218 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
The various versions of “The Gypsie Laddie” point up a signal trait of bal-
ladry: the detachment with which many ballads relate their story. The strophic
form itself is partly responsible, parceling out the tale in repeated patterns of
verse. And rather than providing a commentary on the words, the tune serves
as a neutral framework for their delivery, as in psalmody. All the ballad’s action-
fi lled events are announced to the same music; the repetitiousness keeps them
all on the same emotional level. A sung ballad, then, is typically no exercise in
animated storytelling but a sober, impersonal ritual.
The version heard in the accompanying recording (LG 9.2) is sung by Jean
Ritchie. The youngest of fourteen children in a musical family, Ritchie was born
in 1922 in Viper, Kentucky, in the Cumberland Mountains. The family’s singing
was recorded in the 1930s by the folklorist Alan Lomax (see chapter 14), and in
the 1940s Ritchie moved to New York, where she participated in the urban folk
revival described in chapter 17. She became well known for her singing of tradi-
tional songs, sometimes unaccompanied, as here, and sometimes accompany-
ing herself on guitar or Appalachian dulcimer (also called mountain dulcimer),
a folk instrument with a diatonic fretboard, two drone strings, and a melody
string, usually held in the player’s lap.
Ritchie learned this version of Child 200 from a family member, Jason
Ritchie. It does not correspond exactly with any of the versions preserved by
either Child or Sharp, nor is its pentatonic melody one of the tunes written down
by Sharp. Yet all of its events can be found in one or another of the many versions
that have been collected. Its ten stanzas begin and end as narration, with the
dialogue between husband and wife in the central stanzas. The closing stanza,
in which the g ypsy abandons his lover, is found in relatively few versions; the
majority end with the lady staying with the gypsy.
W hereas in England Cecil Sharp had encountered only aging ballad singers,
in the southern Appalachians he found the English ballad tradition still fl ourish-
ing in the early twentieth century. Here the songs were “interwoven with the
ordinary avocation of everyday life.”
Olive Campbell turned up some of the same ballads that interested Sharp,
but she also collected other music she encountered in the mountains, including
religious songs and hymns, popular music, and instrumental tunes. Campbell
shared Sharp’s belief that some of the songs in oral tradition were aesthetically
better than others. She even imagined a social role that the better songs might
play. In 1916 she wrote that the folk movement in the mountains “seeks the rec-
ognition and preservation of all that is native and fi ne.... We would like to have
the people recognize the worth and beauty of their songs; we would like to have
them displace the inferior music that is now being sung there.” The “inferior”
music of Tin Pan Alley and ragtime was part of a larger change that industrial-
ization was bringing to Appalachia, as a way of life rooted in subsistence farming
was being transformed into one dominated by coal mining.
Campbell was a key fi gure in the founding of Appalachian settlement schools,
where rural children were taught to value their traditional crafts and folkways. A
school Campbell founded in 1925 and named after her deceased husband, the John
C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, continues today to teach
folk crafts from basketry to blacksmithing, with a special emphasis on folk music.LG 9.2the value of folk music172028_09_205-230_r3_ko.indd 218 23/01/13 11:29 AM