ABSTRACT
The songs that D.K. Wilgus has termed “blues ballads” reveal the syncretism of Anglo and African singing traditions in the United States. Collectors and scholars discovered these ballads over the last century among singers, both amateurs and professionals, of both races. Reflecting conditions in the post-Civil War south and mid-south, these ballads present anti-heroes and antiheroines—railroad workers, prostitutes, even a personified “boll weevil”—whose stories of crime, revenge, and trouble develop in elusive and interrupted ways. Rather than narrate in a linear way, these ballads celebrate and comment upon local events for an audience presumably familiar with them. A definitive study of these ballads in the terms of ballad scholarship has yet to be written. Paul Oliver, an English scholar of African American music, has written about both sacred and secular forms, especially the blues. Here, Oliver surveys a sampling of blues ballads, sketching their stories and emphasizing particularities of origin and dissemination. His discussion highlights a complex and sometimes baffling interplay of spheres and influences. Although he only nods at connections between these ballads and others in the Anglo ballad style and tradition, he points usefully not only to the syncretic complexity of origins and contexts but also to the borders between ballad traditions and other forms.
