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Written in fRoots issue 217, 2001

BOOK (+ CD)
ALBERT B. LORD
The Singer Of Tales - Second Edition, edited by Stephen Mitchell & Gregory Nagy
Harvard University Press ISBN 0-674-00283-0

The Singer Of Tales, first published in 1960, has come to be regarded as a classic of research into folk-ballad creation and transmission. The research project was begun in the 1930s by Harvard academic Milman Parry as part of his investigation of nature of composition of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, his hypothesis being that they were the product of an oral tradition older than written literature.
      The plan was to go to somewhere where long epic ballads were still being performed by illiterate singers. Unable to get a visa for his regions of first choice, Kirghiz territory and other parts of Soviet Central Asia, Parry diverted his researches to the South Slavic epic singers, the guslars, in the region of southern Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina. In their main fifteen-month collecting visit in 1934-5 he and his former student Albert Lord, with a number of local assistants, made written transcriptions of over 12,500 texts, and 3,500 aluminium-disc recordings - more than half a ton of discs - using two bulky recorders linked so as to record their long songs without breaks. Parry died suddenly three months after that trip, and the work was continued by Lord, who made further field trips in the 1950s and wrote the book.
      They recorded both Christian and Muslim singers; it seems that their songs were essentially the same in form and language, only differing in the ethnic identity of hero and villain. Indeed the editors of this new edition of Lord’s book refer to the significance of these epics in national identity, and in this connection they mention an influential four-volume collection of epics published in the 18th century by ethnographer Vuc Karadžić which particularly featured ballads associated with the 1389 Battle of Kosovo between Serbs and Turks. (And what were, er, England’s St. George and the Turkish Knight doing around then?)
      Much of the substance of the book concerns the lyrics rather than the tunes, but the musical character of the songs is mostly a rising and falling style of recitative based on melodic framework in a variety of rhythmic patterns. They were sung solo by usually paid singers, often accompanying themselves on gusle, a buzzing one-stringed, skin-soundboard fiddle, or on the two-stringed plucked tambura. (Lord and Parry paid too, each singer’s fee being proportional to local reputation, and, as custom also demanded, provided wine, coffee, rakija and cigarettes.)
      Such guslars would be employed for celebrations at village houses or, commonly, as the entertainment for men during long nights at inns in market towns, or seasonally to sing thirty epics during the thirty days of Ramadan. Listeners would drift in and out in the course of the song, so the singer would need to adjust it accordingly and make sure it ended while there was still an audience. It’s an important part of the Parry and Lord studies that the singers were shown to be not rote-learning deliverers of memorised songs but composers combining and interweaving items from a mental gallery of phrases and story motifs.
      The book is academic, written in formal, footnoted style, but determined plunges into it emerge with handfuls of food for thought as to the nature of folk composition and transmission. As to whether it answers the question of how the Iliad and Odyssey came to be written down - well, not really, no-one really knows that now, but Lord ventures an informed hypothesis, and along the way his and Parry’s work, in linking the revered classics of Homeric and medieval epic with oral ballad-making and treating the singers with non rose-tinted respect, manoeuvred some bridge-girders across the still-existent gap between “high classical” and “folk” art.
      Limited-readership academic books such as this tend to be expensive, but surprisingly this hefty 300-page paperback plus a CD containing fragments of recordings, transcriptions, conversations and photos from the field trips and a short film of one of the informants costs just a CD-matching £12.50.



© 2001 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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