ABSTRACT
The stories we have been discussing were re-created by Mrs Brown at each singing. Knowing something of how oral poetry operates in general, we shall now examine the structures of these texts to see how the oral technique of re-creative composition functioned in the Northeast’s ballad tradition. Ballad structure has not been a popular topic for study; it generally attracts a few perfunctory comments about ‘abrupt transitions’ and ‘incremental repetition’ and is then dismissed. The structures of the old ballads, however, deserve much closer attention than they have received because they demonstrate the genre’s original orality and show how the oral sensibility operated in an acoustical literary medium. And, as Whitman’s study of the complex architectonics of the Iliad has shown, traditional structures may hold the key to an aesthetic understanding of oral art.
