ABSTRACT
A literary scholar and collector, Louise Pound confuted Gummere’s theory of communal origins, drawing evidence from both history and literature and from her own formidable fieldwork in the midwestern United States. Pound argues that individuals within communities create and preserve popular songs, including ballads, both the “traditional” English and Scottish ones prized from Percy on and the later ballads in the broadside style. Ballads have many origins, each connected to particular people and material circumstances rather than to “some mystical special manner of composition, under choral and festal conditions.” Pound thus disputes the idealized context for the ballad proposed by Child, Gummere, and others, insisting that such idyllic conditions “do not fit anywhere, at any stage, in the chronology of society.” Recognizing a transformative and recreative aspect to the preservation of songs in oral tradition, Pound nonetheless sees the predominant direction of cultural influence moving from higher levels to lower and from the center to the periphery. Indirectly undermining Addison’s longstanding image of the ballad singer as a masculine Homeric bard, she argues that traditions remain strongest “among that more fixed and sheltered element of the population, the women.” On Pound and the communalist controversy, see D.K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1959), pp. 89–98. For a posthumously published book showing the range of Pound’s work, see Louise Pound, Nebraska Folklore (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959).
D.D.
