BROADSIDE BALLADS IN AMERICA

by Tom Faigin

In the early 1600’s English printers, looking for new sources of revenue, hired writers to compose ballads for sale the next day on the streets of London. Because they were printed on a broad sheet of paper, they were called "broadside ballads". Villagers and farmers, coming to the big city to trade and sightsee, often bought them for a penny and carried them back home where they were sung to popular tunes of the day. These broadsides, aside from their musical value, served as newspapers, often recounting battles at sea, public hangings of pirates and criminals, and sad tales of separated lovers. Although these ballads wore hastily written, much of the poetry filtered into the community where it was reworked into the local oral tradition. In this process which continued for roughly about 250 years, songs like "The Trees They Do Grow High", "Stewball", "Fennario" and many other broadsides were sung on both sides of the Atlantic in ever increasing numbers.

Sam Hinton (a writer for the CTMS Journal) explained how the great Harvard scholar Francis Child cataloged 305 separate English and Scottish ballads. Some were tragic, some sad or funny, but all of them emphasized dramatic action, used lively dialogs between the characters and avoided moral judgments. Since they were sung and retold for hundreds of years, they had a lean, classic quality about them. By contrast, the broadsides often had weak plots, many trivial details and obtrusive moral opinions on the part of the narrator. Child considered these to be of inferior quality as poetry, and since he was not a musician, found no good reason to include them in his collections. It remained for others to recognize their value and bring them to the attention of the public.

One such person was Cecil Sharp (1859—1924) an Englishman who was trained as a pianist and vocalist. Sharp, as a young man, became aware that native songs and dances were dying out and young people were losing their valuable heritage. Accordingly, around 1903 he began to collect songs throughout the English countryside, convincing older singers that their music was important as well as entertaining. Many older singers of the time feared public ridicule, since most of the people were more receptive to music hall songs and other forms of popular entertainment. After spending about ten years befriending and collecting from this generation of singers, Sharp developed the realization that many of the songs Francis Child had collected twenty years earlier had vanished from the memories of the older singers. He next theorized that perhaps these missing songs might have been taken by immigrants from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales to America. Never a very healthy man, Sharp along with his secretary Maude Karpeles, embarked on two extensive and exhausting trips throughout the Appalachian mountains. Although he traveled by mule and buckboard over virtually non—existent roads, he collected over a thousand songs between 1914—1918. He had to overcome great physical hardship, illness, and fear and suspicion on the part of the shy and reserved mountain musicians. There seemed to lie a high correlation between a community‘s economic progress and the loss of interest in native culture. His greatest volume of collecting was done in the most remote regions, where he found not only poverty but much self sufficiency. People bad to grow their own food and make their own music or go without. The missionary schools in these areas were often contemptuous of native folklore, considering it inferior to that which came from the larger cities.

Everywhere Cecil Sharp traveled, he quietly talked to people, gained their confidence, and then notated by hand the melodies they sang while his secretary wrote down the lyrics. He found most of the ballads that Francis Child had collected in England were alive and flourishing in Appalachia, although often their titles had been changed. For example, Child ballad #20, "The Cruel Mother", was called in America, "Down By Tire Greenwood Sidey—O". He also collected hundreds of broadside ballads that had improved and mellowed with age. You might enjoy looking through Sharp’s book, English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians at the public library.

(Editors Note): Tom Faigin has taught guitar and banjo students in the San Fernando Valley since 1960 and in addition to being on staff of many schools, music organizations and colleges, he currently is a guitar instructor and lecturer on the History of Folk Music at Cal. State Los Angeles since 1982.