Protest Songs from the Textile Mills and Coalfields

Protest songs have sustained strikers on picket lines, memorialized disasters, galvanized support for unions, sparked folk revivals, and established Appalachia in the national consciousness as a site of labor struggle. In Coal Dust on the Fiddle (1943), a collection of songs from the bituminous coal mines, George Korson explains that the folk songs of immigrant miners, traditional ballads of the Southern Appalachians, and African American spirituals combined in music that documented and commemorated life in the mines....

Ballad Knowledge and the Poetics of Repetition

Chapter 3 explores a genre (the ballad) that was wildly popular in nineteenth-century America, and investigates the ways in which women poets entered into discussions about authorship, poetics, and gender through their engagements with it. Focusing in particular on tropes of faithlessness, pride, laziness, and general “badness” that had long marked traditional ballads, this chapter shows how these tropes came to be associated with women and how American periodicals seemed to embrace the circulation of such ballads. But as women poets took up this genre and were faced with how to rewrite this female figure, they pushed its primary convention—repetition—to its limits in order to make explicit the particular problem that accompanies the recitation of “ballad knowledge” for women. Instead of looking away from the scenes of repetition that disempower women, these ballads go right to the center, employing repetitions to new ends.

„Reif hann hennar stakkinn, reif hann hennar serk“

In the Icelandic traditional ballads from medieval and post-medieval times, wo-men and their voices are very prominent, while stories of male heroes were rather portrayed in rímur. The language is very unusual and shows signs of translation, formulas are frequently used, and the mode of narration is objective and clear. Love is a common subject, and so is violence, often gender-based and sexual. In the article the background of these ballads is discussed shortly and their emergence in Icelandic oral culture and later its literature, as they were recorded by educated men, from nameless sources, most probably women. Seven ballads are then used to show different aspects of violence within the genre. All are highly dramatic, and their subject is harsh: hardship, rape, birth and loss of children, and sometimes the victims take things into their own hands and avenge in a graphic way. How ballads that tell such terrible tales, can have been sung and danced to at joyous gatherings, is an interesting food for thought. It will be reasoned that these ballads have primarily been sung by women, and they can even have been a consolation and a tool to deal with gender-based violence in their own lives.

English Folk Ballads Collected By Cecil James Sharp in The Southern Appalachians: Genesis, Transformation and Ukrainian Parallels

The purpose of this research, presented at the Conference sectional meeting, is to tracepeculiarities of transformation of British folk medieval ballads, which were brought to theSouthern Appalachians in the east of the USA by British immigrants at the end of the XVIIIth –beginning of the XIXth century and retained by their descendants, through analyzing certain textson the levels of motifs, dramatis personae, composition, style and artistic means, as well as tooutline relevant Ukrainian parallels. The analysis of such ballads, plot types and epic songs wascarried out: 1) British № 10: “The Twa Sisters” (21 variants); American “The Two Sisters”(5variants) and Ukrainian plot type I – C-5: “the elder sister drowns the younger one because of envyand jealousy” (8 variants); 2) British № 26: The Three Ravens” (2), “The Twa Corbies” (2);American “The Three Ravens” (1), “The Two Crows”(1) and Ukrainian epic songs with the motif oflonely death of a Cossack warrior on the steppe (4). In our study British traditional ballads areclassified according to the grouping worked out by the American scholar Francis Child(305 numbers), Ukrainian folk ballads – the plot-thematic catalogue developed by the Ukrainianfolklorist Оleksiy Dey (here 288 plots are divided into 3 spheres, cycles and plot types). Theinvestigation and comparison of the above indicated texts witness such main tendencies: 1) theAmerican counterparts, collected in the Appalachian Mountains, preserve the historic-nationalmemory and cultural heritage of the British immigrant bearers on the level of leading motifs,dramatis personae, composition peculiarities, traditional medieval images, epithets, similes,commonplaces; 2) some motifs, characters, images, artistic means, archaic and dialectal English ofthe Child ballads are reduced or substituted in the Appalachian texts; 3) realism of Americanballad transformations, which overshadows fantasy and aristocracy of their British prototypes, issimilar to the manner of poetic presentation of the typologically-arisen and described events by theUkrainian folk ballads and dumas .