The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts by David Atkinson

Author:David Atkinson [Atkinson David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: folklore, ballade, literature, music, littérature, musique, ballad
ISBN: 9782821876354
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Published: 2019-05-05T19:11:11+00:00

Fig. 5.1 Carpenter Collection, Photo 101, James Madison Carpenter sitting in his Austin Roadster. Courtesy of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA.

His surviving recordings include many of the earliest known sound records of Child ballads from Britain, although many of them are of very poor quality. Besides displaying the effects of age (some of the cylinders are cracked or unplayable due to the effects of mould) and wear (there is considerable extraneous noise in the frequency range of the human voice), the recordings were evidently made at a slow (and variable) speed in order to fit as much recorded sound as possible on to a single cylinder. This was presumably done because of the cost and bulk of the cylinders, and for the same reason the recordings are in most instances not of entire songs but of, say, two to four stanzas of a ballad (though there are some exceptions to this rule of thumb). Subsequent to making the sound recording, his practice was to take down the words in full from dictation, usually on a portable typewriter, asking questions of the contributor when he thought it necessary and making handwritten adjustments to the dictated copy, which was later typed up as a fair copy. He also made his own transcriptions of both music and words from the recordings. This is presumed to have involved repeated playing of the cylinders, which contributed to their deterioration, and he later made lacquer disc copies, apparently at the suggestion of Alan Lomax. 38 Present-day scholars are able to make their own transcriptions of both music and words from tape and digital copies derived from the cylinder and disc recordings. 39

Of necessity, the written copies provide a different exemplification of the ballads from the sound recordings. And this is not simply because the sound recordings are not very good in this particular case. While on the one hand the written ballad cannot adequately represent such things as the quality or timbre, or even the local accent, of the recorded voice, on the other hand it can provide lexical, syntactic, and semantic precision that is not available from sound. Writing offers distinctions in matters such as:

spelling – e.g. the capacity to distinguish between homophones; to distinguish between English and Scots, and between British and American English; to flag up dialect words and hapax logomena (that is, words or forms of which only a single instance is found in a corpus)

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