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Abstract: Almost half the traditional songs in the repertoire of well-known Canadian traditional singer LaRena Clark are in ballad metre. This article develops a framework of musical prosody appropriate to ballad-metre songs in English-language oral tradition and contrasts it with the approach of literary theory. Drawing on concepts and findings in music psychology as well comparative musicology and linguistics, statistical analysis shows how LaRena Clark's ballad-metre songs are moderate in tempo relative both to other world music idioms in general and in particular to Hebridean Gaelic songs.
Tempo has been a little studied aspect of traditional English-language song. In general, published folksong transcriptions have not provided metronome markings, and commentators and performers have seldom ventured beyond describing particular folksong tempos as slow or fast, if at all. Nonetheless, traditional song performance has been far from capricious: a tragic ballad sung at breakneck speed would be as unusual in tradition as a lugubrious comic song.
Recordings of LaRena Clark's singing constitute a valuable starting-point for understanding tempo in traditional songs. LaRena learned through living oral tradition the hundreds of songs she recorded on her own and with Edith Fowke. From hearing the singing of her parents and grandparents (ca. 1910-20), LaRena retained-with seemingly iconic, photographic (or more properly, "phonographic") memory-songs that were or had been current in lumber camps and rural homes of Ontario and the Maritimes, as well as those from minstrel, medicine and vaudeville shows, and early Tin Pan Alley hits. Of these, about a hundred are "traditional." They are of unknown authorship and transmitted exclusively by voice to ear outside commercial publishing venues. LaRena heard such songs directly from the lips of family members who sang solo and unaccompanied.
Transcriptions of almost all LaRena's traditional songs appear in the life-and-works study A Family Heritage: The Story and Songs of LaRena Clark (Fowke and Rahn 1994). Among the 93 songs in A Family Heritage, the largest group of immediate relevance to questions of tempo consists of 43 in ballad metre.
Ballad metre
In ballad-metre songs, lines are grouped in pairs. Within each pair of lines, a line with four stresses is followed by a line with three stresses. For instance, in LaRena's rendering of "The Wars of Troy" (Examplel), there are four...