ABSTRACT
Musicologist and collector Samuel Bayard brought to the study of Anglo-American balladry an insistence both upon the independence of folk tunes from their texts and upon the value of studying melodies. This influential essay looks out with the gaze of scientific perspicacity upon the entire Anglo-American “folk song culture.” Comprehensive and comprehensible in his analysis of the music, Bayard also addresses core concerns in ballad scholarship as he describes “processes of oral re-creation” in a “communal musical tradition” that he understands as linked to a “national” past and ideal: “one of the most glorious artistic achievements of the peoples of British descent.” His abstractness notwithstanding, Bayard takes up ballad scholarship’s longstanding assumptions and explanations of origins, community, and a traceable fatherland. He finds the tunes collected from traditional singers in Britain and America falling into “families,” for each of which he posits a single originating melody with variants in “relations of a genetic sort.” With scientific detachment, Bayard observes and classifies at length, contextualizing neither his evidence nor his own perceptions as a point of reference. Nonetheless, he describes with precision the melodic continuity and variation of Anglo-American folk tunes, arguing for a musical inheritance in “the popular memory” quite separate from “the compositions of trained musicians.” The excerpt here is taken from the last section of the article, which delineates three main classes of British-American folk melodies.
