The Making of Ballads

Genre - text - interpretation: Multidisciplinary perspectives on folklore and beyond

“…This line of thinking about composition was led by G. L. Kittredge (1904) and Francis Gummere (1907), who believed that ballads were composed collectively: folksongs were products of communal creation. However, the principle of communal creation has long been discarded and has been replaced by the "communal recreation" theory put forward by the American collector Phillips Barry (1914) and the scholar G. H. Gerould (1923). According to this theory, the ballad is conceded to be an individual composition originally, but a ballad does not become a ballad until it has been accepted by the folk community and been remoulded by the inevitable variations of tradition into a communal product.…”