ABSTRACT
Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), my study of Anglo-American balladry’s cross-dressing female warrior, analyzes a particular type of ballad heroine and story popular in hundreds of variants for several hundred years. Bringing together text and context, the study traces a type of heroine in particular ballads and reaches for the larger cultural and ideological preoccupations the figure represents. The essay here grew out of this research and continues the centuries-long exploration in ballad study of the workings of tradition with regard to literacy and commercial popularity. In the line of thinking from Ritson on, I see that over time people’s songs take divergent forms—commercial, noncommercial, oral, written, printed, and now tape-recorded. Ballad tradition consists of an ongoing interplay of different people in different contexts reforming their ballads. Moreover, the record of the song is not the song. Forms are linked not so much to intrinsic compositional or stylistic dynamics but rather to such extrinsic factors as context, function, opportunity, and individual taste. The essay reconsiders the boundaries of folksong, challenging the concept of oral tradition as a defining principle necessarily connected to origins, style, or authenticity. I have omitted here the full texts of the ballad on Mary Ambree that appear in the original article.
