A new Child ballad

[Jonathan Lighter]

Fred, my impression is that there are no more than one or two cases among the 305 ballads that Child incuded in his second and definitive collection in which he suppressed a line or a stanza.  In his notes to the comic "The Keach in the Creel," he complains of a passage, which he pointedly declines to specify, as being "brutal and shameless almost beyond example." Since then, scholars have been unable to identify with certainty what passage he meant. It may be the one where the mother dsays, "There's a man in our daughter's bed!" The father then goes directly into the daughter's room to look. The girl explains the noise by claiming she's been praying over the family bible.

  So Child does seem to have been disturbed by "R" rated situations.  Legman asserts that Child suppressed a manuscript stanza in "Trooper and Maid," but I don't know if this is true. Be that as it may, the phrase "a kick in the arse" appears in "Robin Hood and the Bishop of Hereford," and "Sheath and Knife" involves brother-sister incest. So at least on some occasions Child simply gritted his teeth and followed his scholarly conscience.

  I believe that Legman's accusation is primarily that Child refused to recognize certain ballads that had a rather strong, albeit humorous, sexual content.  He was aware of "The Crab Fish" from the Percy Ms. but rejected it. There may have been some broadside ballads with  sexual content of a folkloric kind which he also rejected. Peter Buchan's Scottish Ms. of "Secret Songs of Silence" - all rather mildly bawdy by today's standards but hot stuff to Victorians - was available to Child but he made no use of it. There may be a (very) few other songs that Child rejected for their unabashed bawdry, but it is equally likely that he did not consider them to have had enough of a story. Nor do Child's notes make any reference to Burns's _Merry Muses_.

  Legman worked for decades on a book to be called "The Ballad Unexpurgated," but my impression is that few of the songs he collected had the strong narrative quality that would qualify them as "ballads," strictly speaking. Nevertheless, some Ph.d needs to complete Legman's valuable project.

  JL



  YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Fred Shapiro
Subject: Re: A new Child ballad
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Speaking of Child, I have a question for Jon or anyone else knowledgeable
about Child. Harvard Magazine recently had a profile of Child which
explicitly described him as a courageous scholar who did not at all censor
his materials. I believe, however, that Gershon Legman frequently
denounced Child as a prig who hurt scholarship greatly by extensively
censoring his materials. Which is the correct view?

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press
Yale Law School ISBN 0300107986
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
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