barry did not agree that there was only one ballad problem; he thought there were many.
21 Ibid.
22 Francis J . Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, e d. George L. Kittredge and Helen Child Sargent (Cambridge, Mass., 1904), p. xiii.
23 See Wilgus' discussion of the communal school of ballad origins and their opponents, the literary school (ChapterI ). Although differing on many points, members of both schools believed the ballad to be essentially a thing of the past, a dead art; they confined their attention to ballads selected by older British collectors and scholars, plus Child, and largely ignored the processes of oral tradition and the living examples of balladry existing around them.
24. For a succinct review of the source of the ideas of these early twentieth-century American scholars, see Ellen J. Stekert, "Tylor's Theory of Survivals and National Romanticism: Their Influence on Early American Folksong Collectors," Southern Folklore Quarterly 32 (1968): 209-236; and Wilgus, Chapters I and II.
25. Wilgus, p. 153.
26. W. W. Newell, "Early American Ballads," JAF 12 (1899): 242.
27. See Barry's references to Newell's articles in "Traditional Ballads in New England," JAF 18 (1905): 295; and "Native Balladry in America," JAF22 (1909): 366.
28. Herzog, p. 439; see also Maria Leach, ed., Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore and Mythology, vol. 1 (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1949), p. 116.
29. National Cyclopaedia, vol. 34, p. 1948; and Who Was Who in America, vol. 1
(Chicago: A. N. Marquis Company, 1942), p. 421.
30. Herzog, p. 439. That Francke was especially interested in Herder is illustrated by the fact that in 1928 he publisheda n articlee ntitled "Weltbuergertum von Herder bis Nietzsche" (see above article in National Cyclopaedia)N. ote also Barry'sr eferencet o Nietzsche, p. 35 of this paper.
31 Who Was Who in America, vol. 1, p. 1343.
32 Wiener was particularly interested in Yiddish folklore and folksong; see references to his work in JAF 19 (1906): 87 ("Folklore of the Russian Jews in Boston"), Francis B. Gummere, The Popular Ballad (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1907), p. 294 (Yiddish Literature), and JAF 27 (1914): 77 ("Popular Poetry of the Russian Jews" -these were folksongs).
33 Herzog, p. 439; personal correspondence, Professor Samuel Bayard.
34. Phillips Barry," The B allad of Lord Randal in New England," JAF 16 (1903): 258- 264.
35. Phillips Barry, "The Ballad of the Demon Lover," Modern Language Notes 19 (1293084.) :
36. Phillips Barry, "Traditional Ballads in New England"; Barry listed the sources for the texts so that the geographical areas in which he collected can be ascertained; also Personal interview, Mrs. Phillips Barry.
37. Ibid. p. 1- 23
38. Phillips Barry," Some Traditional Songs, "JAF 18 (1905): 49.
39. Barry, "Lord Randal," pp. 262-263.
40. Barry, De mon Lover,"p . 238.
41 Phillips Barry, ;'Irish' Come-all-ye'ss,"J AF 22 (1909): 386-387.
42 See Barry, ;'Part of the Folk Singer," p. 59; "King John and the Bishop,s' JAF 21 (1908): 57; and BFSSNE no. 5 (1933): 6. Barry's definition of folk seems to be accepted by many scholars even today. For example, see Evelyn E. Gardner and Geraldine J. Chickering, eds., Ballads and Songs of Michigan (Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1967), p. 15, where the authors accept Barry's definition, interpreting i t as " 'the common people,' those characterized b y Carl Sandburg a s 'We, the people."'
43 BFSSNE no. 5 (1933): 4; no. 10 (1935): 24.
44 BFSSNE no. 6 (1933): 8.
45 Barry, "William Carter," p. 159.
46 Ibid-, pp. 159-164-
47 BFSSNE no. 1 (1930): 2
48 Ibid.
49 Barry, "Part of the Folk Singer," p. 71. For Barry's comments concerning the historic-geographicsc hool see BFSSNE no. 3 (1931): 12, and no. 5 (1933): 20.
50 Phillips Barry, "Irish Folk Songs," JAF 24 (1911): 333; see W. P. Ker, "On the History of the Ballads, 1100-1500, "reprint from Proceedings of the British Academy 4 (1910): 22, 26.
51 D. K. Wilgus, "A Type-Index of Anglo-American Traditional Narrative Songs," Journal of the Folklore Institute, 7 (1970): 161-176.
52 Barry, "Homiletic Ballad," p. S.
53 BFSSNE no. 2 (1931): 20.
54 Barry, "Irish 'Come all-ye's'," pp. 386-387; "Homiletic Ballad," p. 5; BFSSNE no. 4 (1932): 19; no. 6 (1933): 20-21; no. 10 (1935): 24.
56 Barry, "Homiletic Ballad," p. 5.
56 BaX, "TraditionalB aHadsi n New Fngland,"p . 124.
57 BFSSNE no. 1 1(1936)4:.
58 Barry, "American Folk Nlusic," p. 38.
59 See, for example, Ibid., p. 37; BFSSNE no. 3 (1931): 15; no. 5 (1933): 4; no. 10
(1935): 24.
60 BFSSNE no. 10 (1935): 24, the book reviewed is Mellinger Edward Henry, Songs Sung in the Southern Appalachians (L ondon, 1934).
61 BESSNE no. 3 (1931): 22, the book reviewed is Harvey H. Fuson, Ballads of the Kentucky Highlands (London, 1931).
62 See JAF 19 (19M): 87.
63 Who Was Who in America, Vol. 1, p. 1343.
64 For example, see Barry's remarks about folk music in "Some Aspects of Folk Song," JAF25 (1912): 274.
66 Personal correspondence, Professor B ayard, and personal interview, Mrs. Phillips Barry.
66 Bruno Nettl, Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology (N ew York: The Free Press, 1964), p. 49.
67 Phillips Barry, "Folk Music in America," JAF22 (1909): 77.
68 Barry, "William Carter," p. 164.
69 Barry, "Folk Music in America," p. 77.
70 Barry, "William Carter," p. 164.
71 Quoted in BFSSNE no. 5 (1933): 3-
72 BeSSNE no. 5 (1933): 4
73 BFSSNE no. 10 (1935): 24.
74 Personal interview, Mrs. Phillips Barry.
75 Barry, "Traditional B allads in New England,"p p. 123-124.
76 Barry, "Some Aspects of Folk Song," p. 282.
77 BFSSNE no. 3 (1931): 13. Barry's stature as a musicologist is attested to by Marion Bauer: "Enough was written about the theory of Greek music for present-day musicologists to reconstruct the system, although examples of the actual music are rare. Four scores are mentioned by Phillips Barry..." in Music Through the Ages, (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1946), second edition, p. 35. Bauer was a professor of music at New York University. Herzog, another musicologist, appropriately w as appointed by the American Folklore Society to draft a resolution to Mrs. Barry at the death of her husband (see note 10). Herzog also wrote Barry's memoxial notice. And finally, Bayard, another musicologist, wrote the Introduction to the reprinted edition of the BFSSNE, and, after Barry's death, transcribed the tunes collected in many of Barry's 170 dictaphone cylinders (see Barry Collection at Harvard).
78. MacEdward Leach later facetiously referred to the communal theory as "the marshmallow theory" - ballads were composed while everyone sat around a bonfire toasting marshmallows (personal anecdote).
79 Barry, "William Carter," p. 159.
80 Barry, "Folk Music in America," p. 76.
81 W, W. Newell, "Early American Ballads," JAF 12 (1899) and 13 (l900):passim; see also "Individual and Collective Characteristics in Folk-lore," JAF 19 (1906): 1-15.
82 Barry, i'William Carter," pp. 167-168; "Native Balladry in America," p. 372. Barry modified his statement only to the effect that American folksongs were born in a stage of decadence while folksongs of the past were born in the "golden age" of folksinging.
83 Newell, "Individuala nd Collective Characteristics,"p p. 9-10.
84 For Barry's use of Shaker music to disprove the communal theory, see BFSSNE
no. 1(1930): 5-6.
86 Cecil J. Sharp, EnglishF olk-Song:S ome Conclusions( London: Simpkin & Company,
1907), p. 31. Barry refers to Sharp's book in the same article in which he Erst
introduces the term "individual invention plus communal re-creation," see "Folk
Music in America," p. 77.
86 For example, "William Carter," passim; "Part of the Folk Singer," pp. 68-71; and
BFSSNEno. 7 (1934): 4-5.
87 Barry, "Part of the Folk Singer," p. 68.
88 See BFSSNE no. 5 (1933): 4-6; no. 8 (1934): 17; "American Folk Music," p. 44;
and "Part of the Folk Singer," p. 71.
89 Personal correspondence, Professor Samuel Bayard.
90. BFSSNE no. 7 (1934): 18; and "Part of the Folk Singer," p. 71.
91. Quoted in Wilgus, p. 61.
92 Ibid., p. 69-
93 Barry, "American Folk Music," p. 30; also see BFSSNE no. 5 (1933): 4-6; no. 9 (1935): 24; no. 11 (1936): 4; and The Maine Woods Songster (Cambridge, Mass: The Powell PrintingC ompanyX1 939), p. 5.
94 Phillips Barry, "The Origin of Folk Melodies," JAF23 (1910): 445.
95 See, for example, BFSSNE no. 6 (1933): 10; no. 8 (1934): 19; and no. 3 (1931): 9.
96. Barry, "The Transmission of Folk Song," p. 74.
97. BFSSNE no. 11 (1936):24; see also Barry's remarks in no. 1 (1930):2; no.2 (1931): 7; no. 3 (1931): 9; no. 10 (1935): 19; "Some Aspects of Folk Song," p. 280; and The Main Woods Songster, p. 6.
98. Bary, "Origin of Folk Melodies," p. M0; see also "Folk Music," p. 76.
99. Barry, British Ballads from Maine, p. nii; see also "Folk Music in America," p. 72.
100. Barry, "Part of the Folk Singer," p. 76.
101. Barry detailed many specific results of communal re-creation, especially as they pertained to ballad melodies, e.g. see BFSSNE no. 12 (1937): 2-6; this article was to have been continued but never was, owing to Barry's sudden death. For other examples of communal re-creation see "Native Balladry in America," p. 373; "Irish Folk Song," p. 341; "William Carter," passim, BFSSNEno. 2 (1931): 20 and no. ll (1936): 4, 11. See also "The Ballad of the Broomfield Hill" as it appears in Harvard's Barry collection, and Wilgus, p. 71.
102 Barry, "Origin of Folk Melodies," p. 441.
103. See Barry's reference to Meier, ibid.; also see Gordon H. Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford: ClarendonP ress, 1932),p p. 166-168,f or a discussion of Meier and Barry.
104. See note 101.
105. Barry, "Arnerican F olk Music,"p . 44.
106 Barry, "Part of tl.e Folk Singer," p. 75.
107 BFSSNE no. 6 (1933): 21. It is interesting to note that Barry's strongest and most frequent statements concerning psychological approaches to folksong came after his marriage; his bride held a Harvard Ph.D. in psychology.
108 BFSSNEno. 3 (1931): 10. Although Barry did not believe the eSects of zersingen were always negative, he did hold that "folksongs have their span of life" beyond which they were presumably fragmented; in this much he agreed with Meier. See BFSSNE no. 1 (1930): 2.
109 Barry, "American Folk Music," p. 32.
110 Barry, "Irish Folk Song," p. 332.
111. Barry, "American Folk Music," p. 39.
112 Barry did, at times, use zersingen to indicate a fragmented text or air, but, according to the last article he published, "American Folk Music," this was not his primary usage.
113 BFSSNE no. 5 (1933): 4
114. BFSSNE no. 1(1930) : 3
115 Personal correspondence, Professor Samuel Bayard.
116 BFSSNEno. 3 (1931): 11-14 and no. 8 (1934): 24. See also Barry's comments in no. 1 (1930): 11; no. 3 (1931): 20; and no. 11 (1936): 2-4.
117. BFSSNE no. 8 (1934): 17; see also Phillips Barry, "Fair Florella," American Speech 3 (1927-28): 446.
118. Barry, "Irish 'Come-all-ye's,"' p. 378.
119. Having elsewhere analyzed in depth Barry's concept of the secondary ballad - "A Second Look at the Secondary Ballad" - I will only briefly discuss it here.
120 Barry, ;William Carter," p. 158.
121. See especially "The Traditional Ballad in the South," JAF27 (1914): 55-66; "The Traditional Ballad in the South During 1914," JAF28 (1915): 199-203; "The Traditional Ballad in America," JAF47 (1934): 64-75; Reed Smith, South Carolina Ballads (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), pp. 169-174; Arthur Kyle Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), ppe 1-56.
122. C, Alphonso Smith, "Ballads Surviving in the United States," The Musical Quarterly 2 (1916): 109.
123. Arthur Kyle Davis, "Some Problems of Ballad Publication," The Musical Quarterly 14 (l928): pp. 283-296.S ee especiallyh is discussiono f "artificial geography" and "academic versus popular interest."
124 Note that the bibliography in Davis' Traditional Ballads of Virginia does not list British Ballads from Maine, but that the bibliography in British Ballads from Maine does list Traditional Ballads of Virginia.
125 BFSSNEno. 1(1930)1: 1-12.
126 Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, passim, but see especially p p. 4, 11-12, 537.
127 Personal correspondence, Professor Samuel Bayard.
128 BFSSNE no. 7 (1 934): 1 8-1 9; also no. 1 (1930): 2.
129 Barry, ;;Irish Folk Song," p. 332
130 BFSSNE no. 7 (1934): 18-19.
131 BFSSNE no. 1 (1930): 2
132 Ibid.
133 Harvard's Barry collection contains numerous instances of this procedure.
134 See Bayard's" Explanatory Note" (p. 1) to Barry's folksong collection at Harvard.
For an example of a contact by letter followed by a personal visit, see BFSSNE no. 2
(1931): 5.
135 See Harvard collection for Barry's description of his collection; also "Traditional Ballads in New England," for sources of songs.
136 Barry," Traditional Ballads in New England,"p . 124.
137 Compare the article as it appeared in JAF24 (1911): 14-15, with the manuscript in Harvard's Barry collection.
188 From manuscript in Barry Collection at Harvard.
189 For example, see "The Transmission of Folk-Song," p. 67.
140 Barry, "Homiletic Ballad," p. 5-
141 Though forceful in his views, Barry was always open to whatever facts the empirical evidence had to oSer, and he would even drastically reverse himself if such evidence dictated it. Personal interview, Mrs. Phillips Barry.
142 See BFSSNEno. 1 (1930): 2-3; no. 5 (1933): 5-6; no. 6 (1933): 10; no. 11 (1936): 4.
143 BFSSNE no. 9 (1935): 24; "Folk Music in America," p. 72.
144 Barry, The Maine Woods Songster, p. 5.