ABSTRACT
Most of the songs recorded from English singing tradition originated as broadside ballads printed years or decades earlier, affording the opportunity of establishing, by a comparative analysis, the impact of memory and performance on song texts.
The author’s earlier studies of this kind suggested that in the case of songs with a strong narrative element, this impact can wear away the less essential material (including journalistic/sentimental verbiage) to bring out the core structure, enhanced by the generation of verbal repetitions. Together with the introduction of phrases from other songs or common ‘formulas’, the result can approach the ‘vernacular aesthetic’ of traditional balladry.
The same result is achieved in this contribution, which compares versions of the song recorded from 26 singers with the original eighteenth-century broadside, ‘The Gosport Tragedy’ (Roud 15), also of interest as a classic representative of the powerful ‘Murdered Sweetheart’ genre. However, many of those same symptoms are already displayed in a nineteenth-century broadside version, published as (among other titles) ‘Love and Murder’, prompting an intense concluding meditation on the (currently controversial) relationship between print and memory in the verbal ‘morphing’ of vernacular song.
