216 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
ditties” (in Benjamin Franklin’s words) had furnished the tunes for new Amer-
ican lyrics, printed as broadside ballads. By the late 1800s, though, collectors
were interested not so much in these reworkings as in their earliest British
forms.THE CHILD BALLADS
For Francis James Child, a ballad was a literary creation, and he did his collecting
in libraries. Child was an 1846 Harvard graduate who pursued advanced stud-
ies in Germany and then returned to teach English at his alma mater. Searching
through printed sources and manuscripts, he published the texts (not the tunes)
of what he considered the oldest English-language ballads. Child’s monumental
work The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (fi ve volumes, 1883–98) contains texts
and commentary on 305 ballads and their variants. The repertory he collected is
now known as the Child ballads.
One Child ballad, “The Gypsie Laddie” (number 200 in Child’s collection),
tells of a band of gypsies stopping by the dwelling of an absent nobleman and
singing so sweetly that his wife falls in love with one of them, runs off with
him, and is then pursued by her husband. Child prints eleven versions and
comments on their textual differences. The husband is called Lord Cassilis in
three versions; Cassle, Castle, Corsefi eld, and Cashan in others; and in one
collected in America, Garrick. The laddie is variously known as Johnie, Jocki,
Faa (a last name), Gypsy Davy, and Gypsie Geordie. In some versions, the hus-
band fi nds his lady, then hangs gypsies—fi fteen of them, or sixteen, or seven.
In some, the lady regrets her change in status. In another, the gypsy denies an
interest in sex.
The dignifi ed language of the ballads, together with their ancient lineage
and the scholarship of Child and others, gave them academic prestige. And the
disagreement over origins sparked intellectual debate. American versions of
approximately one-third of Child’s ballads were located, leading many to think
of the ballad as the most important Anglo-American folk genre.CECIL SHARP AND OLIVE DAME CAMPBELL
For Francis Child, ballads were a remnant of a lost past that now could be found
only in libraries. But folk song study entered a new stage in the twentieth century,
when scholars realized that the ballads belonged to a living tradition. The new
collectors turned to the folk themselves for material, in an attitude of respect for
oral tradition and the people who still carried it on.
A key fi gure among the new generation of collectors was the British scholar
Cecil Sharp, whose career began in England under the aegis of the Folk-Song
Society, formed in 1898 to collect and publish folk songs. Its founders were musi-
cians determined, in the words of British composer Hubert Parry, to “save some-
thing primitive and genuine from extinction” and “put on record what loveable
qualities there are in unsophisticated humanity.” Parry called traditional folk
music one of “the purest products of the human mind,” though now in danger of
being driven out by “the common popular songs of the day.” Parry’s themes—the
age and authenticity of folk song, fear for its survival, the virtues of the folk, and“The Gypsie Laddie”172028_09_205-230_r3_ko.indd 216 23/01/13 11:29 AM