ABSTRACT
D.K. Wilgus, known for his survey of ballad scholarship in the twentieth century, wrote not only as a scholar but as a collector and archivist who at one time had worked as a performing musician. His summary of the comparative approach in this piece reflects the rootedness of his own scholarship and of folklore study in general in the materials themselves. Originally a talk given as one side of a “‘text versus context’ debate” among folklorists, this essay sets out the principles of the “broader comparative approach” as Wilgus himself practiced it: as an inductive process with considerable attention to particularities of both the item or “text” and its “context” in a world of real people, places, and times. Manifestly historical, his approach derives from Barry’s conviction of an ongoing tradition of songs in the present with links to the past. Speaking of songs’ “histories” rather than “lives,” Wilgus modifies Barry’s more animate image. Like his predecessors, he understands tradition in terms of variation and continuity. He argues that balladry is a complex tradition of particular songs appearing and reappearing in diverse forms that can be understood only by “comparative study unencumbered by preconceptions” of purity and authenticity. I have omitted here the preliminary remarks with which Wilgus opened the original lecture. For an earlier statement of Wilgus’s comparative approach, see the influential article “The Text Is the Thing,” Journal of American Folklore, 86 (1971), 241–52.
