Child-ish Ballads: modern songs in the old style?

This started with a discussion in the ZoomChild online ballad session about ballads which aren’t in the Child collection, and some of the suggestions below come from that group: thanks to them.

Some background, if you haven’t heard of Child Ballads:
In the late nineteenth century Francis James Child (then Professor of English at Harvard University) published five volumes of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which he intended to be a complete collection of the surviving old ballads of England and Scotland, derived from extensive research into antiquarian publications and cooperation with several other scholars. Ballads can be defined as narrative songs with a simple verse structure, and Child was looking for ‘ancient’ ones. There’s endless debate about the provenance and status of such songs. You can read all about Child’s publication, with links to digitised versions, at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Ballads and https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200196779/ The 305 songs in that collection have come to be known as ‘Child Ballads’ and his collection was taken by some in the late 20C folk revival as a definitive source of the Great Songs of Old. This over-simplified things. Child does have many famous songs: Three Ravens, Tam Lin, The Cruel Mother, Edward, House Carpenter/Demon Lover… but there were other powerful ballads, in print or in the oral tradition, that he missed or that were only collected after his time: the Trees They Do Grow High, Polly Vaughn, The Bitter Withy, The Leaves of Life, and more.

Main story:
Of course, there are many newer songs which are ‘ballads’ (as opposed to non-narrative ‘lyrical songs’) which are now in the ‘folk’ repertoire. So we had a short discussion in a Zoomchild session about which of those were notable, and maybe up to the ‘Child standard’ (though not all Child’s examples are that good) and so ‘Child-ish’.

That started me thinking, and I started making up a list of ‘modern ballads’ by racking my brains. That didn’t do much good, predictably, so I looked through my record collection for examples in an unstructured way.

I was looking for what might be ‘ballads’, again defined as narrative songs with a fairly simple verse structure, delivered in a very broadly defined ‘folky’ way. That produced a long list of examples quite quickly, some of which seemed ballad-y to me, and some less so, and I started to get confused about what I was doing. Here’s my examples (below), and my attempts to resolve my confusion. Some of this is me laboriously working my way to rather well-known points.

Characteristics of Child-style ballads (which I’ll call ‘Ballads’, with a capital B, below; the modern ballads I’ll generally call them ‘songs’) are said to be that they’re usually in the third person and cover one particular incident (though some, like Lord Bateman, cover a wider history). Many modern narrative songs in my list below are first person (you could make all kinds of social and psychological ‘me-generation’ points out of this, but it might just be a shorter chain from composition to performance, so modern songs are more personal than long-existing anonymous ones), and some are whole-life biographical or autobiographical, rather than one-incident. But even some of those still seem very ballady. Perhaps one criterion is whether you can imagine telling the events as a story, rather than as a song.

Most Ballads aren’t explicitly judgemental. They are clear about actions which are right, wrong, or foolish, and probably secure in the moral framework that the audience will apply, but there’s usually little explicit moralising. Modern ballads may hammer the social or moral point rather more. Some will challenge accepted moral frameworks. The same applies to commentary on psychological or emotional states. In Ballads, people are frightened, angry, guilty or sad and that’s about it. Modern songs are more self-examining.

But I came to feel that the biggest difference that makes some narrative songs seem less ballady is style, both narrative and linguistic. Ballads’ action is very much to the point, and the language is compact and polished, even when it’s repetitive or a bit archaic. Many modern songs, though they do have strong narratives, lack both these qualities. I feel that there are three stylistic dialects (and to some extent vocabularies) in the full range of songs we deal with: Ballad, broadside (including pastoral), and modern (which reaches its extreme in the singer-songwriter voice). I’m not good enough at linguistic analysis to be clear about the differences, but I do think that I can feel when a song is traditional, rather than modern-composed. I know that Steve Ogden is starting a linguistic analysis of traditional songs, and maybe comparing these with broadside versions: should be interesting.

One feature of modern songs is conscious wordplay. The Ballads can have splendid passages. Lord Bateman:

She has rings, rings on every finger, and on her middle one she has three;
She has enough gold around her middle to buy Northumberland from under thee

and sometimes neat alliteration, but not things like Mike Waterson’s:

Her husband he was a hunk of a man, and a chunk of a man, and a drunk of a man;
He was a hunk of a drunken skunk of a man

in A Stitch in Time.

That’s as far as I’ve got in my understanding.

Here’s the list that grew, in no particular order – I think many more examples are available, but this is enough to be going on with – with some comments which some may find controversial. I’ll put the ones which seem to me to be most in the spirit of the old Ballads in bold. Many of these songs are now in the modern version of the oral tradition – they’re widely sung in varied arrangements, often by people who don’t know the original source and who learned their version from others’ cover versions, and some get changed a bit along the way.

I’ll be interested to see others’ examples and comments on this assortment.

Mike Waterson: A Stitch in Time; Winifer Odd

Cyril Tawney: Sally Free and Easy; The Ballad of Sammy’s Bar

Archie Fisher: Witch of the West-Mer-Lands
So hyper-ballady that it’s almost a parody. I think it’s great, especially as done by Alice Jones.

Paul Carbuncle: Pig Farmer
This may not be known outside the EMidlands, so here’s a link. The same story cropped up in an episode of Gentleman Jack – and in a contemporary murder case. It’s probably been going on for a long time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHamTErPzOg

Marty Robbins: El Paso
Jeff’s Blake’s suggestion, and a great modern example. There are probably others in this tradition, and lots in Country Music generally, but I don’t know that genre very well.

Woody Guthrie: Ballad of Tom Joad; Pretty Boy Floyd
And lots more, I guess. Guthrie seems to me to be much like a modern broadside writer, rapidly producing songs on current issues for popular consumption, only a very much better writer than most.

Bob Dylan: Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol (though the moralising isn’t traditional); Ballad of Hollis Brown – maybe, though it’s very poeticised.

Eric Bogle: The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

Angeline Morrison: Slave No More

Eliza Carthy: Mr Magnifico: though stylistically not very ballady

Bertolt Brecht: Pirate Jenny/The Black Freighter; The Wife of the Soldier

Richard Thompson: Galway to Graceland; 1952 Vincent Black Lightning

Linda Thompson: No Telling (What a Love Song Can Do)

Chris Wood: Hollow Point; One in a Million
I find ‘One in a Million’ too syrupy, really, though it’s definitely a traditional theme: appears widely in folktales. Maybe turning it into a song, with the requirements of rhyme and rhythm, softened the language too much.

Gillan Welch: Caleb Meyer

Show of Hands: Galway Farmer

Dave Sudbury: King of Rome

Then there’s a lot of stuff which is more traditional in feel or origins, especially from the U.S.A., but is post-Child:
All those ‘Murder Ballads’: Ekefield Town, Omie Wise, Little Sadie, Tom Dooley/Dula
Well, they’re called ballads, and they’re narrative, but they’re all rather short, and the action is horribly predictable. Tom Jones’ Delilah (written by Mason/Reed and not really the jolly sing-along it has become), maybe comes out of the same tradition.
Young Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe His Corn
Everyday Dirt
Billy the Kid
Frankie & Johnnie
Stackolee
Charles Guiteau (must be post-1881, after all)
Death of Ben Hall/Streets of Forbes

The ‘New Folk Police’: should traditional content be censored?

There has recently been a discussion on Twitter about a supposed ‘New Folk Police’ who want to ban (or at least discourage) the performance of songs with too much violence, misogyny, prejudice…. I guess this replaces the ‘Old Folk Police’ who wouldn’t allow modern songs, guitars, songs which weren’t From Your Cultural Background, whatever, in their clubs. I’m not sure either kind of cancel culture really exists or existed, but the issue of acceptability or suitability of traditional songs for modern performance is an interesting one, and is something I think about in choosing what to sing myself. I didn’t get involved in the Twitter debate, partly because it’s not a good idea to get involved in Twitter debates, but also because I find it difficult to follow arguments and responses the way Twitter handles them, and it’s not made for presenting any extended argument.

So, I’m writing something here, partly to clarify ideas for myself. [later note: it seems I come out as a pretty Politically Correct Singer. If my wokeness is likely to offend you, you could stop reading now].

I have recently come to think that there are some (a very few) songs which I just find unacceptable. I have resolved to walk out the next time someone sings that jolly rape song The Two Magicians: not sure if I’ll have the nerve to do it. Same goes for the anti-Semitic blood libel song Little Sir Hugh. I think there are probably some others which don’t come up in discussion (or performance) because no-one would find them acceptable – like whatever a British equivalent of the Horst Wessel song might be, or The Ballad of William Calley (still available on YouTube, last time I looked) in praise of Lt Calley, who was convicted of murdering 20+ Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre. There must be plenty of 19C songs mocking African-Americans and using the N-word which came out of the great popularity of Minstrel troupes in Britain, though some less offensive songs from that tradition do still get sung, like Stephen Foster’s Hard Times [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE8L843iUy4].

[There are interesting discussions about Foster’s attitudes to slavery and how that’s reflected in his songs. For instance http://andrewhidas.com/the-stephen-foster-problem/ and Steven Saunders The Social Agenda of Stephen Foster’s Plantation Melodies American Music, Vol. 30: 275-289]

There seemed to be three strands in the Twitter discussion: songs with extreme and gratuitous violence, the whole spectrum of misogyny in traditional songs, and the rights and responsibilities of the performer. Hunting songs and animal cruelty were also mentioned. Here’s my understandings and preferences.

Violence: Classic ballads, which are old-fashioned and dramatic, are quite likely to contain violence. If that’s essential to the plot most people don’t object. Even the bloodbath at the end of Little Musgrave/Matty Groves makes sense in context (two deaths in this version; some have three): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtVkYMFueWs

I’m pretty comfortable with The Baron of Brackley, which has an indeterminate number of Highlanders slaughtered in an argument over cattle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stN21MWL6s8. It’s true-life crime, anyway: it records an incident from September 7, 1666 (though the details in the ballad don’t match the court records). I sing it myself.

One defence of the violence in traditional songs is in catharsis or in working through something that does have to be faced. So Fay Hield on Twitter said:

For me, narrative violence is very welcome in songs, it gives a space to explore it, work out how we feel about it and shape our understanding of the world – in the same way we do with horror movies/soap operas etc…

But sometimes the cruelty seems to overwhelm every other aspect. Prince Heathen is an example (I’m not providing a link) where increasing privation and humiliation is loaded on a woman to force her into submission. I showed the words to someone who isn’t familiar with old ballads, and they said ‘well, it’s just porn, isn’t it?’ But maybe Andrew Rose, the British Sailor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAfeItxM0FU), about a captain’s sadistic treatment and murder of a young sailor, and his subsequent punishment: ‘Captain Rogers, you must die’, is a Dreadful Tale rather than being at all titillating.

Traditional song violence is often overshadowed by that in popular TV crime series.

That example leads into the subcategory of

Violence Against Women This is so common that there’s a genre name: Murder Ballads. I once heard Tom Paley say ‘most of American Traditional Song is about a guy taking his girl out on a date and killing her’. A bit of an exaggeration, but there are a lot (more in the US than UK, I think). He may have been introducing Willow Garden/Rose Connelly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9HjllAe9oI

Of course, these really are true-life crime songs: you can find direct parallels in the newspapers pretty much every week. One defence of these songs in the Twitter debate was that they served as a Useful Warning To Young Women. I wondered if that was really necessary: many young women will have got the point already.

Willow Garden shows one issue with many of these songs: aesthetically, they’re really well-made, and are compelling pieces. I used to sing Harry Cox’s Apprentice Boy/Ekefield Town: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Igd1mPR3Q), a splendid song, quite blithely, struck by how closely it matched current cases, but I gradually turned against it. At least it is a sombre song, which doesn’t underplay the cold brutality of the killing, and has the promise of damnation (and hanging) for the killer: ‘No rest, no rest, all that long night, no rest no rest could I find. The fire and the brimstone all around my head did shine.’

Clarence Ashley’s Little Sadie is brilliant (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXGAj1e3SdE), but it’s just too casual and ironic: ‘Went out last evening about half-past nine. Met Little Sadie and I blowed her down. Went back home and I went to bed .44 smokeless under my head’ – and eventually, in some versions, the judge says ‘I don’t know whether to hang you or not, but this killing of women just has to stop.’ Well, yes.

Even more casually, I can’t be doing with the happy family singalong style of Banks Of The Ohio.

BUT, I found a compromise (or ‘providing context’ as it can be spun) by only doing Ekefield Town when I can pair it with John Jones’ song for Oysterband The Oxford Girl (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZrQ-nplRes) which summarises and deconstructs all the excuses/justifications which might apply in the murder ballads. Brilliantly constructed song, too.

General Misogyny It’s not always murder: there’s rape as well (and quite a bit of that is date rape – that’s not a modern concept). You can find your own examples, but Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ItLkca3Gfk) will do.

Cunning girls can often escape the threat of rape – or gang rape in the case of Maid on the Shore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EkJS8R-Z0E by Martin Carthy (When his daughter Eliza recorded it many years later, she left out the rape threat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HJYwBDN-nY). So there are plenty of songs that give agency to women (courage, ingenuity, sometimes magic) in the face of attack. This leads into an important point that Helen Lindley (https://helenlindleymusic.com/home) made in the Twitter discussion:

The indirect stuff [devaluing of women] is the dangerous bit, and the bit we are very able to change when singing. I’m still toying with this myself, and where to draw lines of what I find acceptable. It goes right down to women mostly being described by looks and men by character. This depiction of women is currently my main area of interest. I’m finding old ballads where the woman is the one in control, or at least making sure she gets what she wants, but these are the songs no longer being sung and the tunes are often non-existent. I want to bring these songs, that portray women taking the initiative, out because I think it’s important to show the songs did exist in antiquity. And it gives us another kind of song without the woman being a possession. Though I’ve noticed in many of these songs that all the men have names, even the servants, but the central woman is ‘the Lady’ or ‘the daughter’ so giving her a name is important to me. I guess we’re all working together but separately on improving the content we perform.

That statement ‘we are very able to change when singing’ got me thinking about small changes I had made – and could make more – in my versions of traditional songs. I’ve written a little bit about that elsewhere: https://folkbeeston.club/weekly-blog/f/18th-august

Broken Token Ballads are a special kind of abuse.
The fidelity of a left-behind sweetheart is tested by a returning soldier or sailor telling her that her lover is dead, sometimes with heart-rending details, and sometimes the ‘stranger’ offers himself as an instant substitute. Only when the bereaved lover tears her hair/falls down in agony/faints/angrily rejects the stranger does he reveal that it was all a lie and he really is her absent lover after all, sometimes producing a ring or other token shared between them to establish his identity, though most ‘broken token’ songs don’t actually feature a token. What a bastard. And they live happily ever after – or perhaps she is trapped in an abusive, coercive relationship.
[There are few non-exploitative broken token songs and stories, where the returning lover is difficult to recognise (missing legs, dreadful scars, ravages of time, etc.) and there’s no deception. My version of the story Jack and the Coat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnqO34SzQrk&t=9s) has that feature.]

The Banks of Claudy is the most extreme example. The girl is lost, wandering ‘in sorrow and despair’, on a ‘dark and stormy night’, looking for Claudy Banks, where she was told she might find her lover. However when she does meet him ‘she did not know me, I being all in disguise’, and he tells her that her lover was drowned all on the coast of Spain. Only when she’s done the ‘falling in despair’ bit, with hand-wringing, hair-tearing, and vowing not to take another man but to wander all her life for his sake, does he reveal himself (ripping off the disguise, maybe) as that ‘handsome (or faithful) young man, and who you thought was slain’ and promises that they’ll ‘never part again’. Pig.

But it’s a great song, otherwise, in which love conquers all. The Plains of Waterloo is an even better song, not quite so ruthlessly exploitative, but throwing in the pathetic news that the lover’s fictitious last words were of his love ‘far from Waterloo’. I’m not sure whether to give up singing these or not.

Rights and responsibilities: should we be allowed to cancel aspects of our Precious Heritage culture, or censor or bowdlerise it to suit effete modern tastes?

I guess this is where the ‘policing’ comes in. Yes, of course we’re allowed, as performers (as academics or archivists things might be different). We’re performing our choice of material in our choice of way, and we’re not bound by any fixed canon. It’s not that kind of tradition. I have no qualms about altering anything I sing, in all kinds of ways, to suit the way I want to sing it. That doesn’t bother me.

Someone suggested that singers have no personal responsibilities because they’re only acting, after all, and everyone knows that it’s all artifice, and actors aren’t responsible for the scripts they’re given. I don’t buy this. Fair enough if you are an actor, doing Iago, or one of the Nazis in an Indiana Jones film, but standing up as an individual making your own choice of what to communicate is quite different. That interpretation would also devalue all the positive things people aim to convey in their performances, because they would be ‘only acting’ as well – goodbye protest songs.

I think there are one or two songs which are set up as character pieces – Sam Hall, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD5HlFbPrgw. I guess it’s reasonable to claim that as role play. Never wanted to sing it myself.

With the exception of the extreme examples mentioned above, maybe people have the right to sing what they want – but that does mean that they are obliged to bear the consequences of their choices. There are many songs which cause me to think somewhat badly of those people who choose to sing them, and if you’re known for singing stuff that others find objectionable, they also have the right to not ask you back, or not to be keen to invite you to sing. Rights are balanced by responsibilities.

Postscript: a category of traditional song that didn’t come up in the discussion is the sexually explicit ones, which are often very misogynistic. Four and Twenty Virgins/The Ball of Kirriemuir, The Good Ship Venus, Down the Back Alley Where Nobody Goes, Three German Officers Crossed the Rhine… There are lots of them. I think they’re the only songs, apart from nursery rhymes, that I learned in a traditional, oral, community-based way. My only real folk songs, maybe. Not heard much in the clubs, though there are some bowdlerised versions on YouTube, and Louden Wainwright did do a fairly straight version of Venus on the Rogues Gallery CD.