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On the "Darling Songs" of Poets, Scholars, and Singers: An Introduction

The essays in this collection articulate vital political, aesthetic, and cultural topics of inquiry that remain in the shadows so long as literary and historical studies are rooted solely in the written and author-identified documents of polite society, omitting widely shared popular forms and traditions. As generally practiced, the field of Cultural Studies has yet to take up adequately the products of premodern oral traditions as they intersect with early print commodities. The need is great for such analyses as these that, suitably capacious on the one hand and agile on the other, begin to theorize this plethora of materials. We could hardly overstate the shaping and grounding influence of eighteenth-century European music and song traditions and practices for those of our own day. Versions of songs popular then--including a number of those discussed in the following essays--continue to circulate among us. Of central conceptual importance to anyone attempting to frame an understanding of modern humanities and social sciences, the eighteenth-century study of European balladry launched the endeavor of ethnography and ethnopoetics and contributed to the modern era's imagining of class structure. More specifically for literary scholars, the study of balladry and "the popular" has been constitutive of the concomitant category of "polite literature" that has dominated the project of literary history and criticism. When we know how to seek out and analyze the materials in which they survive, song traditions and song culture supply a vital and socially resonant arena for understanding any historical moment and place. For the sociopolitical world of eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland, they supply a central arena for study, because songs and singing imbued the culture at all levels. With the new technologies of the last several decades well suited to handling and (dis)playing both texts and tunes--concordance and indexing capabilities for manifold discreet and interreferenced items, Internet Web sites, multimedia databases with digitalized images and sound representations, and so on--ballad and folk song study is coming back into fashion to invigorate our thinking. Songs in eighteenth-century Britain flourished in profuse, complex ways. A consideration of balladry and song culture in the period brings before us overarching topics, four general areas of concern, that will be elaborated in the essays that follow. (1) Because songs are oral, performative, and multimedia--even more intrinsically than drama, say--to consider them adequately we must begin with the concept of performance that underlies verbal texts and musical notation. Further, whatever documents or artifacts allow our study of songs as performed utterances must be examined with regard to the intersections of orality and literacy across a range of modes and social levels. (1) (2) The social and public character of song culture requires that we develop our theoretical understanding of expressive collectivity, moving beyond the almost exclusively individualized focus of much literary and social history, while not limiting our regard to manifestations of modern mass culture. As the essays here demonstrate, vivid collectivized voices are speaking to us in documents from the past that warrant our attention. (2) (3) The study of ballad and folk song integrally shaped the eighteenth-century emergence of British literary history and criticism as we know it. In turn, that historiography cannot be divorced from today's study of songs. In the early modern period, songs shaped and illustrated the mapping of the English literary imaginary by means of divides between past and present, between a pastoralized "popular" and an urbane "polite," between the subaltern and oral "Celtic" and the ruling and written "Gothic." (3) (4) These factors in turn contributed to a paradoxical eighteenth-century gendering of "popular song" as a category reserved for marginalized communities of women on the one hand, or notably masculinized (yet superannuated) bards on the other, both of whom were seen as representing a primitive and vanishing cultural past. …