The Printed Record of an Oral Tradition: Anna Gordon Brown's Ballads

Abstract

Traditional ballads—those sung narratives whose origins are uncertain and whose authorship is unknown—have been difficult for literary scholars to account for and to analyze. Anonymous folk songs, they have moved between oral tradition and printed versions in broadsides or chapbooks and back again over the course of many centuries. They rarely have a single definitive text but can be found in many variants, making textual analysis tricky. Most scholars who have studied ballads are either medievalists—when the ballads are thought to have originated—or eighteenth-century scholars—the century when ballads were first collected. Francis J. Child, Harvard’s first professor of vernacular literature in English, was both. He thought of ballads as our “earliest known poetry,” whose “historical and natural place is anterior to the appearance of the poetry of art”; and he collected as many of them as he could with all their rich variations in the late nineteenth century.