Ballad Extraction: It isn't really like Dentistry, Promise. Or maybe it is....

(Originally posted elsewhere, 25 January, 2005)

I come from two arrested singing families. By this, I don't mean my parents spent time in the slammer; they were both fairly mild-mannered people who would probably be quite surprised to see where I am and what I'm doing these days.

I mean that my grandparents on both sides had very musical families, but my mother and father were not themselves musical. They sang to me when I was a kid of course, and it was hard to stop me from singing pretty much from the day I was born, or at least that's what my mom used to say to people. My dad, who often said he never picked up a musical instrument except to move it off the chair he was about to sit in, had little use for the music his brothers and parents loved. He liked Nat King Cole and blues and jazz, and he used to work swapping 78rpm records out of juke boxes in Phenix City, Alabama. He ended up with a nice collection of lovingly worn 78s, which unfortunately got lost in my mom's move from South Carolina to Alabama.

It was hard to get my grandmother on my mom's side to sing. She'd been told by a teacher that she had a terrible voice. And she didn't, really. She had an ordinary voice. One day, I'll write more about how horrible school music teachers and the perfect-to-perform mentality have done their part to help destroy joyful music and the folk tradition some other time.

Anyway. I had two grandmothers, like most people who came from the Cleaver family. I had a grandmother Knighton (dad's side) and a grandmother Sanford (mom's side). Now, Grandmother Knighton was born Hill, and she came from a family that traveled all over the southeast but had its roots in Asheville, North Carolina. Grandmother Sanford was born Graham, and she'd lived all her life in Alabama but had extended family in Arkansas. Both grandmothers were only one or two generations removed from the mountains.

So while it was hard to get my Grandmother S to sing, she would occasionally oblige, sometimes with Hank Williams and sometimes with things a little older and wilder. My Grandmother K was a lot more willing to sing, and so was everybody else in her kitchen, when I visited her kitchen. Because she didn't like my mother, we didn't visit her very often. Although there were things about her I didn't like or understand, I would have loved to hear more of her singing and the singing of my uncles there in the back yard, too. She was one of those ladies who swept her back yard, and she had a room in her house that I distinctly remember as being completely filled with wire clothes hangers. Really.

My dad would sing to me. Mostly he sang pop songs from the 40s and 50s, but sometimes he'd reach back and sing something older. And all those songs got buried in my head, while I pursued choral music and classical training and got scholarships to places and won contests and stood for juries with people who thought, "How sweet, that little southern girl wants to be a real singer!"

A year at Interlochen taught me that I was really not cut out for a classical music career, and that's the only nice thing I can say about that. I learned a lot there, very little of it applicable to anything I do now, with the possible exception of some literature and poetry writing classes that served me very well.

So I went home to South Carolina, and then I spent a year at Clemson University. Going to Clemson was a poor decision, but the TA (teaching assistant) I had for my freshman English class (an honours survey; I tested out of the usual freshman English class) was no mistake. Aside from giving me a very nice cat at the end of the year, he was interested in folklore, and one of the things he gave our class to analyze was a ballad. It was Barbara Allen, and he talked about how it and most ballads like it came from England and Scotland, with side trips into Ireland and occasionally other places in Europe. I read the ballad, read the story, and it brought back a fragment of my grandmother Knighton's singing. I said, after class, "Mike, this is a song I learned from my grandmother, and she doesn't have anything to do with Scotland."

So after a semilong conversation about my grandmother, the TA took me down into the library and showed me some stuff about Appalachian versions of English and Scottish ballads. Now, I was already fascinated by British Isles culture, and this new link just served to whet my appetite more. I started reading a lot about ballads and balladry, collecting recordings, and that was that.

But really, for me, we're not talking about coming from a 'singing family,' like a Jean Ritchie. No; I come from an arrrested singing family, meaning the singingness has skipped a couple of generations. My grandmother sometimes only remembered a verse or two, and I only remember fragments of that.

So, from those broken memories, how do you rebuild a ballad and make it your own? I will tell you how I do it, and you may draw your own conclusions about me. I do not pass these songs off as songs my grandmother taught me. I do not lie about my background and say I grew up listening to old timers singing Lord Bateman late at night at the hootenanny up on the mountain after all the clogging was done. I have read several accounts of Jean Ritchie putting together several ballad fragments or changing words and adding bits to tunes to make them her own. She talks about this as a tradition in her family, and I think it's a perfectly valid part of the folk process. You will have to give me your definition of authenticity if you want to tell me that what I do isn't authentic, and you'll have to work hard to convince me that I'm not perfectly within the folk tradition. And if you want to go on at me about 'definitive' versions of traditional songs, go somewhere else, because I don't have that argument anymore. Definitive versions of traditional songs do not exist.

Because I don't have a rich oral tradition to draw on, I work from books. My sources are the usual: Child, Bronson, John Jacob Niles, Jean Ritchie, Sharp/Campbell, Lomax sometimes, Kennedy sometimes.

I have worked through ballad references enough to have passing familiarity with a lot of it. I won't say all; I don't think you really can be familiar with all that material: there's just too much. So when I'm looking for a new ballad, I go through, say, Niles first, because Niles was an Appalachian collector in the first half of the 20th century. He probably heard versions of ballads that either of my grandmothers might have heard. And I say, for example, "I'd like to work up an Appalachian version of 'The Elfin Knight' (Scarborough Fair)." So I see which tunes Niles found, where he found them, and then we work out from there. I say, "Let's do something modal, something haunting; there are too many raises and major resolutions in the version everybody knows (popularized by Paul Simon)." So I look for a tune that strikes my fancy. I play it on the harp, or I plug it into a music transcription program so I can listen to it, transpose it, play around with it. When I find the tune that most reminds me of something I might have heard in childhood or that moves me most, I look at the lyrics. Because so many of these ballads come down in fragments or variant versions, often I find tunes to which the singer could only remember a few verses. But that's OK, because I can sculpt the ballad out of what I have.

So let's say, using the Elfin Knight example, that I have found a natural minor tune I really like, in Niles, collected in Kentucky in 1908.

Lyrically, however, it's weak and doesn't put the ballad's story across. Here are the original lyrics:

Oh, water where there is no well,
Viny flow'r and rosemay tree,
Water where there is not well,
What name will my true love tell?
Viny flow'r and rosemay tree

(repeated lines are in every verse)

Oh, valley where no sun do fall,
Valley where no sun do fall,
Grows no crop no spring, no fall

If you should wash my linsey dress,
If you wash my linsey dress
And hang it in my mother's press

If you should wash my shirt of lace
If you wash my shirt of lace,
Be sure the buttons be in place

And then my acre 'side the sea,
Then my acre 'side the sea,
Will be halved up, my love, with thee.

So lyrically, this doesn't do what the ballad traditionally does. It's often a dialogue between the elfin knight and a lady, who assign a set of seemingly impossible lovers' tasks to one another before they can be revealed as one another's true loves. And it doesn't scan the way the ballad does in so many versions. There are five lines in each verse in the tune I chose, and rather than the changing lines being separated by the refrain lines as in the example stanza from the common version of the ballad below, two of the changing lines are sung after one another, so they must seem to follow a little more smoothly than in the common version.
Here is that example stanza, from the version many of us know:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there:
She once was a true love of mine.

So I needed to weave a version of this ballad, to this tune, that kept the original story. The two things I really liked about this set of lyrics were the plaintive 'search for true love' theme put out in the beginning, and the repeated lines themselves, which have a much more Appalachian feel to them than the 'parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme' line in the version everybody knows.

I decided to make it a dialogue of tasks but not really mention any characters, although that takes it away from the distance that many ballads have. I began to read it as a spell to make one's true love appear. I considered it as a riddle, a ritual, all kinds of lovers' tasks. And a projection.

And this, in the end, is what I came up with.

The Shirt of Lace

Oh, water where there is no well
Viny flow'r and rosemay tree
Water where there is no well,
What name will my true love tell?
Viny flow'r and rosemay tree

My true love can make a lacy shirt
My love can make a lacy shirt
Without no seam nor needlework

My true love can clear an acre's land
My love can clear an acre's land
Between the water and the sand

My true love can wash my shirt of lace
My love can wash my shirt of lace
Without no soap nor water base

My true love can plow that land with thorn
My love can plow that land with thorn
And plant it with one peppercorn

My true love can dry that shirt of mine
My love can dry that shirt of mine
From a leaf without tree or vine

My true love can reap my land with leather
My love can reap my land with leather
And tie it all up in a sparrow's feather

I will wear my shirt and walk my land
I'll wear my shirt and walk my land
It's then I'll hold my true love's hand

So that's how I extract ballads. Yes, I fit all those lyrics to that tune. The words are all crafted and put in their places by me. But that doesn't mean this is my song. This is a ballad that I have taken out of tunes and texts and fiddled with until it suited me, and when I sing it, I won't ever insinuate that I wrote it, not even a little bit. It's not mine. It's not really my grandmother's. I think it's Kentucky's. Or maybe Asheville's. It belongs more to the mountain than to me.

If people are interested, I'll post the other extraction I did this past week, a version of "Little Sparrow," which is an Appalachian interpretation of "Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies."