| dc.contributor.author | Gregory, David | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2009-07-17T19:10:44Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2009-07-17T19:10:44Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2009-07-17T19:10:44Z | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/2149/2238 | |
| dc.description | I duly presented my paper at a FSAC conference session devoted to musical aspects of Canadian folklore. This was a decidedly bilingual conference, and the other two papers in my session were delivered in French. They treated aspects of Quebec balladry and music history. Most of the audience was francophone and the wide-ranging discussion of the papers was mainly in French. Luckily I could understand most of what was said, although I had to make my own contributions in English.The most useful part of the discussion for my own work centred round issues of classifying ballads and folksongs.
My paper identified and discussed various ballads that the American ballad scholar Francis J. Child had decided (for various reasons that I explored) to omit from his quasi-definitive canon of 305 English and Scottish ballads. It appears that a parallel phenomenon exists with regard to the canon of Quebecois folksongs identified by the renowned Quebec folklorist Conrad Laforte; francophone scholars are now beginning to dispute aspects of Laforte’s classification and they are identifying songs that he either omitted or (arguably) misplaced. I was previously aware of the importance of Laforte’s work and I was glad to learn more about it and also about the current views of Quebec folklorists on both Child and Laforte. I have never extensively explored Quebecois folksong, but I was stimulated by the FSAC session to want to explore further the song collections and scholarly articles of Laforte and his older contemporary Marius Barbeau. | en |
| dc.description.abstract | Francis J. Child’s professed aim was to include in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads “every valuable copy of every known ballad”. He encountered three major obstacles to achieving this goal. One was the problem of deciding what was and what was not an authentic “popular ballad”. A second was obtaining access to all the manuscript and printed sources in which the latter might be found. A third was the fact that he had a moving target: variants of his chosen ballads and other ballads that ostensibly fitted his criteria were still being collected from oral tradition during the 1880s and 1890s.
The English content of Child’s magnum opus was weaker than the Scottish and, moreover, heavily dependent on the broadside industry that he so despised. The folksong revival in Late Victorian England presented him with the chance to rectify to some extent this disparity between English and Scottish texts, and also to add more melodies to his Tune Appendix in Volume 5.
The aims of this paper are to assess how thoroughly Child took advantage of this opportunity and to identify what he missed. My conclusions are based on archival research recently conducted for my forthcoming book on the Late Victorian Folksong Revival. | en |
| dc.language.iso | en | en |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | 92.927.G1122; | |
| dc.subject | folksong | en |
| dc.subject | ballads | en |
| dc.subject | Francis J. Child | en |
| dc.subject | Victorian England | en |
| dc.title | An Opportunity Fumbled: Francis James Child and the Late Victorian Folksong Revival in England | en |
| dc.type | Presentation | en |
