One of the growing areas of interest to scholars of traditional music is the extent to which printed material affected a country’s oral traditions. Concerning England, for example, evidence continues to accumulate documenting an ever-clearer picture of the development of society from oral to written culture. As Thomas Laqueur asserts: ‘For all its maypoles and rough music, its bear baitings and St. Monday drunks, its ancient feasts and more ancient folkways, the popular culture of seventeenth and eighteenth century England was fundamentally literate and thus inexorably bound to the processes and culture of a society beyond the village community’.Footnote ¹ In light of such evidence, the idea of a purely oral tradition of folk music gradually is becoming untenable.

The anthology Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions, edited by David Atkinson and Steve Roud, addresses various aspects of the oral/print debate. As Steve Roud writes in the introduction to the anthology, the potential oral/print dichotomy goes to the very heart of folk song scholarship. If folk song and printed street literature can be shown to exist in the same cultural spaces, that threatens to undermine not only the received definition of folk song, but its very existence as a discrete genre described in the much-used phrase ‘the voice of the people’ (p. 5). Accordingly, this volume discusses the song traditions ‘discovered’ by the late Victorian/Edwardian enthusiasts, among them Sabine Baring-Gould, Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The collectors themselves spent little time on questions of definition and origin, assuming that there was a corpus of pure ‘folk’ songs that had been handed down through countless generations and which embodied the musical soul of the nation (p. 6). The authors of the 12 essays in this volume, however, broadly illustrate the continual interplay of print and oral traditions in nineteenth-century Britain, Ireland and North America.

David Atkinson contributed two chapters to this volume. The first, ‘Was There Really a “Mass Extinction of Old Ballads” in the Romantic Period?’ directly addresses the theories put forward by William St Clair in his The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004).Footnote ² Briefly, St Clair claims that a ‘high monopoly period’ existed in England from c. 1600 to 1774, in which a powerful cartel of London booksellers and ballad printers dominated the English printing trade and artificially manipulated the popular canon of street literature (pp. 20–22). The disintegration of the monopoly in 1774 resulted in a wider range of affordable literature and, supposedly, a move away from the ballads and chapbooks that had remained popular under the monopoly (p. 22). To test St Clair’s hypothesis, Atkinson reviews the print and social histories of several ballads: ‘The Suffolk Miracle’ (Child 272), ‘The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter’ (Child 110) and ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor’ (Child 73).Footnote ³ Admittedly limited in its scope, Atkinson’s study neither proves nor disproves St Clair’s claim of a ‘mass extinction’ of ballads after 1774 (p. 33). Rather, in combining proof of oral circulation along with print records, Atkinson clearly, and frustratingly, shows that the reasons behind the survival or disappearance of a ballad are sometimes beyond a scholar’s reach.

Atkinson’s second chapter in the anthology, ‘The Popular Ballad and the Book Trade: “Bateman’s Tragedy” versus “The Demon Lover”’, seems to serve as an extension of the ideas presented in his previous chapter, as he examines the social and print histories of two well-known ballads. The two ballads examined are thematically very similar, yet proved to be popular in significantly different ways. Whereas ‘Bateman’s Tragedy’ had a flourish of printings in the eighteenth century, just to disappear by the beginning of the nineteenth, ‘The Demon Lover’ proved to be more durable, surviving in various printed forms well into the nineteenth century and even appearing in America. As Atkinson shows, both ballads were ultimately dependent on the chapbook and broadside trade for continuity and survival (p. 212). Again, he raises questions as to why some ballads survive and some do not. Because Atkinson convincingly ties the survival and spread of ballads to the print trade, as opposed to oral circulation, the answers to the questions he raises have the potential to overturn received ideas about traditional songs and ‘the voice of the people’ (p. 213).

Chris Wright’s ‘Forgotten Broadsides and the Song Tradition of the Scots Travellers’ demonstrates the need for greater consideration of the influence of broadsides on oral culture by investigating specific examples of their influence on the Scottish Travellers – a subculture noted for its remarkable oral tradition (p. 77). Wright makes use of recordings made by the School of Scottish Studies to compare broadside printings to songs collected from a presumably oral tradition. In examining songs such as ‘The Canty Auld Wife’, ‘The Shepherd’s Daughter’, ‘The Gallowa Hills’ and ‘The Road to Dundee’, Wright illustrates a clear relationship between the oral tradition of the Traveller singers and broadside printing. One printer in particular, the Dundee Poet’s Box, which operated well into the twentieth century, had a clear and lasting influence on Scottish oral tradition (p. 104).

The chapter ‘Welsh Balladry and Literacy’, by Ffion Mair Jones provides a different look at balladry and popular culture. Jones emphasizes the overwhelming impression that the Welsh-language ballad trade was firmly rooted in literacy, from the poets who produced the ballads through to the printers, sellers and consumers (p. 106). Furthermore, rather than the anonymous, ephemeral nature of much of British balladry of the period, the opposite can be said of Welsh balladry, with over 260 authors named in the Cronfa Baledi database of ballads printed in the eighteenth century (p. 108).Footnote ⁴ This array of poets and ballad printers did much to preserve the Welsh language and their popular heritage (p. 126). Jones also draws a specific connection between the process of memorization utilized when learning to read as it pertains to both balladry and the Bible. Literacy, being associated with the efforts of religious societies, coloured the moral landscape of Welsh balladry itself, ‘setting the studiousness and reflection of reading against the waywardness of oral rumour’ (pp. 120–21). Jones closes her chapter by considering how efforts at popular religious education helped shape Welsh balladry and forged organic links between the popular and religious culture of the period (p. 121).

John Moulden’s ‘Ballads and Ballad Singers: Samuel Lover’s Tour of Dublin in 1830’ engages in a close reading of Samuel Lover’s essay ‘Ballads and Ballad Singers’ (1831) to examine the elements of street ballad trade in nineteenth-century Dublin. Looking beyond Lover’s satirical point of view, Moulden identifies prominent ballad printers of the time as well as geographical areas of the city where ballad sellers hawked their wares (pp. 131–32). A significant portion of the chapter is given to providing examples of the seven different types of ballads identified by Lover, namely: Amatory, Polemical (religious), Political, Patriotic, Bacchanalian, Descriptive and Non-Descript. Moulden provides some historical context to several ballad texts, but he does not elaborate on the relationship between the oral and print traditions of Irish balladry.

The chapter ‘Henry J. Wehman and Cheap Print in Late Nineteenth-Century America’, by Norm Cohen examines the prolific output of one of the most significant music publishers in nineteenth-century America. Wehman’s output consisted mainly of a series of 10 Cent Song Books, approximately 1,600 single-song broadsides, large multi-song single sheets and book-like song collections (p. 148). His operation underlines the potential influence the printing trade can have on oral tradition. Of the nearly 6,400 total songs printed, 250–300 were clearly traditional or composed in the traditional style, largely taken from earlier broadsides, both American and British, as well as from various oral sources. According to Cohen, some songs were composed in the nineteenth century and subsequently entered oral tradition, and some songs were already in oral tradition by the time Wehman printed them (pp. 157–62). The exact nature of Wehman’s influence on Anglo-American oral tradition is not known, and perhaps cannot be known because of the low quality of paper on which many of the street ballads were printed. Cohen’s chapter, however, provides a well-researched overview of Wehman’s operation and perhaps serves as a starting point for future research into the American context of the oral/print debate.

Martin Graebe’s ‘“I’d have you to buy it and learn it”: Sabine Baring-Gould, his Fellow Collectors, and Street Literature’ is a valuable examination of the way in which several significant nineteenth-century song collectors viewed the role of broadside ballads in their collecting endeavours. Specifically in the case of Baring-Gould, Graebe examines his published writing and private correspondence to chart the growth of the collector’s knowledge of broadsides and the development of his thinking on the subject. Baring-Gould amassed a very extensive collection of broadsides because, as he attempted to discover the origins of the songs he was collecting in Devon and Cornwall, he realized that broadsides had played an important role in transmitting the songs to some of the singers from whom he was hearing them (p. 173). Graebe describes the picture of a collector coming to grips with the reality of the interplay and engagement of oral and print traditions. Among the other collectors Graebe examines, with the possible exception of Lucy Broadwood, Baring-Gould appears to be a pioneer of sorts in recognizing and acknowledging the significant relationship between broadside ballads and oral tradition.

The chapter ‘“Old Brown’s Daughter”: Re-contextualizing a “Locally” Composed Newfoundland Folk Song’, by Anna Kearney Guigné is a fascinating case study that documents the dissemination of the song ‘Old Brown’s Daughter’ from its early appearances in nineteenth-century British music halls to present-day performances in Newfoundland and elsewhere (p. 246). Originally composed by G.W. Hunt and made popular by the stage performances of Alfred Vance in the early 1870s, the song appeared widely on broadsides, in songsters, and on printed sheet music (pp. 250–52). The song made its way to Canada by 1875 and to Newfoundland by the early twentieth century. Once there it was popularized by the publications of local folk icon John Burke, who localized the text to tie it to the Newfoundland experience, and became inextricably linked with his name (p. 258). Subsequent publications that identified the song as Burke’s, as well as public memory, strengthened Newfoundland’s emotional claim on ‘Old Brown’s Daughter’. As Guigné astutely points out, the processes of mass distribution and localization worked concurrently to shape the trajectory of this song’s popular usage (p. 262).

David Atkinson’s and Steve Roud’s Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America is a wide-ranging attempt to engage with the important and possibly controversial subject of the relationship between print and oral traditions. Although the quality of the writing varies, the content is compelling and raises important questions. Several of the authors are practitioners of traditional song and, as such, have first hand experience with the subject. Unfortunately, any readers hoping to find discussions of the musical content of the songs will be disappointed. Aside from the occasional mention of the tune to which a text was sung, musical considerations are absent from the anthology. This publication, however, is still a highly valuable addition to the field of folk song and ballad scholarship and students of the discipline would be well served in reading it.