Subject: RE: Origins: Child Ballads: US Versions Part 5
From:
Jim Carroll
Date: 14 May 13 - 04:05 AM
"That is 100% incorrect."
Quite honestly Richie, like you, and everybody here, I simply don't know - nor does anybody else. Personally, I'm not sure I care enough to go into a matter I believe to be not provable at this stage of the game.
What does concern me is something I find increasingly distressing; the tendency to debunk what little information we do have on the flimsiest of evidence; the fact that this is often done with definitive statements by referring to past researchers as liars, charlatans and fakers leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth. I have seen this done (in somewhat derisory terms) with Sharp, Buchan, Christie.... and many others whose work has given me a lifetime of pleasure and the little knowledge I have on these subjects.
Steve wrote earlier - "There is nothing wrong with scholars having misgivings about the honesty of collectors/antiquarians"
Yes there damn well is unless you come with definitive proof that they have been lying and distorting their information.
If we discussed the work of teachers or architects or engineers in the same terms as we discuss folk song researchers we'd end up in the law courts, or at the very least, by getting (and deserving) a smack in the mouth.
I was delighted when I heard that Dave Harker was intending to re-examine the work of the early collectors - until I read 'Fakesong', which I believe to be little more than a hit-list of all those who have laid the ground for our understanding - it's a rather unpleasant technique that seems to have caught on.
For interest, I have scanned down what Hustvedt had to say about Buchan and would recommend the piece on Jamie Rankin in 'Last Leaves'
Jim Carroll
"One of the many ballad collectors with whom Sharpe came to be associated was the much-belabored Peter Buchan. In the accumulation of texts this Aberdeenshire man was something of a phenomenon; as an editor he may be counted among the most puzzling of the latter-day devotees of the science. For pure persistency in a thankless task he deserves a better memorial than contemporary and later critics have been inclined to give him.
Some account of his various manuscript collections may serve to put his published works in proper perspective. In 1827 he came up to Edinburgh with a huge folio collection for which he had been accumulating materials for more than ten years. The next year a large part of this hoard was published. He continued to collect by his own peripatetic exertions and by the aid of the blind itinerant1 who has shared obliquely in Buchan's notoriety. Still bent on getting into print, and meanwhile bedeviled with financial cares, he made up another manuscript, consisting partly of unused things from his first manuscript, partly of traditional ballads picked up by blind Rankin, and partly of stall-ballads and other miscellaneous findings. Failing to enlist a publisher for this new packet, Buchan was at length constrained to dispose of it to agents for the Percy Society, which printed much of it under the editorial eye of J. H. Dixon2 in 1845, whereupon the manuscript eventually found a permanent lodgment in the British Museum, and so in due time served the needs of Child. A third manuscript, containing "high-kilted" songs, through various hands finally came into the archives of Harvard College. There, too, by a stroke of adverse circumstance, Buchan's first manuscript arrived — too late to be used by Child.1
Now to a survey of Buchan's publications. Outside of stall-copies and chap wares struck off by Buchan as a printer, there are three published collections. The first of these, drawn from earlier printed sources, and entitled Scarce Ancient Ballads, appeared in 1819; some year's ago only a single copy of this work was reported to be in existence.2 Of greater value is the Gleanings of Scotch, English, and Irish Scarce Old, Ballads (1825). Buchan boasts that none of these texts had been included in any previous collection. The larger part are versions of traditional ballads; in addition, there are some two score poems by the editor himself, a relish for such readers as might not care for the old verses that had "smoked in some old woman's wardrobe for the last hundred years." Buchan's most important collection is the Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland, drawn from the first manuscript described above, and published, with the editorial aid of D. Laing and C. K. Sharpe, in two volumes in 1828. Here again Buchan insists that, except for a few texts supplied by him to Motherwell's Minstrelsy (1827), the contents had not previously seen the light. Although the editor states in a note3 that it has been his practice, "in general," to print his pieces as obtained from a single reciter or other source, it may be admitted that he has done at least as much "editing" as we have seen to be done by reputable editors before him. As for the wholesale manufacture with which he and James Rankin have been charged, William Walker makes a good case in showing that Rankin's materials did not enter very largely into that first manuscript from which the collection of 1828 was printed, and that collation of the manuscript and the printed texts of this work demonstrates substantial agreement. Among contemporaries, Motherwell had a good opinion of Buchan.
1 Svend Grundtvig defended him. 2 Most telling evidence in his favor has come to light through the very extensive collections of Aberdeenshire ballads and tunes made by the late Gavin Greig. Gleaning largely in Buchan's field after the lapse of a century, Greig found that his later texts tended to confirm the substantial authenticity of Buchan's earlier texts.3 Child, to whom Buchan and his works were at first highly repugnant, gradually came to take a more favorable view, and in the end accepted a large number of the originally proscribed ballads.4"
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