ABSTRACT
William Motherwell refined the concept of tradition, accentuating the orality of ballads in connection with a notion of purity. For him, the editor-collector gained a new importance as the keeper of this ballad inheritance, whose task it was to recognize, preserve, and interpret its records. Motherwell took up his study of balladry in Scotland in the context of salvaging a threatened Scottish heritage, “the fleeting and precarious memorials tradition has bequeathed to these latter times.” He explicitly urges the collection of ballads from “the lower and uneducated classes … with scrupulous and unshrinking fidelity” and “carefully and accurately gathering” these records of the past as “what of its wreck we can yet find floating around us.” Motherwell thus continues the preoccupation with “an Ancient National Minstrelsy,” seeing “inwoven” in the ballads “the feelings and passions of the people … their Universal mind.” A model for later editors, this essay establishes the idea of a ballad’s existence in versions whose separateness and integrity an editor must respect. He brings to the study of “traditionary” ballads a concept of authenticity tied to their orality. He points to the complex interplay of connections and disconnections between people’s song traditions and the representations of them in writing and print. The “Armorican” (i.e., Breton) quote near the end of Motherwell’s discussion is from the preface to the Middle English lay Sir Orfeo. On Motherwell and his work, see William McCarthy, “William Motherwell as Field Collector,” Folk Music Journal 5 (1987), 295–316. On Motherwell, Scott, and class politics, see Dave Harker, Fakesong (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), pp. 38–77.
D.D.
