Foreword

doi:10.5871/bacad/9780197262887.002.0005

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Foreword

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https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197262887.002.0005

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vii–x

Published:

August 2003

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Ballad studies over the years have been both nurtured and overshadowed by the study of the longer, more complex, and—in the opinion of many—more impressive grand classic epics. On the one hand, the very matter of taking orally transmitted narratives seriously—which has become increasingly dynamic since the days of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord¹—has provided scholars with exciting new perspectives on the function and importance of oral traditions generally, and has led to re-examinations of ballads in particular. On the other hand, the privileging of massive Greek and Serbian texts as models has solidified and promoted the idea that longer is better. Indeed, Lord rather proudly provides an account of one Serbian singer who learned a brief epic from another guslar and soon was singing it in a version he had expanded to several times its original length.² Clearly, in the field of epic, size matters.

In contrast, the popular ballad is typically focused on a single incident, and is delivered in a very spare, often elliptical, manner that emphasizes situation and dramatic impact more than narrative detail. If one is looking for length and narrative complexity, the ballads seem at first relatively insubstantial in comparison to epics and sagas. Small wonder, then, that those ballads whose texts seem incomplete or ‘fragmental’ have received very little attention at all, beyond the lament that some singers apparently do not have the capacity to recall or perform a ‘whole’ text properly. But this is clearly an academic lament; one doesn’t hear it from the ballad singers or their audiences. Indeed, if meaningful expression can exist only in ‘complete’ texts, why is it that so-called ballad fragments have enjoyed such a stubborn longevity in oral tradition? Admittedly, not all singers have the same talents; at the same time, however, people singing for friends and neighbours do not enjoy making fools of themselves, nor do they have a compulsion to sing things in public that have no meaning for themselves or their audiences. Moreover, interviews with skilled ballad singers,³ as well as scrutiny of multiple performances by the same singers, demonstrate that typical singers seldom if ever sing the same ballad the same way. Thus, we can probably say that while there is such a thing as a recognizable ballad, there may not be any such thing as a single, complete text. But the issue lies deeper than dynamic variations in ballad performance, for the more elliptical a rendering is, the more responsibility falls on the audience to reach for what the song is all about.

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