When folklorists observe living (as opposed to manuscript) folklore, they may be seeing information on a spectrum from ‘relatively stable’ to ‘constantly changing’. Some genres of folklore tend toward some stability, such as shorter types of oral poetry, including ballads (Anderson 1991:31, 35; McCarthy 1991:10). These can remain relatively stable in content because their brevity permits performance more from memory than by the recreating process that also occurs in oral tradition.
Consider the sung or printed song of the Folly as being relatively stable, and when changing, changing slowly and in increments. Song prosody can provide some of this stability, and print especially stabilizes folklore for short periods, even if there is a dynamic interplay between oral and print traditions (for example, see Niles 1978:147, 149). The convergence of oral tradition and print technology often led to a blend of oral and written tradition in Europe (for example, see Brown and Douglas 1981:101-103 on such a genre starting in 18th century Scotland).
A printed or even sung ballad contrasts with the highly variable beliefs being expressed in the conversational folklore. In this sense the song is raised up or objectified; it is set apart due to its song-form, which is easily recognizable as being differentiated from routine types of communication (conversation, newspaper articles, radio and TV broadcasts, etc.). Once a folklore performance has been extracted from its setting, it can be subjected to evaluation and reproduction (Bauman and Briggs 1990:80). The print media may have a special ability to objectify a folklore text. The text is extracted from an immediate personal context and placed in a central location in the community – its own location in an ornamental box on a newspaper page, as the Folly ballad has been published in The Anglo-Celt newspaper.
And what is the nature of the objectified folklore of the Folly ballad? It avoids social and political polarization by focusing on the least disagreeable theme: the natural beauty and continuance of a land that can be defined from the viewpoint of a hill-top tower visible to several communities. True, that tower was built by a representative of days when the majority of the people were disadvantaged by a cultural hegemony, and the song does not avoid a subtle comment on the fate of the landlord class: the tower, after all is “just a rich man’s folly” although Fleming whose “wish was never fulfilled” will have his name live forever “around Belville Mountain Hill” – a name associated with an unattainable goal of seeing far (which may be a metaphor for ruling far). Yet this is hardly a militant political statement in a land where militant statements concerning the conflicts of the Irish border conflicts have indeed been made in ballads (see for examples Galvin 1960; Zimmerman 1960). The song is ‘good natured’ though rather idealized relative to the reality of everyday discourse in the community.
In contrast, the conversational folklore is free to enter the game of adaptivity, and its adaptivity is the freedom to evaluate and reproduce folklore (the themes selected by the ballad) that has been stabilized and set part. This freedom is necessary to accommodate the community, which is diverse in opinion. The rather authoritarian static text of the song presents only what most of the community can agree about: that there was a man named Fleming, who was a landlord, who built the tower, which has become a community landmark and a viewing place over a beloved home. But beyond these generic sentiments, the community requires real work to be done in mediating the everyday encounters between people; people must discover their relation to each other, and decide how that relation should proceed. The tradition offers tested ways for people to make comments.
Part of the local tradition evaluates Fleming’s tower positively (it was a charitable work project paying the poor during slow economic times, or perhaps during the potato famine) or neutrally (the tower was used for watching for horse thieves or for watching the hunting hounds at the sport or for seeing the ships at sea). And part offers a negative evaluation; tyrants take from the people – symbolized by bullocks’ blood used in the mortar – to finance their pleasure projects; the tower was dangerous (someone fell off the top and died); and what was meant to be charitable work was in fact not (the work was financed by raised rents). These are the beliefs that emerge in everyday encounters, and they may agree or differ with the ideas that the tower and its song continually re-inject ideas into the community, which the mediating folklore tradition is free to repeat, select, and exclude. These acts of selection are, indeed, hallmarks of folklore tradition (Glassie 1995:406-408). Some of these acts are also part of anti-hegemonic ‘back-talk’: a way of speaking in an environment of social encounter in which the ideology of a potentially overwhelming (hegemonic) group is countered by a discourse by a group seeking to maintain its identity (Hufford 1995:540).
The act of selection of a theme out of the many preserved in the tradition may have a function in stating one’s ethnic identity. Consider the point and counter-point of the two men I met on the night I explored the tower: one man claimed that Fleming built the tower to make work for the local people, while the other said, yes, Fleming commissioned the tower to provide work, but then he raised the rents to pay for it. The farmer’s exegesis to the first belief reversed one man’s view, which otherwise might have overlaid local history with a potentially flattering interpretation of Fleming. Other potentially conflicting views exist as well – the tower can have the function of looking for horse thieves or watching the hunting hounds, or it may be a negative thing, a place from which one can fall and die, and a site where the people’s sustenance (cattle) was invested to finance their master’s folly.
These are examples of a traditional dynamic. In the dynamic, the ballad does not exist as an isolated text even when objectified ultimately in print. It exists alongside other cultural communications that are affected by the ballad and each other. As Bauman and Briggs (1990:60-61) write:
“A given performance is tied to a number of speech events that precede and succeed it ... An adequate analysis of a single performance thus requires sensitive ethnographic study of how its form and meaning index a broad range of discourse types, some of which are not framed as performance.”
The very brevity of ballads calls for supporting exegesis (Seeger 1994:152). The Folly ballad is incompletely documented without the complementing and counter-pointing conversational lore.
BACK© Wade Tarzia 1997
© assemblage 1997