The humorous ballads are in so broad a vein that, although wholesomely amusing when clacked off to the beat of hobnailed boots beside glowing peat fires, they seem awkward when cramped into the narrow decorum of our times. In Scotland the tunes of many humorous ballads are closely related to Scottish reels, Strathspeys and bagpipe tunes; in Southern England, to Morris pipe and fiddle tunes. And always the' suspense is heightened by the rounding of each stanza" with rollicking chorus or refrain.
To the British peasants (farmers and shepherds, in the main) who transmitted this mass of folklore, relying upon the memory seemed a matter of course, I listened while one Scottish lass and her brother recited half of a poem with 230 four-line stanzas. They knew the whole v it. One singer, a Scottish farmer, had printed and sold 1,000 copies of his own poems, composed mainly during the day as he followed the plow and written down at night. He knew his Burns from cover to cover and could recite page after page of it with almost flawless accuracy.
I met one man and learned of two others who, encouraged by a ring of fireside cronies and heartened by an occasional mug of ale, were able to sing, impromptu, from dusk to dawn and never repeat. And I found one Scottish woman, 84 years of age, who gave me texts and tunes for nearly 300 songs and ballads (counting up to some 400 typewritten pages) without once referring to note or manuscript. Her songs and ballads have a total number of lines approximately equal to that of "Paradise Lost"—and, besides, she knew the tunes.
This memory hoard of the peasants, although infinitesimal in comparison with our millions of printed books, was keenly, tanzibly human—not reduced to abstract symbols, as with us. It was handed down from father to son, learned from the warm living voice. Each succeeding peasant caught the living emotions, the life impulse, from those going before—how they looked, what they said before they sang; little mannerisms and tricks of expression; their gestures and, above all, the sound of their voices.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.