ABSTRACT
A complex interleaving of printed, oral, and recorded modes of song transmission, together with an equally complicated array of legends, anecdotal mentions, historical documents, and fanciful rumors compose the genealogy of this hero(ine) and story. Rosetta Wakeman's words rise from the page—independent, assertive, self-protective, and grittyin keeping with the spirit of the longstanding ballad and chapbook heroines. As a recurring type, the "female warrior" of Anglo-American popular ballads presents a high-mettled heroine who masquerades as a man and ventures to war for love and for glory. In the paradoxical mode of broadside balladry, the text combines the up-to-the-minute with the tried-and-true, the topical with the traditional. The female warrior of balladry and history supplied a particularly vivid and marketable form of the interrelation between the gritty facts of actual people and events and the conventionalized fictions and valences of fantasy. Simultaneously, cultural materials of this long period offer popular stories and songs shaped by a fantasy of female heroism.
