CONTENTS PREFACE "Communal" Authorship and Ownership II Individual Authorship and Ownership III The "Ballad " as the Earliest Poetic Form 95 1 106 III The "Uniformity" of the Ballad Style . IV Improvisation and Folk-Song. POETIC ORIGINS AND CHAPTER I THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY Certain [Indian] societies require that each member have a special song; this song is generally of the man's own composition, although sometimes these songs are inherited from a father or a near relative who when living had been a member of the society. These individual songs are distinct from songs used in the ceremonies and regarded as the property of the society, although the members are entitled to sing them on certain occasions. When this society holds its formal meetings a part of the closing exercises consists of the simultaneous singing by all the members present of their individual songs. The result is most distressing to a listener, but there are no listeners unless by chance an outsider is present, for each singer is absorbed in voicing his own special song which is strictly his own personal affair, so that he pays no attention to his neighbour; consequently the pandemonium to which he contributes does not exist for him. The foregoing paragraph from Miss Alice C. Fletcher's account of Indian music 1 reads like a travesty of the accepted view of primitive song, its character and authorship. There is the familiar primitive "horde," engaged in festal singing, without onlookers. Yet instead of col 1 The Study of Indian Music. Reprinted from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. I, p. 233. 1915. According to Miss Fletcher, the Indians are sitting as they sing. Compare a custom among the Karok, an Indian tribe of California (Stephen Powers, Contributions to North American Ethnology, vol. III, p. 29, Washington, 1877). 1 2 THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY laborative composition, improvisation, and communal ownership of the ensuing "ballad," we have individual authorship and ownership, and individual singing. This is the testimony of a specialist who has spent many years among the people of whom she writes, studying and recording their songs and their modes of composition. Easily recognizable is the homogeneous primitive group, singing in festal ceremony; but this group does not conduct itself in the way which literary historians have insisted that we should expect. The songs of primitive peoples have received much attention in recent years, especially the songs of the American Indians. An immense amount of material has been collected and made available; and this has been done in a scientific way, with the help of countless phonographic and other records. Instead of having to rely on the stray testimonies of travellers, explorers, historians, and essayists, the student of primitive poetry has now at his disposal an amount of data unavailable to his predecessors. He need not linger among the fascinating mysteries of romantic hypotheses, but can supply himself with the carefully observed facts of scientific record.2 In this matter it cannot be valid to object that we should not look among North or South American Indians, or Eski 2 References of chief importance for the American Indians are Frederick R. Burton, American Primitive Music, with especial attention to the songs of the Ojibways, New York, 1909; Natalie Curtis, The Indian's Book, New York, 1900; and the following thorough studies: Frances Densmore, Chippewa Music, in Bulletins 45 (1910) and 53 (1913) of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and Teton Sioux Music, Washington (1918); Alice C. Fletcher, A Study of Omaha Indian Music, Papers of the Peabody Museum, vol. 1, No. 5, 1893, Indian Story and Song, Boston, 1900, The Hako: a Pawnee mos for "beginnings." It cannot reasonably be said that these tribes are too advanced, too highly civilized, to afford trustworthy evidence as to aboriginal modes. As a matter of fact, we can go little farther back, in the analysis of culture, than these people, if we are to stay by what can be demonstrated. When we have learned what we can learn from the primitive tribes on our own continent, in South America, Africa, Australia, Oceania, we know very nearly all that we can surely know. If we go to the prehistoric, we are conjecturing, and we ought to label our statements "conjecture." In general, gradations of " "primitiveness among savage peoples are difficult to make. A social group may show the simplest or least organized social structure, and yet be relatively advanced in musical and artistic talent. Another group may show advance in social organization, yet be backward in song and story. And certainly even the most advanced of the Indian communities (with the exception of civilized Mexico and Peru) are every whit as primitive as the medieval peasant communes, from whose supposed ways we are constantly asked to learn as regards poetic beginnings. If, as we Ceremony, 22 Report (1904), Bureau of American Ethnology, and The Study of Indian Music quoted supra; James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion, 14 Report, Bureau of Ethnology, Part II, 1896. Excellent pieces of work are "Hopi Songs" and "Zuñi Melodies," by B. I. Gilman, published respectively in the Journal of American Ethnology and Archæology, vol. I, 1891, and vol. v, 1908, but nothing is said in these regarding the composition or presentation of the songs recorded. Many references are cited later, especially books, studies, or special articles dealing with South American, African, and Australian tribes. 8 See F. B. Gummere, The Beginnings of Poetry, 1901, and The Popular Ballad, 1907. See also Primitive Poetry and the Ballad, Modern Philology, I, 1904. |