ABSTRACT
The principles of composition and transmission exemplified by Mrs Brown’s texts reveal the essential operations of the oral ballad tradition. The maker learns from older traditional singers not only the individual stories but also the tradition’s structural and formulaic patternings, and re-creates the ballad-stories every time he performs. He learns specific structures and formulas but, more important, learns how to expand and create anew on the basis of the old. Behind the maker’s creation of individual structures lies his sense of the established rhythms of tradition—binary, trinary, and annular—and behind his individual formulas lies his sense of the aural, melodic, metrical, and syntactic patterns intrinsic to the local tradition’s form. Because re-composing marks the essential difference between oral and written poetry, it is natural to emphasize the re-creative element in oral composition, but it is perhaps more necessary, as a corrective, to emphasize that the re-creative method produces story-texts remarkable for stability rather than innovation.
