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This paper presents new evidence concerning the broadside ballad "Reynardine," which became popular in the British folksong revival movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that the revival versions of this ballad were not products of the folk tradition, but rather descendants of a text authored by A. L. Lloyd, who was both a singer and a folksong scholar. The paper goes on to suggest reasons why Lloyd might have authored the ballad, and reasons why he might have concealed that authorship, placing its evidence and observations in the context of folkloristic concerns about authenticity and authorship, folklore and fakelore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various papers published in this issue including one by Lis Moller on the Mark Stig Ballads, one by Gunilla Hermansson on poetry in Swidish and Danish Romanticism, and one by Gry Hedin on Johan Thomas Lundbye as mediator between art and science.

Place names in ballads range from the real and historical—London, Edinburgh, Aberdeen—through to the patently fictional—Ambertown, Archerdale, Scarlet Town, Roch Royal. In between these two poles lies a range of names that might refer to real places but equally might shade off into the imaginative. In terms of ballad narrative this rarely poses a problem; however, for the ballad collector/editor, such names may pose a real challenge of representation. The functions of ballad texts in writing are not the same as those of ballads in performance. The phonetics of a place name when sung or recited may not always usefully translate into its written representation. Is there any merit in writing “Edinborough,” even if the word is pronounced as a tetrasyllable? An editor is often required to make decisions about the orthography of a name—decisions that might seem much less compelling to a listener than to a reader. This paper traces some of the questions raised in particular by place names in the ballad collection made by James Madison Carpenter, and considers their implications for editorial strategies and for the referentiality of place names in ballads at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution of stories in biblio-poetry therapy practice and in enhancing personal development is the focus of this paper. Writing, telling and listening to stories open up possibilities for change and new learning windows. Through expressive and communicative stories, therapeutic and developmental dia- and polylogism can expand one's imaginative space and perspectives of action in a “holding framework” and even in virtual communities. Rewriting previous “truth stories” moves and modifies one's conceptions of self, others and life relations. The inhibitions, failures and dislocations inherent in storytelling also provide valuable experiential and experimental touching/moving knowledge. The presence of the “imagined reader” and the “internal supervisor” in the writing process can help in reflecting, evaluating and steering, through meta-emotional and metacognitive processes, one's own and others’ needs, aspirations and goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women are the principal informants in the modern oral tradition of Hispanic balladry, th e romancero. This fact conditions the point of view, ideologies, and perceptions expressed in the ballads. Critics often state that the romancero contains a feminine voice, but the nature and characteristics of this voice have not been studied in any detail. The present paper attempts to reveal the ideas and beliefs that women express in their rendition of one such ballad, La Bastarda y el Segador, and show how their renditions differ from those of men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breton ballads singing tales of crime and justice have been collected by ethnographers since the nineteenth century. These songs refer to a number of episodes of crime and violence that took place during the ancien régime. Composed shortly after the events they describe, they were passed on by families and communities over centuries, almost exclusively in oral culture, since printed broadsheets of these songs were not produced in the early modern period. The Breton ballads give privileged access to the omnipresent sonic element of early modern culture, since singing leaves few traces in the written and visual sources typically studied by researchers. Comparing the ballads with documents from the criminal archives concerning the same or similar cases reveals how communities maintain, adapt, and transmit the memory of current events and crime. These songs, shaped by a desire to preserve faithfully the details of local historical events and a need to adapt their storytelling to the poetic demands of the genre, give great insight into the customs and mentalities of the communities that performed them and passed them on through the generations, especially concerning questions of justice and morality. Studying these songs demonstrates from a methodological point of view the importance of comparing oral and written sources in order to better understand early modern society and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mary Darby Robinson is well known for writing her final volume of poems, the Lyrical Tales (1800), as a direct answer, sometimes poem by poem, to Wordsworth and Coleridge's 1798 Lyrical Ballads. What has been less studied is how deliberately hybrid in style and allusions her response-poems are in the Tales, especially how prominently they foreground Gothic imagery, theatricality, and hyperbole in poems that also ape the emerging "romantic" mode of the Ballads themselves. Part of that "cheekiness," I argue, stems from the condemnation of the Gothic that both Wordsworth and especially Coleridge had articulated in print, while also echoing it, albeit in highly modified ways, in their poetry. Most of what Robinson attempts with her hybrid Tales, though, develops the penchant in Gothic for symbolizing deep and unresolved ideological conflicts in Western culture. Her answers to Wordsworth and Coleridge, which I exemplify with selected Robinson Tales, therefore, bring out those very conflicts underlying, haunting, and even tormenting the speakers and the subject-matter in the original Lyrical Ballads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ‘ontological rift’ between the digital and the material archive of political broadside ballads. It outlines the ways in which the ballad’s original diversity has been eroded and homogenised by multiple processes of remediation, including digitisation over time, and investigates the limitations of digitisation projects in delivering the multifarious and widely scattered broadside ballad archive online. Finally, it considers how far digitisation projects have unintentionally ‘concretised’ not only older interpretive practices in relation to the ballad as genre, but also outdated narratives regarding the ballad’s place in the news networks and political culture of seventeenth-century England. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

News-songs differ in crucial ways to the other news media of the early modern period. As a result, historians need to ask different questions of these multi-media artefacts. How did the presentation of this performative genre affect the dissemination and reception of information about events? What part do orality and aurality play in how the news was sold and received? What kind of information can ballads provide about specific news events that other documents cannot or will not provide? This article seeks to answer these questions, and suggest some of the skills historians need to develop in order to appreciate the full meaning of songs as the most popular of news media in early modern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Widespread interest in Australian folklore and folk music began in the 1950s as a response to the international popularity of the folk revival, led principally by American and British artists and organisations. In revising their own folk traditions, Australian scholars looked to the convict era as an important foundation for the “bush music” that was to follow. Yet, the evidential basis for the oral transmission of convict ballads has been remarkably slim. This essay considers the case of one well-known convict ballad, exploring its evolution through British print culture and its transformation into a “folk” song in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After 1961, any published commentary on Evans seemed incomplete without a comment on the peculiar emotional register of his ballad playing in the trio setting. The fervor of Evans's fans and the sheer quantity of praise he received inDown Beatmagazine was enough to inspire skepticism in some corners. This essay analyzes the critical reputation of Evans's emotional signature in the 1960s with regard to the material most crucial to that part of his reputation: the popular romantic ballad. Following a discussion of the problem of anti-sentimentalism in jazz criticism and scholarship, the essay moves to the Evans trio's celebrated 1961 recording of “My Foolish Heart.” After considering the film song's lyrics and noting some musical characteristics of the Evans trio's performance, the essay turns to the whirl of critical discourse that met this and other Evans recordings in the 1960s. Special attention is given to the rhetoric of poignancy in jazz criticism. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, “poignant” and a related cluster of evaluative terms about music and emotions (e.g., introversion, introspection, lyrical, impressionistic, and reflective) circulated around the ballad playing of Evans, his former bandleader Miles Davis, and others. The circulation of the term “poignant” and its analogues in jazz writing was in part a response to the gendered reputation of “sentimental music” as feminine, emotionally excessive, and aesthetically inferior. Although he strongly regretted his reputation as a ballad specialist (which he found diminishing), Evans's balladry nonetheless exemplified his stated project of pursuing what he called the “finer feelings” in music. The pianist's sense of jazz's relationship to the “finer feelings” in the 1960s also informed his vocal resistance to emerging paradigms of expanded improvisational freedom and new avenues of tonality, timbre, and emotional communication in music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1840 a Scottish naval officer, Captain Alexander Maconochie, was appointed Superintendent of the British penal settlement on Norfolk Island, a tiny speck in the Pacific 1000 miles off the coast of Australia, designated by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Ralph Darling, as ‘a place of the extremest punishment, short of death’. This became the setting for what is still regarded as one of the seminal experiments in the history of penal reform, based on an innovative system of rewards and penalties that aimed at the rehabilitation, rather than merely the punishment and repression of prisoners. Integral to Maconochie's armoury of reforming influences on the convicts was music, conceived not as an abstract aesthetic experience but as a means of ‘moral improvement’, facilitating the prisoners' transition from selfish brutality to civilized social being. Here, at the margins of British society, both socially and physically, music including the ballads of Thomas Moore, Robert Burns and Charles Dibdin was harnessed to inculcate the moral qualities—love of country, longing for home, hope for the future—which Maconochie aimed to foster in the prisoners. Set out in a short bureaucratic memorandum, his remarkably clear and practical argument for the role of music as part of a ‘moral economy’ arguably represents some of the most cogent British theorizing on the social and moral effects of music in the first half of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This manuscript explores the charged and complex cultural histories bound up in the music and performative repertoire of English retro soul artist Amy Winehouse. It considers the aesthetics of Winehouse's vocal gestures and racial mimicry, and it explores the politics of what we might call sonic blue(s)face culture, a vocal phenomenon pioneered by black and white female entertainers in early twentieth century popular culture. The essay re-situates Amy Winehouse's work within this cultural legacy, and it explores the ways that her performance aesthetics invoke a diverse swatch of twentieth-century popular music genres, everything from the turn of the (last) century's black and white women's minstrel phenomenon to the late twentieth-century white female R&B vocalizing sensation and beyond. In sum, this essay aims to recuperate the vocal legacies of white and black women's musical collaborations and (dis)identifications so as to trace a through line that runs from early interracial aesthetic encounters all the way to Winehouse's (tainted) love and (unapologetic) theft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Folklore is the artistic expression of belief. The various forms of folklore change and adapt to reflect changing circumstances and changing views of the world. When Ukrainians came to Canada, they brought their folklore, ballads included, with them. In the new land, ballads helped voice the struggles of the Ukrainian Pioneers. Examining a collection of ballads made approximately sixty years after Ukrainians began arriving on the Prairies shows that the ballads performed in Canada spoke of real problems, problems attested in both folk sources and historical records. These include the physical hardship of life on an acreage, male absence as they went to work on the railroad, and the tension between women and their daughters-in-laws, who were left to struggle on their own. Ukrainian girls attracted to non-Ukrainians were seen as problematic, as were men seeking solace in alcohol and infidelity. And there were many other Canadian issues for which traditional ballads provided a powerful means of expression. The ballad tradition was modified through selection, i.e., only relevant songs continued to be performed. It was also changed internally and individual ballad texts were altered by the addition of new terminology and new ideas. This is especially true when attitudes in Canada differed from those in Ukraine. A very important change in attitude applies to magic. While the use of magic is treated ambiguously in ballads performed in Ukraine, it is routinely condemned in those performed in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William J. Entwistle died on 13 June 1952. It is appropriate, half a century later, to look again at his work on ballad and epic. In a five-year period Entwistle challenged the increasingly powerful neotraditionalist view of Spanish epic in his studies of Bernardo del Carpio and the Cantar de Sancho II (both 1928) and in an important theoretical statement arising out of those detailed studies (1933). He then, however, seems to have lost interest in the epic, returning to it briefly in a slighter and provisional article on epic chronology (1947–48). His interest in ballads, in contrast, persisted throughout his scholarly life. His first article on the subject was published in 1923, when he was in his late twenties, and he left two articles in press at his death. In all, he published twenty-two ballad articles, and a standard book on the subject, European Balladry (1939, 2nd ed. 1951). In this article, I survey Entwistle's work in these two areas, and try to assess its relevance to our research in these areas today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of old English song ballads in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky at the turn of the twentieth century has been the subject of fascination by geographers, folklorists and historians for the past century. The recent release of two dramatic films, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Touchstone Pictures) and Songcatcher (Rigas Entertainment) in 2001 has used the Appalachian ballad as a basis for the film narrative and revived interest in American folk music and the roots of the English ballad tradition in the Kentucky mountains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores some of the social, political, and cultural meanings of 'eccentricity' in nineteenth-century England. It does this through examining the treatment of 'local characters' extensively recorded in North-East histories, newspapers, and ballads, and depicted in visual material in the period c. 1800–1901. The first part examines the typology emerging from these media; and demonstrates how mental and physical abnormality, transgression of social mores, and odd beliefs, were classed as 'eccentric'. A study of representations of eccentricity, many of which were commercially available, forms the second part, supported by illustrations relating to popular figures such as William Purvis, or Blind Willy, of Newcastle. Eccentricities were identified across the region, in rural areas as well as in the 'public spaces' of Durham, Sunderland, and Newcastle. The final part relates this chronicling of odd characters to Victorian culture; the region's social history; and local patriotism across the period, but especially the late Victorian period, when the popularity of local history ensured a prominent place for eccentrics as emblematic of the quaint past in the North-East (and, it is indicated, elsewhere). Finally, the uses of eccentric characters are briefly discussed more broadly in terms of moralism and stigmatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]