Oskar Cox Jensen has written a fascinating and insightful book on a subject that has been poorly served by serious scholarship. Ballad-singers were a common sight and sound in urban streets, at fares and markets from the 16th century through to the second half of the 19th. One could go so far as to say that such singers were the main communicators of popular song to the vast majority of the population in pre-and early industrial England. Their living was gained as tradespeople – it was through performance that ballad-singers sold their wares: song lyrics on flimsy sheets, often poorly printed. To Cox Jensen they constituted the practitioners of an ‘ancient custom in the modern city’ (p. 81).
The book is structured in a lively and stimulating way and the writer often comes up with an excellent turn of phrase. Four main chapters deal with central themes of the problems of the historical visibility of ballad-singers, change over time, performance and repertoire. These are inter-cut with four of what Cox Jensen terms ‘interludes’, examinations of particular songs in their social and historical context. The reader is taken from the general to the particular in a way that I found totally engaging.
Representations of ballad-singers are plentiful, in illustrations, plays, stories and even songs. Cox Jensen comments: ‘The one voice we do not hear is the singer's, though we see them everywhere. We must make do with representations’ (p. 22). With the notable exception of Mayhew's mid-19th century interviews, and a few, sometimes colourful, court cases, this is largely true. The central question is what we make of these representations as they vary considerably. Sometimes they are highly romanticised, sometimes singers are exemplars of criminality and squalor, characterised as ‘noisy, rude, eloquent, intrusive’ (p. 22). The Morland 1764 painting on the front book cover is highly romanticised (the sort of thing Cox Jensen later describes as a ‘tasteful representation of distasteful subjects’, pp. 35–6). He sees such representations as a bid to tame ‘noisy, feral streets’, with ballad-singers consistently represented as ‘other’ (p. 67). Such representations, he argues, amounted to a ‘strategy of containment, rendering the alien known, the tawdry romantic and the dangerous “interesting”’. ‘Romanticised, pitied, sterilised: these are singers subjected to a gaze that denies both their agency and their articulacy’ (p. 38). There is clearly force to this argument and Cox Jensen explores the material in a highly stimulating and sometimes challenging way.
Since the emergence of the street ballad in the 16th century, many of those who exercised power had worried about its subversive potential, its ability ‘to articulate unlicensed commentary on current affairs’ (p. 82) or to have an unsettling or corrupting effect. Perhaps such fears were overestimated – much of the song material sold was conventional and conservative. On occasion, singers took up particular causes (for conviction or money). Sometimes ballad performances could be perceived to have a corrupting influence. Through some use of pertinent case studies, Cox Jensen vividly demonstrates some of the antagonisms and anxieties that the presence of ballad-singers engendered in a changing city.
Ballad-singers who attracted large audiences were often seen as disruptive to traffic and encouraging the dereliction of servants’ duties. Successful singers projected their performances in a way that communicated in an environment with many distractions and yet made sales. Clearly singers varied in their ability to do this, but the best were effective. There was no such thing as a single ‘vernacular’ voice (p. 151), rather a wide range of forms of vocalisation with a few singers even moving between the street and the stage. Cox Jensen helpfully increases accessibility in providing 62 downloadable recordings of songs cited in the book, but he denies that these approximate to the ways ballad singers delivered the material (pp. 20–21). There is much on performance in the book that is excellent, informative and stimulating.
Perhaps the most interesting thought that Cox Jensen proposes is the idea that ballad-singers’ repertoire constitute a broad and fluid musical ‘mainstream’: ‘one in which the singers and their performances might be ghettoised as low or popular, but in which the songs they sung were the common repertoire of all types of audience, whether defined by class, education, age, ethnicity, or gender’ (p. 11). ‘From high to low, from ancient to modern, street repertoire found a space for everything’ (p. 191). It is absolutely true that the ballad sheets demonstrate a wide range of material of very diverse origins, but the ideas of ‘space for everything’ and ‘the common repertoire’ go too far; some idioms are not even represented on ballad sheets and perhaps it is only in jobbing printers’ workshops that such a mainstream came together. Cox Jensen is on stronger ground stating that the repertoire was ‘plural, hybrid’ (p. 191), even a ‘promiscuous mingling’ (p. 192). That songs changed their social milieu is clear – traditional songs became parlour ballads through the agency of poets and publishers; theatre songs became street songs.
We know that the purchasers of song sheets exercised choice, reflected in manuscript song books, records of singers’ repertoires and in what they memorised. It is in the patterns of choices that people made, and in the styles with which they performed the material that different popular traditions were moulded. Repertoires and styles were constantly in process; material came in and dropped out.
This may seem a nice distinction, but rather than a ‘mainstream repertoire’ (pp. 12, 211, 214, 228), we could think of the breadth of songs on ballad sheets as a changing but available ‘stock’ of materials from which people made selections according to their individual, social and cultural situations and dispositions. Thus, songs of different origins crossed into different musical spaces, were selected, adopted and appropriated to particular milieu. ‘Repertoire’ seems to me an active thing, and ‘stock’ is the material from which a repertoire can be made. Earlier studies have shown that the repertoires of singers of different social backgrounds had elements of overlap but also significant differences in emphases.
There are a few things in the book which I would discuss further with the author, but the success of the work, the material it presents and the ways in which it encourages us to think about the subject specifically and generally, far outweigh any details of disagreement. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to enhance and stimulate their knowledge and understanding of popular music.
