Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/96

 5o8 Oral Literature to a variety of tunes. The text and the melody brought from the Old World occasionally survive together; but, on the whole, one text holds to one air with little regularity. Despite its fluctuations and the variant forms it assumes, the text of a ballad remains more constant and is more easily identified than the air. Nevertheless it is the singing which tends to keep bal- lads alive. The words and the music are recalled together by the singers. The music and the text help to preserve each other. Where comparison is possible between the melodies of the American pieces and their Old World originals, it shows that the tendency is constantly toward greater simplicity in the New World derivatives. This is true also when ephemeral popular airs of the day are taken up by the people and persist in folk-song. Like the songs which are emigrants they tend toward simplification in transmission. Many Old World songs and ballads now having oral cur- rency in the United States have passed through the medium of print, and owe something of their diffusion to broadsides and songbooks, or to rural newspapers. When ballads are reduced to print, they are not "killed" but have a better chance to survive; and the same is true when they have been transcribed in manuscript books. Most of the ballads included in the Child coUectionwere preserved in broadsides or printed sources, or in manuscripts, and the same agencies have helped to per- petuate these songs when they reach the New World. The life of ballads is not ended by their reduction to print or to writing, but they are likely to receive new tenure therefrom. Various things happen in America to these Old World emi- grants. Occasionally they are preserved pretty exactly. A few lose compactness and are lengthened by repetition, iteration, or garrulous protraction, sometimes from the example of other songs, or they cross outright with other songs. More often they are shortened. Passages are forgotten until hardly recognizable fragments remain. Moralizing banalities drop out. Frequently ballads become disordered, one well-known piece blending with another; and a new amalgam song may arise. And sometimes they cross with songs of recent origin, lending a few stanzas to assimilated street songs of unmistakably modem composition. The more vulgar and repugnant elements tend to disappear, and also the supernatural elements. In The House Carpenter, the