LL-L "Songs" 2002.10.11 (05) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 11.OCT.2002 (05) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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 A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
 L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic
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From: George M Gibault <gmg at direct.ca>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2002.10.11 (04) [E]

Fellow Lowlanders/Appalachian Highlanders,

Hi! Old ballads are a wonderful linguistic gold mine. In the late 1800s
James Francis Child published a classic collection of traditional English
and Scots ballads (narrative songs) now known as the Child Ballads.
Collectors such as Cecil Sharpe published dozens of versions of these from
England and Appalachia early in the twentieth centuries, and in the 1960s
professor Bertrand Bronson of Berkeley published several volumes of those
which had been collected together with their melodies.

Jean Ritchie did a 2 album set of her family's Child Ballad versions from
eastern Kentucky for Folkways Records - still available from the
Smithsonian Institute on tape. The School of Scottish Studies has produced
an album of them and a number of performers from the 60s folk revival such
as the Corries, Jean Redpath and Ewan McColl in Scotland, Maddy Prior and
Steeleye Span in England and Peggy Seeger, Hedy West, and Custer La Rue in
America have recorded many wonderful Child Ballad versions. The old English
Topic Label is a great source for them , and at least a few years ago
actual field recordings or tapes of them were available from the Library of
Congress collection.

A huge collection of traditional folk songs sung by the ordinary  folk of
the British Isles is now available on cd for anyone who wants to hear real
dialects this is the pace. The series is called "The Voice of the People"
and is on the Topic label. There are dozens of artists who have recorded
Child Ballad variants as part oft heir repertoire - but only a few have
made it a major focus. (Early Joan Baez records, for example)

Ballads often preserve old language and old folklore - for example old
Appalachian expressions such as "down in yanders holler" or remote
pronunciations such as "He stobbed her to the hort" even sometimes
preserving Scottish words needed to sustain the rhyme such as "dee" for die
in some versions of Mary Hamilton. One of my favourites comes from a
version of Little Musgrove in North Carolina called "Mattie Groves"

Get up from their you naked man
Get up put on some clothes
For I won't have it said in the North Scotland
That a naked man I slow (for slew)

or a phonetic reading of one verse of the popular bluegrass song "Rabbit In
the Log" would come out:

There's a rabbit in the log and I ain't got no dog
How will I git him? I know
I'll git me a braar (for briar) and twist in his haar (for hair)
And thet way I'll git him I know.

In the Ballad Sir Lionel (known in North America as Old Bangham) a witch
and a magic boar figure along with pagan tree lore and sacrifice -
including the fascinating line:

"Old Bangham drew his wooden knife and twined that wild boar of its life"
this after the wild boar heard his horn on "temple hill" and came with such
a crash that he "broke down both oak and ash" some scholars have suggested
the wooden knife - a strange choice - is really a Woden knife. Other
amazing archaisms that show up include heretical elements from what appears
to be an underground stream of folk Christianity - perhaps Gnostic? So, in
one of Jean Ritchie's ballads the enquiry is made
"Are you the Queen of Heaven she asked - or are you the Mary Magdalene come
to pardon all our sins?"

One interesting note on the language of ballads - as different dialects
came into contact - sometimes different versions of the same word would
coexist in the same text! - such as law and laigh for low in Scots. Poets
always liked a good rhyme better than linguistic purity it seems.

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