ABSTRACT
Combining the topic of origins with questions about persistence and variation, Eleanor Long proposes that ballad tradition is a complicated tapestry woven by individual singers whom she understands along a continuum of change and stability. At one end, she sees highly innovative singers, individual “ballad makers” like Ives’s “folk poets.” At the other, she posits a greater number of more conservative and memory-bound singers whose performances constitute “continuous piecemeal re-creation.” Arguing for the impact of personality upon tradition, Long attempts to integrate under the rubric of “folk artistry” such contrasting perpectives on composition as oral-formulaic theory as opposed to emphasis upon individual authorship, and such dissimilar approaches to context as synchronic study of performance, function, and meaning as opposed to diachronic study of origins, variants, and popularity over time. She generalizes from studies of particular singers and their singing in a way that pointedly leaves ballad culture various and complex: literate and illiterate, amateur and commercial, and composed of both isolated homogeneous communities and complicated mass audiences. The Transformative Voice: Songs and Singing in the Life of Jeannie Robertson by Herschel Gower and James Porter (forthcoming from the American Folklore Society) takes up these concerns with performance, analyzing ballad tradition in terms of the repertoire, biography, and performance practice of an individual singer.
