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XXI. The English Ballad in Jamaica: A Note Upon the Origin of the Ballad Form
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In collecting stories and songs from the Jamaica negroes during the summer“ of 1919 and the winter of 1921, I was constantly on the lookout for traditional English ballads, some of which I hoped to find handed down in their older forms as a result of two hundred and fifty years of English occupation of the island. A fair number of secondary ballads were easily accessible, some of them preserved with an English intonation which proved them to have been memorized from cultivated English singers. Among these were the Wurlean Woman, and the ballad of Adinah sung to the same tune as the New England ballad of Springfield Mountain. But of traditional ballads of the better class, both words and music, I secured only the widespread song of Little Musgrove. Naturally I asked myself what had become of old ballad forms in Jamaica.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1924
References
1 See Barry, Mod. Lang. Notes, XXVIII. 1-5; Belden, Journ. Am. Folklore, XXV. -18; Tolman, Journ. Am. Folk-lore, XXIX. 192-193.
2 See Barry, Journ. Am. Folk-lore, XXII. 366f.; Lomax, Cowboy Songs, N. Y. 1910, pp. 315-7.
3 See Child No. 81 (II. 242-260) ; Sharp, English Folk Song from the Southern Appalachians, N. Y. and Lond. 1917, pp. 78-89; Rimbault, Illustrations to Percy's Reliques, p. 92; Journ. Am. Folk-lore, XXIII. 371-374; XXV. 182; XXX. 311f
4 Jekyll, “Jamaica Song and Story,” Pubs. Folk-lore Soc. LV. 14; 26; 58; 65; Parsons, Folk-tales from Andros Island, Memoirs Am. Folk-lore Soc. XIII. 152-157.
5 Child No. 95 (II. 346-355); Jacobs, More English Fairy-tales, pp. 12-15; Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, pp. 106-108; Folk-lore Journ. VI: 144; Journ. Am. Folk-lore, XXI. 56; Parsons, op. cit., 152-154; Jekyll, op. cit., 58-59.
6 Sharp, op. cit., pp. 290-291 and note, 334.
7 See Barry, Journ. Am. Folk-lore, XVIII. 51-54; Cf. Tremearne, Hausa Superstitions and Customs, pp. 342-345.
8 The song was dictated by Margaret Morris, eighty-five years old. Later a chorus of four Maroon men sang it into the phonograph, from which record the music is transcribed. Compare Sharp's stanza,
Lay still, lay still, little Matthy Groves,
And keep me from the cold
It's only my father's shepherd-boy
Driving the sheep from the fold.
9 Jekyll, op. cit., pp. 283-284.
10 “Jamaica Anansi Stories,” Memoirs Am. Folk-lore Soc. XVII. S.
11 Ibid. p. 173.
12 Folk-games of Jamaica., Vassar College Pubs. in Folk Lore, 1922
13 J. Torrend, Specimens of Bantu Folk-lore from Northern Rhodesia, Lond. and N. Y., 1921.
14 Heli Chatelaine, “Folk-tales of Angola,” Memoirs Am. Folk-lore Soc. 1894, 1.
15 Henri A. Junod, Les Chants et les Contes des Ba-Ronga de la baie de Delagoa, Lausanne, 1897.
16 Memoirs Am. Folk-lore Soc. III and XIII, (1895, 1918).
17 Op. cit., pp. 3-6.
18 Op. cit., p. 77.
19 Steere, Swahili Tales as told by Natives of Zanzibar, Lond. 1889, Preface, p. vii.
20 Cf. Parsons, Andros Island, pp. 62-65; Cronise and Ward, Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider & the other Beef, pp. 160-163; Renel, Contes de Madagascar, II. 167-168; 283-286. In Cronise & Ward, from West Africa, the “hard-headed” stranger persists in setting his trap in “Devil's bush” and the pigeon he catches sings the song, which runs in this fashion:
Daddy come loose me…
Daddy kare me go nah ho'se…
Daddy kill me one tem …
In the Madagascar version, the trapper persists in eating the child of a magic bird, in spite of the mother's warning. The song which is reported without “incremental repetition,” runs,—
Il l'a mangé, hêlas! cet homme é
Il l'a mangé l'enfant de l'Antsaly
Il l'a mangé, hélas, oh!
21 See “Mr. Miacca,” in Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, p. 171; The Godfather, Grimm 42; “The Disobedient Boy,” in Parsons, Andros Island, pp. 155-156.
The Jamaica version and the song were obtained from Mrs. Charles Wilson of Jamaica, who had them from her negro mammy.
22 In the familiar tale of the girl courted by a transformed bull, one storyteller gave the transformation song as follows:—
See me, Nancy, a wind,
T'ink a me, Nancy, me come!
Another sang it as,
Me a Miles a moo, me a Miles a moo,
Fe me Gracie is a fine girl.
Fe me Gracie have a kill her!
Pong, me lady, pong!
A third, finally, as,
Dirt i' room a yerry,
Double bing, double bing!
Dirt i' room a yerry,
Double bing, double bing!
Dirt i' room a yerry,
Double bing, double bing!
Belling belling beng,
bell i' leng,
beng!
23 See my Jamaica stories, op. cit., p. 130.
24 This is no new idea. Mr. Jacobs developed it in his note to “Childe Rowland” in English Fairy Tales. He says, “It is indeed unlikely that the ballad itself began as continuous verse, and the cante-fable is probably the protoplasm out of which both ballad and folk-tale have been differentiated, the ballad by omitting the narrative prose, the folk-tale by expanding it.” I chanced upon this note of Mr. Jacobs's after having reached my own conclusi n, but his process of reasoning is identical with my own and he goes into some detail to show how many traces of the cank-fable occur in other forms of literature,— in the French of the Aucassin and Nicolette type, the Arabian, Indian, Persian, even Hebrew story-books; and what traces of it are to be found in our own folk-tale.
Mr. Gummere takes exception to Mr. Jacobs's thesis, as I think unjustly, on the ground that “under simple conditions, poetry breaks up into prose, but prose is not found in its transition to poetry.” (F. B. Gummere, Beginnings of Poetry, Lond. and N. Y. 1901, p. 71). Mr. Jacobs is not arguing, however, for the development of the prose tale into poetry, but for the survival of the poetic dialogue apart from the prose in which it was once imbedded.
25 Miss Pound says: “It is not, in fact, the presence of the refrain or of choral repetition that makes the Child pieces ballads. What is essential, if pieces are to be classified as ballads, is that they tell a story.” (Louise Pound, Poetic Origins and the Ballad, N. Y. 1921, p. 77).
26 Mr. Kittredge concludes, in his introduction to the Cambridge edition of Child's Ballads, “It appears, then, that there is no lack of characteristic traits—besides the general air of impersonality—which justify the conjecture that the history of balladry, if we could follow it back in a straight line without interruptions, would lead us to very simple conditions of society, to the singing and dancing throng, to a period of communal composition” (p. xxii).
Mr. Gummere thinks that the märchen “will do nothing for the origins of balladry; it follows an entirely different impulse, as any observer can determine for himself who watches the same group of children now playing ‘Ring round the Rosy’ or what-not, singing and shouting in concert with clasped hands and consenting feet, now sitting silent, absorbed, while some one tells them a story,” (English Ballad, p. 694). Mr. Gummere's own supposition in favor of communal dance as the original ballad substance is objected to by Miss Pound, who says, “There is no evidence that ballads are ever built up from dance songs, but a great deal that dance-songs may be built upon popular songs of all types” (op. cit. pp. 47-86).
The theory I am advocating by no means decides the folk or minstrel origin of any particular ballad; it merely supplies the ballad structure, the style, the content, as the product of a folk art, which any minstrel may have used later for his own purposes. That this usage consisted in a retouching of old material already existing in dialogue-song, is suggested by the very small success that modern literary imitators have had in reproducing both form and spirit of the old English ballad.
27 Mr. Moore, (“Omission of the Central Action in English Ballads,” Mod. Philol. II. 394), says, “The story so far as any exists, serves merely to furnish a background for the dialogue.”
Mr. Gummere finds characteristic the “abrupt dramatic openings with a dialogue only partially explained” (English Ballad, p. 84).
Mr. Courthope says, “Often compression led to obscurity and in many ballads the story would not have been understood if the singer had not prefaced it with some explanation. The effect may be compared to what would be presented by a paragraph of prose in which the sentences should be without connecting particles” (Hist. of Eng. Poetry, I. 461).
Miss Pound's argument (op. cit. 139-146) against the early origin of the dialogue ballad, as opposed to Prof. Hart's thesis (that the dialogue ballad is earlier than other ballad forms), is misleading because she bases her arguments upon literary rather than upon folk sources. The dramatic improvised dialogue of the folk certainly has nothing in common with the unwieldy literary quality of early epic. Rather it should be compared with the speeches in the more simple church drama.
28 Out of 502 Scandinavian ballads, according to Steenstrup, only 20 lack a refrain; out of 305 Child ballads, 106 show evidence of chorus or refrain. See Gummere, p. 74 note.
Mr. Gummere says “The refrain is an organic part of the ballad; it is of great structural importance …. ballads were at first always sung, and always had a refrain; the refrain is incontestably sprung from singing of the people at dance, play, work, going back to that choral repetition which seems to have been the protoplasm of all poetry,” (English Ballad. p. 73).
Mr. Moore (op. cit. p. 394), finds that in some fragments of ballad refrains “the story has been lost so completely that only a name or two serve to associate these fragments with the complete ballads. In such cases these chips seem to lose the chief characteristics of the old block and to become lyrical in character. It is the story which seems to drop out first. It is the situation with the lyrical comment upon it which remains.”
Mr. Cox (The Mediaeval Popular Ballad, pp. 85-88) shows how the refrain furnishes the “cohering quality” of the ballad because in it the listeners participate. It thus voices the mood of the ballad.
Professor Kittredge (op. cit. pp. xx-xxi) believes that the refrain “presupposes a crowd of singers and dancers” and is “a very ancient survival which brings the whole category of ballads into close relations with the singing dancing theory.”
29 Mr. Henderson (Scottish Vernacular Literature, p. 370) says of ballads: “In many ways…they bring us into immediate contact with the antique, pagan, savage, superstitious, elemental characteristics of our race. They have to some extent embalmed for us the essence of old forgotten romances, and the essence of what the old romances embalmed—the sentiments, passions, beliefs, forms of thought, and imaginative wonder and dread of our pagan ancestors.”