The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #157044   Message #3704775
Posted By: Jim Carroll
28-Apr-15 - 03:16 AM
Thread Name: Origins: Barbara Allen
Subject: RE: Origins: Barbara Allen
"This brings up an excellent point and I'm glad you mentioned it:"
The oral tradition/printed version link has become n increasing fascinated me from our work at recording Irish Travellers who, though as a community, were non-literate, had the greatest influence in preserving Child Ballads in Ireland than any other social group - Lamkin, Lord Bateman, Maid and the Palmer, Young Hunting, Lord Gregory, Sweet William and Fair Margaret (Child 74), Famous Flower, Thomas of Winesbury, Outlandish Knight, to name but a few - all found in the Irish Traveller repertoire in the latter half of the 20th century - some of them the only surviving oral versions.
The last remnants of the broadside trade here - the ballad sheets continued into the 1950s and was carried out by non-literate Travellers.
We interviewed a Kerry Traveller Mikeen McCarthy who sold the Ballads and described that, along with 'Little Grey Home in the West', Patsy Fagan, etc, e also sold "my father's songs", which included 'The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green', which he described as the oldest song he knew.
He described how he would go with his mother to a local printer and recite the songs over the counter to the printer, who would then run off the required number to be sold at rural fairs and markets.
The link between print, the oral tradition and literacy has never been fully discussed and it seems to me that we are far too ready to attribute the origins of these ballads and songs to printed versions.
Any knowledge we have of the oral traditions dates back only to the end of the 19th century and that is, to say the lest, extremely flimsy and based on singing traditions that largely were disappearing and being remembered rather than thriving.
Hardly grounds to base firm conclusion on origins on.
Jim Carroll