Subject: RE: John Jacob Niles authenticity?
From:
GUEST,Niles Center
Date: 29 Jan 04 - 05:39 PM
Dear Colleagues,
Thank you for your continuing contributions to the twists and turns of this thread. It is really difficult to present a general case for Niles regarding the "authenticity" of his music, since each song is really a special case, ranging from completely original art music, to adaptations, to arrangements, to songs in the "style of folk music" to accurately transcribed traditional music that was acquired through less than scholarly means, to accurate transcriptions done in a well documented and scholarly way, to songs composed around a kernel of folk text or tune, and so on....each song poses a separate challenge of verification, and many do not warrant this sort of scrutiny, perhaps. It is sometimes enough to take the song for what it is--a moving and effective song or not.
That said, let me address the Bronson-Niles issue. I endorse Malcom's good observation of Niles's content in _Traditional Tunes_ Part of this may be due to copyright issues--something that Niles was particularly concerned with--in fact that is WHY his Ballad Book appeared so late in his career-- but mostly because the Niles Ballad Book was not published until 1960--after much of Bronson's work was completed (and he started publishing these volumes in 1959--a year before the Ballad Book of Niles was first issued by Houghton-Mifflin. There are also many ballad singers not represented in Bronson for a variety of reasons.
I also understand the hesitancey of most folklorists to regard Niles as a folklorist, thus he is absent from Lomax and Bronson, etc. That is why his Ballad Book was largely ignored in academic journals. Niles complicated this by "posing" as a folklorist. In fact, he had a genuine interest in the origins of this music and spent time researching it in Europe and worked with Saintsbury in London in 1918. His library does contain a wealth of reference works that he studied closely--including a signed edition of Child's multivolume work. But he was clearly an entertainer, a vaudevillian, a story teller, and while he was interested in folklore, he was not really a folklorist though the Popular Press did portray him as such (with his encouragement).
Oh yes, my name is Ron Pen....I simply avoided it in the interest of "tradition" on this site.
Thank you all again for the perspective, for the questions, for the interest, and for being such an informed group of contributors.
Cordially,
Ron
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sj
