This subject will introduce students to scholarship about folk music of the British Isles and North America. We will define the qualities of "folk music" and "folk poetry," including the narrative qualities of ballads, and we will try to recreate the historical context in which such music was an essential part of everyday life. We will survey the history of collecting, beginning with Pepys' collection of broadsides, Percy's Reliques and the Gow collections of fiddle tunes. The urge to collect folk music will be placed in its larger historical, social and political contexts. We will trace the migrations of fiddle styles and of sung ballads to look at the broad outlines of the story of collecting folk music in the USA, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In addition to several response papers about concerts attended in the course of the semester, students will be expected to trace variations in a single ballad and write a ballad about its literary qualities. They will also be asked to write a paper describing the melodic and rhythmic characteristics most often found in folk music. Presentations in the last weeks of the semester will entail either performing a fiddle tune or a ballad the student has learned or else presenting a piece of music that he or she has collected.
Coursepack of articles.
Whisnant, David. All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Ritchie, Jean. Singing Family of the Cumberlands. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1988.
Our Singing Country. Compiled by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax. New York: Macmillan, 1941.
Harker, David. Fakesong. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985.
Child, Francis J. English and Scottish Popular Ballads. New York: Dover, 1965, Vol. I.
CD: "Classic Ballads of Britain and Ireland." Alan Lomax Collection. (Rounder 1775)