YOu must answer both question in detail. source attached
After reading Stanley Hyman’s article “The Child Ballad in America” answer the following questions:
Hyman, Stanley. The Child Ballad in America- Some Aesthetic Criteria.pdf
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- What is Hyman’s argument regarding the nature of change in ballad text between the “Old” and “New” World Versions?
- The House Carpenter Ballad was also known in Scotland as The Daemon Lover (text of both versions are attached). After comparing the text of both versions, do you agree with Hyman’s claims regarding ballad change in the US? Use evidence from the song to support your perspective.
The Daemon Lover:The House Carpenter - Lyrics.pdf
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The Child Ballad in America: Some Aesthetic Criteria The Child Ballad in America: Some Aesthetic Criteria Author(s): Stanley Edgar Hyman Source: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 70, No. 277 (Jul. - Sep., 1957), pp. 235-239 Published by: American Folklore Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/538322 Accessed: 24-05-2018 20:43 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms American Folklore Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of American Folklore This content downloaded from 136.152.143.143 on Thu, 24 May 2018 20:43:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE CHITTL) BATTAD IN AMERICA: SOME AESTHETIC CRITERIA BY STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN OST of the attention that has been paid to the words of the Child ballad in America has been scholarly; I should like to propose some critical con- siderations. The most comprehensive study we have had in the field, Tris- tram P. Coffin's critical bibliography, The British Traditional Ballad in North America (Philadelphia, x950), is an invaluable work, but it is confined by its nature to descrip- tion and classification primarily in terms of plot, which John Crowe Ransom would call poetic structure rather than texture. In his introductory essay, "A Description of Variation in the Traditional Ballad of America," Coffin manages to discuss most varieties of alteration, in texture as well as structure, with their causes, but as a scholar he is forced to discuss them rather neutrally and eschew conclusions, whereas as critics we may build on his work and reprehend as forcibly as we wish. Coffin lists (p. ii) some factors causing change-we might say degeneration-in basic plot or mood as follows: Such headings would include the elimination of action, development toward lyric, loss of detail through forgetting; fragmentation; convention and cliche; localization; the effect of literalness; rationalization; sentimentalization; moralization; manner of use; secondary growth; new ballads which rise from the old; and mergers. Somewhat less neutrally, he adds (p. x8), "Squeamishness and religious scruples con- tinually haunt the American folk singer." I should like to consider the problem rather differently, primarily in terms of an Old World configuration we find in the Child ballads, and a New World configura- tion they adapt to here. For convenience, my examples will be taken wherever pos- sible from MacEdward Leach's new anthology,1 which offers a representative Ameri- can text or two for many of its Child ballads. We must first note that fewer than half of Child's 305 ballads ever got here at all, and of those that did, most never attained American popularity. Only a handful have been widespread in the United States. Mrs. Jane Gentry of Hot Springs, North Carolina, sang sixty-four different songs for Cecil Sharp, at least fifteen of them Child ballads.2 Her repertoire, although unusually full, seems fairly typical, and her fifteen traditional ballads are a good sampling of some of the more popular ones in America. She sang "The False Knight upon the Road" (Child 3), "The Twa Sisters" (Child io), "Edward" (Child I3), "The Cherry Tree Carol" (Child 54), "Young Hunting" (Child 68), "Lord Thomas and Fair Annet" (Child 73), "The Wife of Usher's Well" (Child 79), "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" (Child 8i), "Lamkin" (Child 93), "Johnie Scot" (Child 99), "Geordie" (Child 209), "James Harris (The Daemon Lover)" (Child 243), "The Gray Cock" (Child 248), "Our Goodman" (Child 274), and "The Sweet Trinity" (Child 286). Among the important ballads that never got to America are some that seem too This content downloaded from 136.152.143.143 on Thu, 24 May 2018 20:43:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Journal of American Folklore grimly supernatural, such as "Gil Brenton" (Child 5); some patently too disreputable, such as "Kempy Kaye" (Child 33); and a group in which villainy triumphs or evil goes unpunished, among them "Clerk Saunders" (Child 69), "Young Waters" (Child 94), "Johnie Armstrong" (Child I69), and "The Baron of Brackley" (Child 203). Among those of very limited appearance here, for similar reasons, are such fine ballads as "The Twa Magicians" (Child 44), "Sir Patrick Spens" (Child 58), "The Unquiet Grave" (Child 78), "Child Maurice" (Child 83), and "Johnie Cock" (Child II4). Those ballads that do survive the ocean voyage suffer curious sea changes. Magic and the supernatural slough off readily, even where they seem the ballad's point, and demons, ghosts, elves, and mermaids rationalize and humanize. The terrible death curse of the victim in "The Twa Sisters," spoken by a harp strung with her hair, tends to disappear in the American versions, along with the harp, and in the common American "Bow Down" texts (if the girl is not actually rescued), only the miller is punished, in an absurd ending that ignores the elder sister: "The miller was hung in his own mill-gate, / For drowning of my sister Kate." A Maine text of "The Cruel Mother" (Child 20) has the murdered children return, but drops their judgment and curse. None of the enormous number of American versions of "James Harris (The Daemon Lover)," so far as I know, keeps the lover convincingly demonic or retains his cloven hoof. In the American texts the wife of a house carpenter elopes with her sailor beau, the ship springs an accidental leak (in one Virginia text nothing happens to it at all), and the wife regrets her impetuosity. As against the satanic ending of Scott's version: He strack the tap-mast wi' his hand, The fore-masts wi' his knee, And he brake that gallant ship in twain, And sank her in the sea an American broadside concludes: A curse be on the sea-faring men Oh, cursed be their lives, For while they are robbing the House-Carpenter And coaxing away their wives. Like magic and the supernatural, sex, incest, and kin-murder tend to disappear or diminish, in a folk process very like individual repression. In the typical American "Son Davie" or "Little Yaller Dog" variants of "Edward," the murder is of a brother rather than a father, and there is never the final revelation of the mother's instigation that gives the last line of the Percy text some of the pity and terror of the end of the Tyrannus. (Despite Archer Taylor's argument,3 I cannot for a moment accept the parricide and the mother's complicity as literary additions.) Coffin (p. 46) notes a characteristic American tendency to make kin-murder fratricide rather than parricide, and in a version collected by Sharp in Tennessee this has gone to the end of the line and the victim is a brother-in-law. Coffin points out (p. i8) that in American texts of "The Cruel Brother" (Child ii), "The Twa Brothers" (Child 49), and "Lizie Wan" (Child 51), the British suggestions or assertions of incest "have vanished or are rapidly vanishing." Examples of the toning down of the frank sexuality of the ballads in America are almost innumerable, and we might note that even the mention of the 236 This content downloaded from 136.152.143.143 on Thu, 24 May 2018 20:43:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Child Ballad in America 237 lady's nakedness in "Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight" (Child 4) seems on its way out. Much of the starkness of tragedy diminishes as the ballads transform in our cul- ture. The terrible ending of "Lady Maisry" (Child 65) in Jamieson's text, Lord Wil- liam's announcement of his vengeance for the burning of his betrothed: "O I'll gar burn for you, Maisry, "An I'll gar burn for you, Maisry, Your father an your mother; The chief of a' your kin; And I'll gar burn for you, Maisry, An the last bonfire that I come to, Your sister an your brother. Myself I will cast in." is lost in all the American versions, where he kisses the corpse, writes his will, and dies. Another ending at the stake, the burning of the fair wicked lady "like hoky- gren" in Herd's text of "Young Hunting," becomes in the Kentucky "Loving Henry" an inconclusive dialogue with a little birdie. Lord Barnard's fearful punishment of his wife in "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" in the Wit Restored version: He cut the paps from off her brest; Great pitty it was to see That some drops of this ladie's heart's blood Ran trickling downe her knee. becomes a more chivalric (and considerably less significant) splitting of her head in the Kentucky "Little Mathie Grove" and the New Hampshire "Lord Banner." Where the British texts of "The Gypsy Laddie" (Child 200) have the gypsies put down, often executed, and the lady restored to her husband, in the American "Gypsy Davy"s the lord comes alone to appeal to his wife and is repudiated as she chooses romantic love and freedom rather than loveless wealth and security (here the opposi- tion of the American ethos to tragedy seems very clear). In a Kentucky "Black Jack Davie" the gypsy casts the "glamourie owre" her by babbling "How old are you, my pretty little Miss?" and she responds with the proud declaration of love, "I'll be six- teen next Sunday." Many of the Child ballads in America lose not only the tragic movement that Francis Fergusson has called from Purpose through Passion to Perception, but any narrative or dramatic movement at all. "Riddles Wisely Expounded" (Child i) reduces itself to the riddles and answers alone in Virginia, and "The Elfin Knight" (Child 2) to a comic dialogue of tasks and counter-tasks in Kentucky, North Caro- lina, and Vermont. "Mary Hamilton" (Child i73) has dwindled down to a lyric lament in Maine and Virginia, without any of the story but the protest over the Queen's ingratitude, and in one Virginia text, to three stanzas that do not mention the Queen. "John of Hazelgreen" (Child