Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths. By Roger de V. Renwick. (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 183, works cited, general index, singer index, song index, ISBN 1-57806-393-0, cloth.)

For over thirty years, one of the easiest ways to disparage a folkloristic study has been to call it “item-oriented.” We have not abandoned text completely, but folklorists do pride themselves on having moved beyond the inherently philological approaches typified by the Historic-Geographic method, with its emphasis on indices and genre-based catalogues, and on type analyses rooted in the genealogy of tales or songs. For these approaches, “the text is [or was] the thing.” All this, of course, is basic stuff for anyone with an Intro to Folklore course under their belt. So it comes as a surprise to find that a new major study of Anglo-American folksong — perhaps the first of the new millennium — reasserts the relevance, in fact necessity, of philological research in folklore. The work is a collection of five essays by Roger Renwick, written in an attempt, or so it says on the dustjacket, “to wrest folksong from contemporary theorists and return it to textual study.” Two issues are implied, one of which is the push to reinvigorate textual analysis, which is an audacious objective all on its own. Renwick also takes on what he sees as a not-always-healthy dependency on “theory” in recent folklore scholarship. He expresses particular concern over a tendency toward “hypertheorizing,” which occurs “when the act of theorizing rather than the illuminating of some body of data becomes the investigation’s chief rationale” (xiii). The extent to which hypertheorizing has, in fact, become a problem in recent scholarship is open to debate, but Renwick is to be congratulated for at least initiating a discussion of the Emperor’s new clothes. To set the stage, he explores a particular instance where a researcher was, in Renwick’s view, lead astray by putting a theory of song transmission and adaptation ahead of the textual evidence available. The target is a 1987 article by Roger Abrahams that explores “Creolization” in a small number of Afro-Caribbean variants of older British ballads, all of them Child types. Renwick especially challenges Abrahams’s treatment of a variant from the Windward Islands, in cante fable form, of what appears to be “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” (Child 81; Roud 52; see Abrahams 120-26). There are clear narrative similarities between the Caribbean story-song and the well-known British ballad of adultery and revenge killing. Additionally, one of the central characters is named “Matty Glow,” which strongly suggests a connection with the ballad character “Matty Groves.” Creolization is observed in an increased use of prose narrative (refrains, really, are all that is left of the song), and in the presence of a bird acting as informer, which, in Abrahams’s assessment, shows the influence of African Anansi tales. Renwick argues, however, that neither feature indicates necessarily a departure from the ballad’s British roots. Cante fable variants, he notes, are not uncommon in Anglo-American ballad tradition, and the character of the bird, rather than suggesting the influence of African narrative tradition, probably indicates that the source ballad is not Child 81, but the much less common but related ballad, “The Bonny Birdy” (Child 82), which features a virtually identical character. Renwick then offers his own explanation for the influences shaping St. Vincentian tradition through an evaluation of the broader Caribbean tradition. He shows that a significant number of Carribean ballad traits — including some that Abrahams views as African syncretisms — are found primarily among older British versions or, more broadly, in older European ballad traditions. Caribbean balladry, in his view, can be explained as easily by the retention of these older features as by syncretic adaptation. Ultimately, all arguments and counter-arguments hinge on the relative …