Course material

1. Read Article and Answer Questions related to Music
After reading Stanley Hyman’s (found in FILES) article “The Child Ballad in America”
answer the following questions:
What is Hyman’s argument regarding the nature of change in ballad text between the “Old”
and “New” World Versions?
The House Carpenter Ballad was also known in Scotland as The Daemon Lover (text of both
versions are attached). After comparing these versions, do you agree with Hyman’s claims
regarding ballad change in the US? Use evidence from the song to support your perspective.
Requirements: Half to 1 page
The Child Ballad in America: Some Aesthetic CriteriaAuthor(s): Stanley Edgar
HymanSource: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 70, No. 277 (Jul. - Sep., 1957), pp. 235-
239Published by: American Folklore SocietyStable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/538322Accessed: 24-05-2018 20:43 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-
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athttp://about.jstor.org/termsAmerican Folklore Society is collaborating with JSTOR to
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THE CHITTL) BATTAD IN AMERICA: SOME AESTHETIC CRITERIA BY STANLEY EDGAR
HYMAN OST of the attention that has been paid to the words of the Child ballad in America
has been scholarly; I should like to propose some critical con- siderations. The most
comprehensive study we have had in the field, Tris- tram P. Coffin's critical bibliography,
The British Traditional Ballad in North America (Philadelphia, x950), is an invaluable work,
but it is confined by its nature to descrip- tion and classification primarily in terms of plot,
which John Crowe Ransom would call poetic structure rather than texture. In his
introductory essay, "A Description of Variation in the Traditional Ballad of America," Coffin
manages to discuss most varieties of alteration, in texture as well as structure, with their
causes, but as a scholar he is forced to discuss them rather neutrally and eschew
conclusions, whereas as critics we may build on his work and reprehend as forcibly as we
wish. Coffin lists (p. ii) some factors causing change-we might say degeneration-in basic plot

2. or mood as follows: Such headings would include the elimination of action, development
toward lyric, loss of detail through forgetting; fragmentation; convention and cliche;
localization; the effect of literalness; rationalization; sentimentalization; moralization;
manner of use; secondary growth; new ballads which rise from the old; and mergers.
Somewhat less neutrally, he adds (p. x8), "Squeamishness and religious scruples con-
tinually haunt the American folk singer." I should like to consider the problem rather
differently, primarily in terms of an Old World configuration we find in the Child ballads,
and a New World configura- tion they adapt to here. For convenience, my examples will be
taken wherever pos- sible from MacEdward Leach's new anthology,1 which offers a
representative Ameri- can text or two for many of its Child ballads. We must first note that
fewer than half of Child's 305 ballads ever got here at all, and of those that did, most never
attained American popularity. Only a handful have been widespread in the United States.
Mrs. Jane Gentry of Hot Springs, North Carolina, sang sixty-four different songs for Cecil
Sharp, at least fifteen of them Child ballads.2 Her repertoire, although unusually full, seems
fairly typical, and her fifteen traditional ballads are a good sampling of some of the more
popular ones in America. She sang "The False Knight upon the Road" (Child 3), "The Twa
Sisters" (Child io), "Edward" (Child I3), "The Cherry Tree Carol" (Child 54), "Young Hunting"
(Child 68), "Lord Thomas and Fair Annet" (Child 73), "The Wife of Usher's Well" (Child 79),
"Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" (Child 8i), "Lamkin" (Child 93), "Johnie Scot" (Child 99),
"Geordie" (Child 209), "James Harris (The Daemon Lover)" (Child 243), "The Gray Cock"
(Child 248), "Our Goodman" (Child 274), and "The Sweet Trinity" (Child 286). Among the
important ballads that never got to America are some that seem tooThis content
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Journal of American Folklore grimly supernatural, such as "Gil Brenton" (Child 5); some
patently too disreputable, such as "Kempy Kaye" (Child 33); and a group in which villainy
triumphs or evil goes unpunished, among them "Clerk Saunders" (Child 69), "Young
Waters" (Child 94), "Johnie Armstrong" (Child I69), and "The Baron of Brackley" (Child
203). Among those of very limited appearance here, for similar reasons, are such fine
ballads as "The Twa Magicians" (Child 44), "Sir Patrick Spens" (Child 58), "The Unquiet
Grave" (Child 78), "Child Maurice" (Child 83), and "Johnie Cock" (Child II4). Those ballads
that do survive the ocean voyage suffer curious sea changes. Magic and the supernatural
slough off readily, even where they seem the ballad's point, and demons, ghosts, elves, and
mermaids rationalize and humanize. The terrible death curse of the victim in "The Twa
Sisters," spoken by a harp strung with her hair, tends to disappear in the American versions,
along with the harp, and in the common American "Bow Down" texts (if the girl is not
actually rescued), only the miller is punished, in an absurd ending that ignores the elder
sister: "The miller was hung in his own mill-gate, / For drowning of my sister Kate." A Maine
text of "The Cruel Mother" (Child 20) has the murdered children return, but drops their
judgment and curse. None of the enormous number of American versions of "James Harris
(The Daemon Lover)," so far as I know, keeps the lover convincingly demonic or retains his
cloven hoof. In the American texts the wife of a house carpenter elopes with her sailor beau,
the ship springs an accidental leak (in one Virginia text nothing happens to it at all), and the

3. wife regrets her impetuosity. As against the satanic ending of Scott's version: He strack the
tap-mast wi' his hand, The fore-masts wi' his knee, And he brake that gallant ship in twain,
And sank her in the sea an American broadside concludes: A curse be on the sea-faring men
Oh, cursed be their lives, For while they are robbing the House-Carpenter And coaxing away
their wives. Like magic and the supernatural, sex, incest, and kin-murder tend to disappear
or diminish, in a folk process very like individual repression. In the typical American "Son
Davie" or "Little Yaller Dog" variants of "Edward," the murder is of a brother rather than a
father, and there is never the final revelation of the mother's instigation that gives the last
line of the Percy text some of the pity and terror of the end of the Tyrannus. (Despite Archer
Taylor's argument,3 I cannot for a moment accept the parricide and the mother's complicity
as literary additions.) Coffin (p. 46) notes a characteristic American tendency to make kin-
murder fratricide rather than parricide, and in a version collected by Sharp in Tennessee
this has gone to the end of the line and the victim is a brother-in-law. Coffin points out (p.
i8) that in American texts of "The Cruel Brother" (Child ii), "The Twa Brothers" (Child 49),
and "Lizie Wan" (Child 51), the British suggestions or assertions of incest "have vanished or
are rapidly vanishing." Examples of the toning down of the frank sexuality of the ballads in
America are almost innumerable, and we might note that even the mention of the 236This
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The Child Ballad in America 237 lady's nakedness in "Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight" (Child
4) seems on its way out. Much of the starkness of tragedy diminishes as the ballads
transform in our cul- ture. The terrible ending of "Lady Maisry" (Child 65) in Jamieson's
text, Lord Wil- liam's announcement of his vengeance for the burning of his betrothed: "O
I'll gar burn for you, Maisry, "An I'll gar burn for you, Maisry, Your father an your mother;
The chief of a' your kin; And I'll gar burn for you, Maisry, An the last bonfire that I come to,
Your sister an your brother. Myself I will cast in." is lost in all the American versions, where
he kisses the corpse, writes his will, and dies. Another ending at the stake, the burning of the
fair wicked lady "like hoky- gren" in Herd's text of "Young Hunting," becomes in the
Kentucky "Loving Henry" an inconclusive dialogue with a little birdie. Lord Barnard's
fearful punishment of his wife in "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" in the Wit Restored
version: He cut the paps from off her brest; Great pitty it was to see That some drops of this
ladie's heart's blood Ran trickling downe her knee. becomes a more chivalric (and
considerably less significant) splitting of her head in the Kentucky "Little Mathie Grove" and
the New Hampshire "Lord Banner." Where the British texts of "The Gypsy Laddie" (Child
200) have the gypsies put down, often executed, and the lady restored to her husband, in
the American "Gypsy Davy"s the lord comes alone to appeal to his wife and is repudiated as
she chooses romantic love and freedom rather than loveless wealth and security (here the
opposi- tion of the American ethos to tragedy seems very clear). In a Kentucky "Black Jack
Davie" the gypsy casts the "glamourie owre" her by babbling "How old are you, my pretty
little Miss?" and she responds with the proud declaration of love, "I'll be six- teen next
Sunday." Many of the Child ballads in America lose not only the tragic movement that
Francis Fergusson has called from Purpose through Passion to Perception, but any narrative
or dramatic movement at all. "Riddles Wisely Expounded" (Child i) reduces itself to the

4. riddles and answers alone in Virginia, and "The Elfin Knight" (Child 2) to a comic dialogue of
tasks and counter-tasks in Kentucky, North Caro- lina, and Vermont. "Mary Hamilton" (Child
i73) has dwindled down to a lyric lament in Maine and Virginia, without any of the story but
the protest over the Queen's ingratitude, and in one Virginia text, to three stanzas that do
not mention the Queen. "John of Hazelgreen" (Child 293) has become two lyric stanzas in
Vir- ginia; "The Lass of Roch Royal" (Child 76) is almost exclusively the two well-known
shoe-my-foot stanzas, and finally, in Davis' U text, it comes down to what seems an
irreducible single stanza.4 As these ballads relinquish their Old World tragedy and
ominousness, they adapt to an American configuration in which, Kenneth Burke has noted,
death is held "in exceptionally bad repute." One paradoxical way they become less real is by
the addi- tion of realistic touches. The murdering brother in "The Two Brothers" goes to
"some graded school" in a version Sharp collected in Virginia, and Lady Maisry's lover runs
a still in a version of Child 65 he obtained in Kentucky.5 A Maine Lord Randall leaves his
poisoner "a barrel of powder to blow her up high," and YoungThis content downloaded
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238 Journal of American Folklore Hunting's murderer in South Carolina "sits out on her
porch playing her piano." At the extreme of the process, ballads are trivialized to the point
where they become comic songs about animals. "Sir Lionel" (Child i8) becomes "Old
Bangum" (in the opinion of some scholars), a ludicrous fight with a boar, and in a Missouri
version has the refrain: "Dillum down dillum / Dillum down / Kibby ky cuddle down killy
quo cum." One of the grandest and most terrifying ballads in the canon, "The Twa Corbies"
(Child 26), becomes the parody crow song "Billy Magee Magaw," and the new-slain knight is
a butchered horse in Iowa, a pig with three cork legs in Virginia, and a poor little lamb
crying "Baa, Baa, Baa" elsewhere. Another type of acclimatization is a Christianizing at best
and a vague pietizing at worst. "The Wife of Usher's Well," a nakedly pagan ballad about the
ironic limits of magical power, becomes the American "Three Babes" or "Lady Gay," in
which Christian prayer returns the children to Usher's Well and higher spiritual responsi-
bility carries them back to Heaven. The ending of a Georgia text reads as though it were
deliberate parody of the familiar Scott version: "Wake up, wake up," said the oldest one,
"Farewell, dear father, farewell, dear "The chickens will soon crow for day, mother, And
yander stands our Saviour dear, Farewell to Aunt Kate and Kane, And to Him we now must
go. For yander stands our Saviour dear, And to Him we now must remain." "Sir Hugh, or The
Jew's Daughter" (Child 155) has lost its serious Christianity, the power of the Virgin and her
holy well producing the miraculous voice of the corpse out of it, in many American versions,
but it has gained a superficial Christian piety in Indiana, Connecticut, and other texts in the
boy's burial with Bible and prayer book at his head and feet. Sometimes morality reverses
the whole dramatic action of the ballad, as in the Missouri "Earl Brand" (Child 7) where the
girl turns against her lover when he slays her father, or the Maine "Riddles Wisely
Expounded" where the Devil has become a suitor captivated by the girl's wit, and the ballad
concludes handsomely: Now maidens, pretty maidens, Be neither coy nor shy, But always,
when a lover speaks, Look kindly and reply. Finally, many ballads in America simply go into
meaningless nonsense. The model for American refrains seems to be the demented refrain

5. of Percy's "The Maid and the Palmer" (Child 21), happily unique in Child: Lillumwham,
lillumwham! Whatt then? what then? Grandam boy, grandam boy, heye! Leg a derry, leg a
merry, met, mer, whoope, whir! Driuance, larumben, grandam boy, heye! A West Virginia
refrain for "The Twa Sisters" is: "Hey oh, my Nanny! / And the swim swom bonny." A
Vermont "Elfin Knight" refrain is: "Fluma luma lokey sloomy / From a teaslum tasalum
templum / Fluma luma lokey sloomy." Sometimes American folk etymology produces not
secondary meaning but no meaning at all.This content downloaded from 136.152.143.143
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The Child Ballad in America 239 The refrain of "The Twa Sisters" which Mrs. Gentry sang
for Sharp (from the old witch charm "juniper, gentian and rosemary") was: "Jury flower
gent the roseberry / The jury hangs over the roseberry."6 When folk etymology spreads
beyond the refrain, it can turn a whole ballad into a crazy jumble. The "Lamkin" that Mrs.
Lena Bare Turbyfill of Elk Park, North Carolina, recorded for Herbert Halpert and the
Library of Congress as "Bolakins" in 1939 gets the "false nurse" as "the foster," "much red
gold" as "many marigolds," punishes the foster at "the stake of stand-by" (for "the stake a-
standing by"), and hangs Bolakins "to the sea-gallows tree," what- ever that may once have
been.7 Eventually some ballads work into total idiocy, like the "Poor Anzo" version of "Lord
Randal" that Reed Smith discusses in his chapter "The Road Downhill" in South Carolina
Ballads (Cambridge, Mass., I928). Anzo is asked why he left his sweetheart and replies "Here
is a red hot iron will broil a bone brown"; asked what he would like for supper, he concludes
"Make me a little breely broth soup." What has happened to the Child ballad in America, in
sum, is that it has become inadequate narrative, aborted drama, happy-ending tragedy,
corrupt and meaningless verbiage, and bad poetry in general. Some of this may be the effect
of transmission in time, which seems to degenerate and deteriorate folk literature wherever
we can observe its effects. Some of it, however, is certainly the effect of the American ethos,
with its denial of death, its resistance to the tragic experience, its deep repression of
sexuality, its overriding pieties, and its frantic emphasis on the rationalistic, the incon-
sequential, and the optimistic. It almost seems that these ballad texts are bad precisely to
the degree that they have become successfully American, that they reflect our dominant
values and resemble other unlovely features of our popular culture. The conclusion for
folklorists to draw is not that American ballads should not continue to be vigorously
collected and carefully studied, but that in the course of those worth- while activities they
need not be overvalued in aesthetic terms, that the folklorist should not pretend or insist
that they are high art when so many of them are patently trash. Here we might note with
some melancholy that if the rediscovery of the British traditional ballad inspired the
Romantic movement in poetry, our rediscovery of the American ballad has for the most part
inspired our poets in quest of a folk tradition to go seek it elsewhere. NOTES xMacEdward
Leach, The Ballad Book (New York, 1955). Texts not otherwise identified will be found
there. 2 Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, ed. Maud
Karpeles, 2 vols. (Oxford, I932). 3Archer Taylor, "Edward" and "Sven I Rosengard" (Chicago,
I93I), p. 26. 4Arthur K. Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Cambridge, Mass., 1929). 5
Sharp, pp. 68, 98. 6 Sharp, p. 26. 7 Library of Congress record AAFS 34A. Bennington College
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The Daemon Lover “O where have you been, my long, long love, This long seven years and
mair?' 'O I'm come to seek my former vows Ye granted me before.” “O hold your tongue of
your former vows, For they will breed sad strife; O hold your tongue of your former vows,
For I am become a wife.” He turned him right and round about, And the tear blinded his e’e:
“I was never hae trodden on Irish ground, If it had not been for thee.” “I might have had a
king's daughter, Far, far beyond the sea; I might have had a king's daughter, Had it not been
for love of thee.” “If ye might have had a king's daughter, Yer self ye had to blame; Ye might
have taken the king's daughter, For ye kend that I was nane.” “If I was to leave my husband
dear, And my two babes also, O what have you to take me to, If with you I should go?” “I
have seven ships upon the sea, The eighth brought me to land; With four-and-twenty bold
mariners, And music on every hand.” She has taken up her two little babes, Kissed them
baith cheeks and chin: She set her foot upon the ship, No mariners could she behold; But
the sails were of the taffetie, And the masts of the beaten gold. She had not sailed a league, a
league, A league but barely three, When dismal drew his countenance, And drumlie grew his
e’e. They had not sailed a league, a league A league but barely three, Until she espied his
cloven foot, And she wept right bitterly. “O hold your tongue of your weeping,” says he, “Of
your weeping now let me be; I will show you how the lilies grow On the banks of Italy.” “O
what hills are yon, yon pleasant hills, That the sun shines sweetly on?” “O yon are the hills of
heaven,” he said, “Where you will never win.” “O whiten a mountain is yon,” she said, “All so
dreary wi frost and snow?” “O yon is the mountain of hell,” he cried, “Where you and I will
go.” He struck up the tap-mast wi his hand, The foremast wi his knee, And he brakes that
gallant ship in twain, And sank her in the sea.“O fair ye well, my ain two babes, For I'll never
see you again.”
The House Carpenter "Well met, well met, my own true love, well met, well met," cried he.
"I've just returned from the salt, salt sea all for the love of thee." "I could have married the
King's daughter dear, she would have married me. But I have forsaken her crowns of gold all
for the love of thee." If you could have married the King's daughter dear, I'm sure you are to
blame, For I am married to a house carpenter, and find him a nice young man." "Oh, will you
forsake your house carpenter and come away with me? I'll take you to where the grass
grows green, to the banks of the salt, salt sea." "Well, if I should forsake my house carpenter
and go away with thee, What have you got to maintain me on and keep me from poverty?"
"I've six ships, sailing on the sold, sold sea, seven more upon dry land, One hundred and ten
all brave sailor men will be at your command." She picked up her own wee babe, and kisses
gave him three, Said "Stay right here with my house carpenter and keep him good
company." Well, they'd not been gone but about two weeks, I know it was not three. When
this fair lady began to weep, she wept most bitterly. "Ah, why do you weep, my fair young
maid, weep it for your golden store? Or do you weep for your house carpenter that never
you shall see anymore?" "I do not weep for my house carpenter or for any golden store.
But I do weep for my own wee babe, that never I shall see anymore." Well, they'd not been
gone but about three weeks, I'm sure it was not four. Our gallant ship sprang a leak and
sank, never to rise anymore. "What hills, what hills are those, my love, that rise so fair and
high?" "Those are the hills of heaven, my love, but not for you and I." "What hills, what hills

7. are those, my love, those hills so dark and low?" "Those are the hills of hell, my love, where
you and I must go."