Welcome, and a bit about ol' Leonard

Hello!
Welcome to my blog concerning ballads and love songs from the Leonard Roberts Collection here at Berea College!
I'll be studying story songs from the Leonard Roberts Collection for the next month here in the sound archives at Berea in eastern Kentucky. I'm especially searching out songs and versions of songs lesser known to contemporary singers. My goal is to learn 20-30 of these pieces so that I can teach them in workshops and develop performances around them as well.
I will use this blog to discuss the songs I find and post recordings of my renderings of the songs as I learn them. I'll also be discussing the modern social politics of ballad singing, and other reflections on my studies.

So who was Leonard Roberts?

Roberts was a folklorist, who was in many ways ahead of his time. He was born in Floyd, Co. Kentucky and graduated from Berea College. He studied music, literature and creative writing at various colleges and universities, teaching in Kentucky and North Carolina. In 1945 he came back to Berea College to teach. For the next eight years Roberts engaged in collecting songs, stories and music from his students and locals in the eastern counties of Kentucky. His hundreds of recordings are an incredible glimpse into the day-to-day oral culture of rural Appalachians in the mid-20th century.

What I so strongly appreciate about Roberts is that he appreciated the rich variety of spoken traditions in the communities around him. Unlike many collectors of his era, Roberts didn't restrict himself to music or ballads. He recorded riddles, superstitions, magic tales, hero tales, instrumentals and songs. His interviews with source tellers include questions about the context of the tales- when they were told, why, who participated. Roberts understood that these stories and songs related to each other- that one riddle might remind the teller of a song, and that song of a legend, and so on and so forth. This may seem obvious to modern singers and tellers, but it was (and I feel still is) much more common to categorize oral songs and stories into "types" which isolate them from their full context. As a result students who study this material are given only a narrow window of understanding what these songs or stories meant in their communal settings. Our modern knowing of a song can be cut off from the many ways in which it nourished its community- as a bed time story, a distraction from despair, a moral tale, a cure for boredom, or a means to express private feelings.  

Roberts published his dissertation in 1955 as a book called South From Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folktales. I highly recommend any readers pick up a copy. The book exhibits another one of Robert's valuable approaches to this work. Unlike other contemporaries such as Richard Chase, Roberts doesn't try to "fix" any of his source stories. He uses the language of his source tellers verbatim, and doesn't adjust their language to popular grammar or pronunciation. He also doesn't change the structure of the stories themselves to create more satisfying or expected endings.

Chase published a good deal of other books in his life, including In The Pine: Selected Kentucky Folksong, which I have been using for my research. Roberts collected ballads and folk songs from several local families and directly from his students. He also encouraged his students to collect from their friends, relatives and neighbors. The result is a mix of hundreds of written and recorded ballads and folk songs.
In In the Pine Roberts estimates that there are over 100 ballad varients in his collection, and over 1,000 folk songs. I look forward to learning some compelling song stories, and sharing them with you as I go!

Signing off from the little town nestled on the borders of the stark Cumberland Plateau and the rolling Bluegrass (see the photo below)!