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Document : 961
Title    : Sing Us One of the Old Songs - Why Teach Ballads?
Author(s): Elaine Petrie

Copyright holder(s): Elaine Petrie

Text

Anyone who contemplates teaching the ballads is quickly going to ask – or
be asked a few basic questions: What is a ballad? Where do I find them? Who
wrote them? Why are we doing this? For many people interested in
contemporary popular song, a ballad is simply a slow song, like Frank
Sinatra’s ‘My Way’. And it may be hard to offer a satisfactory
definition to replace this. 

Perhaps it’s the form that defines the ballad better for us. It is
usually narrative verse, in two or four rhymed lines with the four line
stanza frequently made up of alternating iambic tetrameters followed by
trimeters. There’s a further impression that the setting must be
historical and that ballads are long – very, very long. In addition
there’s often stark, violent action; dramatic changes in the unities of
time and setting; repetition in both dialogue and action; patterns of
events in threes. There may well be some supernatural intervention, just
for good measure. 

So does this count as a ballad? 

O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, 
They war twa bonnie lasses; 
They bigget a bower on yon burn-brae, 
And theekit it oer wi rashes. 

They theekit it oer wi rashes green, 
They theekit it oer wi heather; 
But the pest cam frae the burrows-town, 
And slew them baith thegither. 

They thought to lye in Methven kirk-yard, 
Amang their noble kin; 
But they maun lye in Stronach Haugh, 
To biek forenent the sin. (to shelter from the sun) 

And Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, 
They war twa bonnie lasses; 
They biggit a bower on yon burn-brae, 
And theekit it oer wi rashes.

It’s short, and there’s no supernatural element but in other respects
it fits the bill. For many enthusiasts the clinching argument is that it
appears as item 201 in Francis J.Child’s would-be definitive collection
of “The English and Scottish Popular Ballads”, a five volume compendium
published between 1882-1898 which drew together ballads from earlier
printed collections and manuscripts. 

In many ways, it is the influence of these earlier collections and the
texts they presented that governs our expectation of what a ballad should
be. The most familiar ballad versions – certainly the ones in the Oxford
anthologies derive from Sir Walter Scott’s “Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border”. They were favoured because of the completeness of the text and
their historical and romantic elements which sat fairly well with
contemporary models of what poetry should be but that polished, satisfying
literary quality owes a good deal to Scott’s careful editorship. Research
has shown that he invented very little but he certainly pieced together
verses to create what he saw as a recreation of the fullest ‘original’
form. ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’ and ‘The
Battle of Otterburn’ as we know them, all owe their popularity to the
success of Scott’s publishing and editorial work. An interesting exercise
is the comparison of the traditional ballad ‘Jock of Hasilgreen’ with
Scott’s ‘Jock o’ Hazeldean’. 

This argument is taken a stage further in Dave Harker’s provocative study
“Fakesong”. He suggests that the concepts of the ‘ballad’ and even
‘folksong’ itself are artificial, constructed partly knowingly, partly
innocently by the mainly middle-class song collectors of the last three
hundred years. It is his view that the collectors – Scott and Child
included – patronised the working-class singers from whom they collected
and carefully selected areas of their repertoire to preserve, shaping it,
enhancing it and giving it a certain sort of gloss and prestige by the way
they presented it. 

Modern, comprehensive collecting practices prove that singers always have,
and therefore probably always had, a mixed repertoire of narrative, lyric,
comic and serious songs, both old and contemporary and of course, it’s
all ‘folk’ music wherever it comes from. When we ask what a ballad is
we should perhaps follow one definition from around 1700 which gives it as
no more than ‘Common song sung up and down the Streets’ (Harke,p.r8).
You can put it another way as the famous quip often attributed to American
blues singer Big Bill Broonzy has it: any song is a folk song ‘cause I
ain’t never heard a horse sing.’ 

I would suggest that there is a case to answer about the sanctification of
some areas of folk life and lore. With the increasing awareness of oral
history projects and the growth of Media Studies, it is time to be more
adventurous in the selection of ballad/folk texts, not always selecting the
items that look most like standard high poetry or prose. 

The best response to the question of who wrote the ballads is that it
doesn’t matter but here again there has been some controversy. The
answers that have been given to this question are all coloured by issues of
social values and class or gender perspectives. Matthew Macdiarmid argues
that the best ballads are so good they must have been created by men of
poetic genius, well-educated in literary composition and traditions: Lord
Hailes, Burns and Scott himself. By contrast, many of the best transmitters
of ballads seem to have been women: Anna Brown, whose manuscripts Scott
used, Bell Robertson and Margaret Gillespie both significant contributors
to the Greig-Duncan collection in the northeast. 

Macdiarmid is not alone in rejecting the myth of some spontaneous
outpouring by ‘the folk.’ There is an argument that each song must have
had an originator whose presence is now blurred by the accretions and
distortions of the transmission process. David Buchan suggests that singers
in traditional, non-literate communities did not learn a fixed version of a
narrative song. Instead they stored away the skeleton of the narrative and
recreate the song anew each time – a bit like the way good jokes are
stored and repeated. He claims that singers used well-known formulaic
phrases, repetitions and patterns of threes to build up and develop the
song. In a sense each singer is the author, recreating the song each time
it is performed. The idea of a fixed text to be memorised and passed on
verbatim in the same form each time only becomes established after the
advent of print. 

One useful classroom spin-off of this approach is that you needn’t feel
too worried about tailoring your own ballad from the version as available
in Child or Greig-Duncan. Better still, you can get your students to edit
their own preferred version. 

Often the first question that springs to mind in dealing with the ballads
is why teach them – or any traditional form at all? The answer has as
much to do with national self-esteem as with practical criticism. 

The ballad represents the persistence of a vernacular culture and some sort
of continuous indigenous literary tradition which survived the hiatus
brought about in the high literary tradition in Scots after the Union of
the Crowns in 1603 and the transfer of the court and its patronage to
London. When the literary revival came in Scots, it developed in some
measure out of a popular song tradition with Allan Ramsay’s song
collections “The Evergreen” (1724) and “The Tea-Table Miscellany”
(1724-32) and his use of songs in his pastoral drama “The Gentle
Shepherd” (1725). The line from Ramsay through Burns and Scott, all
collectors, all poets, is quite clear. In drama,even Home’s “The
Douglas” of 1756 draws on ‘Gil Morice’ (Child 83 `Child Maurice’).


The ballads are something are something to be proud of – a national
symbol. The number and quality of songs collected in Scotland have earned
us the right to speak about these loosely as ‘Scots’ ballads even where
versions of many of these songs have also been collected elsewhere and the
extent of motifs shared with other – frequently Scandinavian – cultures
suggests some earlier European root. Even if we dismiss this form of
chauvinism, then we can still point with pride to the development of quite
distinctive regional contributions which have come to be regarded almost as
separate genres: the Border riding ballads and the North-east bothy
ballads. Each of them reflects a particular society and its own heritage. 

The next issue is probably where to begin. There are 305 titles in
Child’s 5 volumes and there is the prospect of 8 volumes in the
Greig-Duncan collection to contend with. The best point of entry is
probably through the magical ballads like ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ or ‘Tam
Lin’ and there is good background material available on these in Matthew
Macdiarmid’s tape. ‘Clyde’s Water’ (Child 216, Greig-Duncan 1231)
is perhaps more challenging. 

This is a song that grows on you. Most versions are fairly long and the
different tunes to which it is most familiarly sung are usually striking
but plaintive. The story itself contains elements that cannot fail to
impress. There is something implacable in Maggie’s mother’s relentless,
incremental list of stables/horse/, barns/corn, bowers/gentlemen and it
doesn’t really matter that there’s a tradition pattern of three, for
the concrete power of the corn/horse/men images is so definite and
conclusive. 

Willie’s hat and cane again introduce a three-part movement and our first
reaction may be that these motifs seem slightly anachronistic if we believe
that ‘real’ ballads date from the 1600s. They can even seem bathetic
and out of place with their eighteenth century broadsheet overtones. What
gives them power is the fact that they represent the personal element, as
powerful symbols of ordinary, familiar, everyday life specifically set
against the dramatic randomness of death and disaster. They are like a bag
of messages found at the roadside after a hit and run accident and they
seem frail and trivial pitched against the crushing elemental force of the
Clyde’s Waters. This is the sort of snapshot detail we admire in Edwin
Morgan for instance or in a telling piece of film-making and perhaps it is
ultimately more impressive than the superficially more intriguing use of
supernatural forces represented by the mother’s curse on Willie. 

Ostensibly Willie dies because he has refused to do his mother’s bidding
and stay at home. The ballad shows the mother’s love is dangerously
all-consuming and Willie properly rejects it to seek romantic love with
Maggie although some versions of the ballad show that Willie recognises his
mother’s authority by fatalistically accepting the inescapability of the
curse and refusing to accept his brother’s suggestion that he cling to
his horse who will swim with him to the shore. It is not the curse itself
that kills him but his own compact with the river. His burning love for
Maggie helps him to defy his mother but his bitter acceptance of Maggie’s
apparent rejection snuffs out this positive fire and abandons him to
despair and the water. 

Willie’s pact with the river – ‘mak me a wrack when I come back but
spare me as I’m gaun’ – has all the authentic rashness of a young man
in love and it rings well to the ear with the internal rhyme of ‘wrack’
and ‘back’ but it seems that this is perhaps one of the oldest elements
of the song and one that puts it in touch with older traditions in
literature as it is used in verses on Hero and Leander by the Roman poet
Martial. Francis Child thought that ‘the conceit does not overwell suit a
popular ballad’ (4,187) but I cannot agree. The idea has obviously been
borrowed (and has stuck) because it catches the imagination and proves the
balladeer’s ability to recognise an arresting phrase and to take it over
in a natural way. 

Another striking element of the ballad is Maggie’s devotion. While it is
not unusual by ballad standards, her immediate calm determination to find
her William is an impressive movement in the ballad. She is more active
than many women in conventional literature. She calmly faces the rushing of
the Clyde which, we are reminded, would fear nine hunder men.’ She
acknowledges the force of the river with a mixture of awe and
understatement: `o and alas this lady cries your water’s wondrous
deep’. 

The final image of the lovers in their chaste death embrace is as powerful
as the ending of “Romeo and Juliet” and the two texts make for
interesting comparisons in their treatment of the archetypal theme of
lovers facing parental disapproval. There is irony but also a curious
dignity and consolation in the idea that the lovers will be united ‘like
sister and like brother’ while we are well aware that this less, much
less, than the wedding and fortune that other ballads and the
‘happy-ever-after’ side of popular fiction and traditional tale-telling
offer. 

The beauty of this ballad is that it matches the grand scale and power of
elemental archetypes against small scale domestic details (Willie’s boots
full of Clyde water) in a way that helps us sense William and Margaret as
living characters and not just cardboard stereotypes. 

One thing ballads are good at is striking openings. It’s not just that
they frequently plunge straight into the action; in many cases they open
with a stark, figurative image – like the king safely ensconced in
Dunfermline downing his wine while Sir Patrick Spens is pacing a cold
deserted shore. My own favourite is the opening of ‘Sweet Willie and Fair
Annie’ (‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’ Child 73E), where 

Sweet Wille and Fair Annie 
Sat a’ day on a hill 
And though they had sitten seven year 
They neer wad had their fill.

Child is probably closer to the mark when he describes this as ‘one of
the most beautiful of our ballads, and indeed of all ballads.’ Adolescent
groups might find Willie’s two-timing a topic that provoked discussion.
Bell Robertson’s version (Greig-Duncan 212D) again offers a contrast
between the strictly economic considerations of Willie’s mother who
advises him to look go for a wealthy bride and the romantic view of his
younger sister who bids him follow his ‘heart’s desire’ and marry for
love. 

One of the difficulties the ballads present to modern readers may be the
violent treatment of women who all too often appear to be commodities to be
guarded by jealous brothers or tricked and abused by lovers or vindictive
mothers. Some, like Willa Muir, have suggested that this is an echo of
matrilinear descent where family property and wealth passed to one’s
sister’s son. Matrimonial connections with the right families were
therefore essential and a brother might well feel more than a passing
interest in his sister’s intended. Be that as it may, the women of the
ballads and their undertakings often present a very positive view of
womanhood. As we have seen, many exhibit tremendous dedication and
endurance and they can be ready to take forceful action to secure their
aim. See for example ‘Glenlogie, or Jean of Bethelnie’ (Child 238;
Greig-Duncan 973), where Jeannie, aged fifteen or sixteen, eventually
persuades Glenlogie, whose love is ‘promised awa’, to give up his
sweetheart and marry her. 

If love with its trials and tribulations proves dangerous, you can always
opt for adventure and the hardihood of the Border riding ballads. There’s
lots of help here and George Macdonald Fraser’s “The Steel Bonnets”
(London, 1971) gives good background while James Reed “The Border
Ballads” (London, 1975) is also useful. 

As Hamish Henderson says, the riding ballads are a bit like Damon
Runyon’s Chicago gangster stories, full of gang lists, revenge killings
and treachery. One character, Hobie Noble, actually turns up in two
ballads. In one, ‘Jock o’ the Side’ (Child 187), he helps to spring
Jock from prison in Newcastle. 

Now Hobie was an Englishman, 
In Bewcastle-dale was bred and born; 
But his misdeeds they were sae great, 
They banished him ne’er to return. 

Child 187B

The raid is successful: 

And now they are fallin to drink, 
And they drank a whole week one day after another, 
And if they be not given over, 
They are all drinking yet. 

Child 187C

But all did not end quite so well with Hobie. As an Englishman in hiding in
Scotland, he is in great demand for his skill as a guide on Scots raids
into the south. He is led into a trap and is arrested and taken to
Carlisle. He is well-received by the ordinary folk who have heard of his
part in rescuing Jock o Side. 

They gave him a wheat loaf to eat 
And after that a can o beer 
Then they cried a’, wi ae consent, 
Eat brave Noble, and make good cheer! 

Child 189

Despite all this he is hanged for breaking his banishment and presumably
also for the unspecified `great misdeeds’ that prompted his initial
flight. 

The single biggest problem with the riding ballads is that they can become
a confusing tangle of names. Even ‘The Battle of Otterburn’ has the
Douglas picking out his team like a Premier League line up: 

He chose the Gordons and the Grahams 
The Lindsays, light and gay, 
But the Jardines wald not with him ride, 
And they rue it to this day. 

Child 161C

To some extent you can point a similar charge at the bothy ballads. Many of
them immortalise masters and their farms (‘The Boghead Crew’,‘The
Skranky Black Farmer’, ‘Drumdelgie’, ‘Bogie’s Bonnie Bell’,
‘Guise o Tough’, ‘Swaggers’, ‘Sleepytoon’) and so the basic
pattern is easy to characterise. Their real strength lies in the detailed
social record they leave behind of life among the ploughman lads and
kitchie deems. They usually bitterly attack the broken promises and harsh
conditions doled out by parsimonious farmers 

As I cam in by Turra Market 
At Turra Market for to fee 
I fell in wi’ a wealthy farmer 
The Barnyards o’ Delgaty 

Lintrin adie toorin adie 
Lintrin adie toorin ae 

He promised me his ae best pair 
I ever set my e’en upon 
When I gaed hame to the Barnyards 
There was naething there but skin and bone 

The auld black horse sat on his rump 
The auld white meer lay on her wime 
And a’ that I could hup and crack 
They widna rise at yokin time 

Meg MacPherson maks my brose 
Her an me we canna gree 
First a mote and syne a knot 
And I ae the tither jilp o bree

The songs tell their own story with vitality and detailed imagery and are a
true record in as much as they often refer to actual characters as Peter
Hall has shown. Out of this tradition grew the witty penmanship of George
Bruce Thomsom, responsible for some first rate, tongue-twisting songs that
brilliantly depict the fermtoun way of life. Each a technical tour de force
with words exactly fitting the rhyme of the tune, they present a rich feast
of Scottish dialect and an exact record of the food, implements and
utensils of the time (about eighty years ago). The songs work because of
their humour and also because of the lightning pen sketches of a moment
such as the break up of a good going party when one of the farm pigs
stumbles in and causes confusion. The moment when one of the farm workers
trips in the pantry and pulls all the jars and preserves down on his head
is particularly good and if this isn’t balladry in the high tradition
then it’s certainly an eloquent advocate for casting a wider net. 

Johnnie Murphy he ran efter her, and ower the pig was leapin’ 
Wan he trampit on an ashet that was sittin’ fu’ o’ dreepin 
An’ he fell doon and peel’t his croon ,an’ quidna’ haud frae
greetin’ 
At McGinty meal and ale whaur the pig ga’ed on the spree. 
And the pantry shelf cam’ ricklin’ doon an’ he was lyin’ kirnin 
Amang saft soap, pease meal, corn floor and yirnin’ 
Like a gollach amang trickle(treacle) but McGinty’s wife was girnin’ 
At the soss upon her pantry fleer and wadn’ lat him be.

Further Reading: 

David Harker – “Fakesong”, (OUP 1985) 
George MacDonald Fraser – “The Steel Bonnets” (London 1971) 
James Reed – “The Border Ballads” (London 1975)

There are many selections of ballads, the main reference being made to F.G.
Childe – “English and Scottish Popular Ballads”, but an easily
available collection is Emily B.Lyle’s “Scottish Ballads” published
by Canongate. 

The Greig-Duncan Folksong collection is currently being published in
several volumes. 

Scotsoun have also produced a tape on the ballads by Matthew Macdiarmid.


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Text audience
Adults (18+): Informed lay people: Specialists: Audience size: 100+

Text details
Method of composition: Wordprocessed
Year of composition: 1997
Word count: 3470

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Published: Publisher: Association for Scottish Literary Studies
Publication year: 1997
Part of larger text: Contained in: Laverock 3
Editor: Ronald Renton, Duncan Jones

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Author
Author details
Author id: 870
Forenames: Elaine
Surname: Petrie
Gender: Female
Decade of birth: 1950
Educational attainment: University
Age left school: 17
Upbringing/religious beliefs: Protestantism
Occupation: College Manager
Place of birth: Aberdeen
Region of birth: Aberdeen
Birthplace CSD dialect area: Abd
Country of birth: Scotland
Place of residence: Falkirk
Region of residence: Stirling
Residence CSD dialect area: Stlg
Country of residence: Scotland
Father's occupation: Smallholder
Father's place of birth: Orkney
Father's region of birth: Orkney
Father's birthplace CSD dialect area: Ork
Father's country of birth: Scotland
Mother's place of birth: Portlethen
Mother's region of birth: Kincardine
Mother's birthplace CSD dialect area: Kcdn
Mother's country of birth: Scotland

Languages:
Language: English
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: 
Language: Scots
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: No
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: