Genre and the Ballad

Author(s): Judith Seeger

Source: Journal of Folklore Research , Jan. - Dec., 1994, Vol. 31, No. 1/3, Triple Issue:
Ballad Redux (Jan. - Dec., 1994), pp. 151-176
Published by: Indiana University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3814513

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Judith Seeger

GENRE AND THE BALLAD

During the years I have heard, sung, recorded, studied, and thought about
ballads, I have wondered increasingly about generic identification of the
form. The traditional scholarly definition of the romance, the Hispanic and
Luso-Brazilian ballad with which I have particularly worked, appears to be
clear enough, if somewhat literary: The romance is a narrative song or
poem, composed of octosyllabic (or, occasionally, hexasyllabic) verses with
alternate lines ending in assonance, which we now usually write as six-
teen- (or twelve-) syllable lines divided into hemistichs. The oral traditional
romance tends, as well, to be increasingly presented in dialogue, as com-
pared with earlier renderings, and to exist in variants. This would seem quite
straightforward, if it were not the case that the category romance has little if
any meaning to the people who actually perform and listen to oral tradi-
tional ballads, unless they have learned the term from collectors. Ever since
Juan and Ram6n Menendez Pidal and Maria Goyri began collecting ballads
in Spain in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, collec-
tors have had to devise techniques, most frequently singing or reciting the
first line or two, called the incipit, in order to communicate to potential
singers what they would like to hear. This has been a source of endless
frustration.'
Some of my own struggles with the non-existence of romance as a
recognizable category in the field have been recounted in my study of the
ballad "Count Claros."2 Using various approaches during two years of
fieldwork in Brazil and Spain, I have recorded, in addition to numerous
items remotely if at all related to ballads, pieces that tell stories I recognize as
canonical ballad narratives. Not all of them, however, have been in canoni-
cal ballad form. Some have been performed as songs; some as poems; some
as dramas sung by different singers taking different parts, occasionally
accompanied by gestures; and some as stories, with sung verses liberally and
often imaginatively embedded in spoken prose. These pieces are generically
Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 31, Nos. 1-3, 1994
Copyright © 1994 by the Folklore Institute, Indiana University

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152 Judith Seeger

distinct. Many of them would not find their way into ballad collections,
certainly not in the form in which they were performed. Yet, in some
respect, they are related to ballads, and they are certainly examples of living
tradition. One is reluctant to banish them from balladry on the grounds of
generic rules which begin to appear both rigid and artificial. Why not, then,
use them to investigate our notions of genre itself? Why not, instead of
lamenting our hardship, consider the implications of the inescapable fact
that the traditional romance, as ballad collectors have defined it, does not
exist in any meaningful way for the ballad-performing community?
The oral traditional ballad cannot be identified with a single time, place,
or style of performance, because whatever it is to those who sing and listen
to it, it is not an inviolable object. Like any living text the ballad raises
questions, but unlike a fixed written text it allows itself to be modified to
answer them. We know that traditional ballads may be performed in many
different settings, ranging from harvests, to dances, to evening spinning
sessions. Therefore it should not be surprising, particularly in a community
that does not recognize the ballad as such, that the setting of the perfor-
mance seems to influence the generic tendency of any particular rendering.
In Brazil at least, ballads performed as children's games or in adult street
ceremonies will be sung and enacted by different singers. Ballads per-
formed as lullabies will, of course, be sung solo, as will those that lighten
solitary labor. Ballads performed during relaxation from work may be sung
or told, and ballads performed during storytelling sessions will be couched
in prose. I would like to suggest in particular that a tendency toward
including prose in a ballad performance fills a perceived need to answer
questions raised by the characteristic spareness of sung ballad diction.
Further, I suggest that such prose is a legitimate and valuable part of the
ballad, and that we as ballad scholars ignore it at our peril, if we aspire to say
anything meaningful about the ballad thus performed.
On the basis of my fieldwork and my familiarity with ballad collections,
the phenomenon I have called prosification, though by no means limited to
Brazil, seems particularly striking there. Whether it really is or not remains
to be seen. But before addressing that question I will focus on a single ballad
I recorded when I visited the Brazilian states of Sergipe and Espirito Santo in
1989. This is the very popular ballad called in Brazil "O Cego" (The Blind
Man), known to Portuguese tradition as "O cego raptor" (The Blind Abduc-
tor), and to Hispanic tradition as "El raptor pordiosero" (The Begging
Abductor). The ruse of blindness combined with poverty employed by a
young man in order to deceive a young woman is not exclusive to the
Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian traditions, appearing, for example, in the
English and Scottish ballads known as '"The Jolly Beggar" and "The
Gaberlunyie Man" (Child 279 and 279 appendix). The British and His-
panic/Luso-Brazilian ballads differ so greatly in every other respect, how-
ever, that I would hesitate to claim any deeper relationship among them.

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GENRE AND THE BALLAD 153

In all the renderings I have read or heard, the sung words of the Brazilian
"Blind Man," with the exception of a frequent opening of onomatopoeic
knocking, consist entirely of dialogue. From the words we infer characters
and actions. The ballad may open with a voice calling for "mama" to wake up
and come see the blind man. Alternatively there is a knock at a door;
someone asks who is there; the person knocking answers that he is a blind
beggar; the unidentified speaker tells a woman, who is the only character
given a name (in the renderings I recorded it was Helena, Aninha, or
Naninha), to get up and fetch him bread and wine; the blind man says he
does not want bread or wine; what he wants is for Aninha to show him the
way; Aninha is told to guide him; they walk down a dark road; she, perhaps
seeing horses and a carriage, begins to fear that he is not what he seems, and
he reveals that in fact he is not blind but instead has disguised himself in
order to entice her out of her house so that he can carry her off and marry
her; she bids good-bye to her house, her garden, occasionally to her father,
and finally to her mother, who, she claims, was false to her.
The story thus sung is simple. Nothing in it answers such questions as
"Why does the blind man come to this particular door?" or "Why does the
mother ask her daughter to leave the house, evidently at night, to guide a
stranger?" The daughter seems to think it was all a trick. But why does she
think so? Furthermore, does anybody care? The nine renderings of 'The
Blind Man" I recorded reveal that people do care. They also reveal that
answers to these questions differ radically. In some cases the questions were
raised and answered in discussions outside the performance. In others,
which I have classed as sung stories, they were included in the performance.
The renderings of 'The Blind Man" which I recorded in 1989, in brief, were
the following:
One had been learned as a song. The singer was a twelve-year-old girl who
had learned it in school. This was the only time I saw a definitive written text.
A friend of the girl who shyly sang it for me had written it out for her as a
present, on a piece of graph paper, with a dedication and an elaborately
designed border worked in variously-colored pencils.
Four had been learned as sung dramatic games. In only two perfor-
mances, however, did different singers actually take the different parts. Of
the other two, one had been learned in school as a dramatic game, though
the singer sang it alone. The other consisted of a lively encounter between
two collectors (a Brazilian and me) and an aged singer, forgetful but feisty,
trying her best to remember a game she had played and sung as a girl, while
rigorously resisting being manipulated by the collectors, too many of whose
questions were those of people who thought they knew the answers.
Four were story-songs. One of the performers began with an explanatory
introduction in prose and continued with sung verse dialogue interspersed
with prose segments, most of which identified the speakers. Another first
told me the story in great detail, none of which is included in her sung

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 154 Judith Seeger

version of the ballad,

announcement that the s
combined with prose. T
fable: mostly prose, wit
mance was given by tw
trying together to recoll
In order to explore the
examine in some detail t
singer learned it as a dr
be a canonical ballad text in the stanzaic form characteristic of much
Brazilian balladry. The second performance, in traditional generic t
would more correctly be called a cante-fable than a ballad. The third, wh
I have called a story-song, was a strikingly emergent performance
melded song and story into a very curious rendering, much of wh
meaning arose from its setting.
The first performance I recorded from forty-six-year-old Maura Fern
da Costa, in Conceicao da Barra, Espirito Santo. She had learned
Blind Man" as a dramatic game in school. Maura, who was recognized
good singer with a good memory, sang clearly, tunefully, and expres
but without gestures or any direct address to the audience, which includ
in addition to me, three women and four teen-aged girls.
A transcription and translation follow.3 I have written the words with
internal punctuation because the only pauses were provided by the
which was, roughly:

FJJ- IJJJ i'J !J- I- Jl

yLIf'J
:r 'r=.r--rr -4-rJ 'n
IJi-rt-rT-Fr 'I
r11
1. Toques toc toque quem bate ai
Toques toc toque quem bate ai
Sou eu pobre cego esmola a pedir
Sou eu pobre cego esmola a pedir
2. Vai Helena no armarinho
Vai Helena no armarinho

'panhar pao e vinho p'ra dar ao ceguinho

'panhar pao e vinho p'ra dar ao ceguinho

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GENRE AND THE BALLAD 155

3. Nao quero seu pao tampouco seu vinho

Nao quero seu pao tampouco seu vinho
Quero que Helena me ensine o caminho
Quero que Helena me ensine o caminho

4. Vai Helena mudar o vestidinho

Vai Helena mudar o vestidinho
para ensinar o caminho ao ceguinho
para ensinar o caminho ao ceguinho
5. Pronto seu cego la esta o caminho
Pronto seu cego la esta o caminho
6. Marcha Helena mais um bocadinho

7.i Eu nao sou cego e nem quero ser

Eu nao sou cego e nem quero ser
Me finjo de cego p'ra roubar voce
Me finjo de cego p'ra roubar voce

8. Adeus minha casa adeus meujardim

Adeus minha casa adeus meujardim
Adeus minha mae que foi falsa p'ra mim
Adeus minha mae que foi falsa p'ra mim

1. Knock knock knock who's knocking there

Knock knock knock who's knocking there
It's me poor blind man asking for alms
It's me poor blind man asking for alms

2. Go Helena to the little cupboard

Go Helena to the little cupboard
To get bread and wine to give to the little blind man
To get bread and wine to give to the little blind man

3. I don't want your bread or your wine

I don't want your bread or your wine
I want Helena to show me the way
I want Helena to show me the way

4. Go Helena change your little dress

Go Helena change your little dress
To show the way to the little blind man
To show the way to the little blind man

5. All right you blind man there is the road

All right you blind man there is the road
6. Walk Helena a little bit more

7. I'm not blind and neither do I want to be

I'm not blind and neither do I want to be

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156 Judith Seeger

I pretend to be blind to steal you

I pretend to be blind to steal you

8. Good-bye my house good-bye my garden

Good-bye my house good-bye my garden
Good-bye my mother who was false to me
Good-bye my mother who was false to me

As is common in sung Brazilian ballads, the dialogue begins

immediately. The speakers are not identified, so that in a performance
like this, where there was only one singer, listeners unfamiliar with the story
would have had to follow the singing closely in order to recognize different
interlocutors. The repetition of each line probably helped by slowing the
pace of the narration. The opening "toques toc toque" represents the sound
of knocking at the door, as is revealed almost immediately by the question,
"Who's knocking there?" This single phrase establishes the scene with
characteristic ballad brevity. The text has not indicated either who is knock-
ing or who is asking the question, but the reply to the question appears to be
clear and direct: "It's me, a poor blind man, asking for alms." The first
musical quatrain, then, which is, verbally, a couplet with each line repeated,
has established the scene and two speakers. Each of the following stanzas
belongs to only one speaker, including those I have numbered 5 and 6,
despite their appearing on paper, in terms of assonance, to be parts of a
single, incomplete, stanza, artificially divided. The division may be artificial,
but it is not mine, for each of these "stanzas" was sung to the first half of the
melody, repeated in stanza 5 and sung only once in stanza 6.4
The response of the unnamed questioner seems simply charitable. Re-
vealing itself to belong to a person with some authority, the voice in the
second stanza tells "Helena" to bring bread and wine to "the little blind
man." The blind man, however, though he has called himself "poor," has not
called himself "little." The diminutive is common enough in Brazilian
speech to pass perhaps unremarked. But the situation becomes more com-
plicated as the man responds that instead of bread and wine, he wants
Helena to show him the way. What way? And why Helena? The ballad does
not tell us. The unidentified voice instructs Helena to change her "little"
dress and show the little blind man the way. Helena, though obedient, seems
to lack enthusiasm for her task. Immediately after the stanza telling her to
show him the way, we hear her first words, informing him, "All right, you
blind man, there is the road." She has not called him little, and she speaks
shortly, as she might say seu malandro, that is, "you rascal." As this is a half-
stanza, we might suppose that the musical incompleteness indicates that
something has been forgotten. The other renderings I recorded in Conceicao
da Barra, however, also broke this stanza at this point, so it was not a
momentary lapse, but rather was an accepted rendering. Whether or not

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GENRE AND THE BALLAD 157

the musical truncation was deliberate, when considered together with

Helena's dry diction, it contributes to both characterization and action.
Helena seems eager to discharge her duty and go home, but the man, as if
interrupting, urges her onward. Then, breaking off his own stanza, he
asserts his physical soundness and reveals his disguise and its purpose.
Helena's immediate capitulation to her fate does not indicate enthusiasm
for it so much as the realization that her home provided only an illusion of
safety. She first bids farewell to the place itself, and then to her mother, who,
we now know, was the unidentified third speaker and the central player in
what Helena belatedly understands was a deception designed to lure her
away from her home. What seemed at first to be a simple drama is revealed
instead to be a drama within a drama, economically expressed within a few
short exchanges of dialogue.
Still, one might ask whether Helena has reached the right interpretation
of the double drama. The diction of Maura's rendering certainly does not
contradict her reading of events. On the contrary, it seems to support it. In
retrospect, it appears that the man already knew Helena's name and ad-
dress. We also re-evaluate the mother's readiness to send her daughter on a
possibly dangerous mission, as well as her soothing diminutives. Yet it is
possible to ask questions that Maura's rendering does not explicitly raise.
Was Helena's mother really false to her daughter? Might she not have been
taken in by the blind man, too? And if the mother did know who the blind
man really was, why did she deceive her daughter? While giving us a
sequence of action revealed through dialogue, with a few hints as to inter-
pretation, Maura's rendering, by virtue of its form, can provide no more
than a glimpse of a mystery as far as character and background are con-
cerned.

Such spareness is characteristic of traditional Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian

ballad diction and arguably is part of its appeal. A ballad like 'The Blind
Man," with its tight core of action expressed through dialogue, is an open
book as far as interpretation is concerned. This does not necessarily mean,
however, that its performers are content to accept ambiguity. Rather, it
seems to mean that the ballad is alive for them insofar as they have made it
"their" story. And their stories vary greatly. One singer, when asked, insisted
that the mother did not know the man was an abductor in disguise. Another
explained before beginning to sing the ballad that the mother had indeed
plotted the whole thing with a young man, but insisted that she had done it
for her daughter's own good, as the daughter was too shy to accept anyone's
proposal of marriage. A third, more elaborate account was that the mothe
had to trick her daughter into marrying a king because the daughter had
been so traumatized by all her mother had suffered to bring her up in
poverty that she could not imagine marrying anybody, no matter how rich
and powerful. Still, even in that rendering, questions are left unanswered

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158 Judith Seeger

Perhaps the mother was right and her daughter would go on to live happily
ever after with her royal husband. Nonetheless, the daughter's last words are
as bitter as those of Maura's Helena, and we never know whether she later
realizes that her mother knew best, after all.
A thorough consideration of such questions can be seen in the rendering
of Hildete Falcao Baptista. Hildete, who had learned 'The Blind Man" from
her grandmother on the cacao plantation in the state of Bahia where she
grew up, was the sixty-eight-year-old wife of a federal senator from the state
of Sergipe, and founder and director of an institute in the capital, Aracaju,
which provided a home for boys who were orphans or whose parents could
not afford to support them. She offered to perform two ballads for me when
she discovered that I was looking for ballads among the women who worked
at the institute. One was a love ballad she called "Capitao Eduardo," which
combined motifs from various love ballads and ended happily, Hildete said,
when the palm trees growing from the graves of both lovers entertwined in
a posthumous embrace. The other was 'The Blind Man." I made an appoint-
ment to audiotape her in her office, and another some days later to
videotape her. Hildete, thus, had time to polish her rendering. Her style of
delivery was nearly emotionless. She stared into space when I audiotaped
her, and into the camera on the day I videotaped her, seeming almost to
ignore the several women who were present both times, smiling only slightly
as she approached the moral of the story. Her two renderings were nearly
identical.

The tune to the sung verse was:

r r r I r J r 1 JI 1L , i
Hildete began with prose. I have marked her pauses with line ends.
Um dia tinha uma menina numa choupana.
E ela brincava assim na...
na.

assim no terreiro, quando passava u

Entao ele virou-se para ela e pediu q
a sua casa

pois
ele era cego,
e nao sabia como chegar.
A menina entao foi, perguntou a mae se podia levar.
A mae disse, "E isso ai, vamos, minha filha. Ja que o lugar nao e longe.

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GENRE AND THE BALLAD 159

Voce vai levando esse pobre rap

Ela entao pegou na mao dele
e saiu cor ele, ne? Saiu, chega
corn certo tempo, ela disse par
Ai ele cantou:

1. Caminha Naninha mais um bocadinho

que eu sou um pobre cego que ando sozinho

E nisso eles iam andando.

Quando ela estava sempre cansada

ele pedia esa miseric6rdia a ela: [ri]
2. Caminha Naninha mais um bocadinho
que eu sou um pobre cego que ando sozinho
Mas deixe la,
que esse rapaz,
ele tinha essa missao a cumprir,
devido a uma fada ma ter posto nele um feitico,
que ele s6 voltaria a ser feliz
quando ele encontrasse uma menina boa,
d6cil
e bela,
e que ia levar-se a ele ate o seu palacio.
Pois ele, porque ele nao sabia mais onde era o palacio dele.
E ele encontrou essa menina
por sinal ela era muito bonita, chamava-se Linda,
e

foi levando, e acabou chegando ao palacio.

Quando chegou a ver aquela. ..
aquela casa suntuosa, ela ficou
abismada, ne? de ver um ceguinho, ne?
que ela pensava que era um mendigo e no entanto ela estava diante de um
principe.
Ele ia entao ...

confessou a ela que ele era um principe

que ele nao era um mendigo,
que ele apenas estava cumprindo uma sina
e que,
daquele dia em diante,
que ele ia desposa-la
pois ela mereceu dele.
Nao s6 ela fez a caridade a ele
como mereceu dele

tudo o que ele que Ihe ia dar:

riqueza,
posicao,
e tudo mais.

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160 Judith Seeger

Eu acredito que essa hist6ria mais fosse...

seja uma forma de mostrar que o bem e sempre recompensado.
Aqueles que faz o bem
sempre
a pessoa e recompensada por alguma coisa,
e por isso que a gente deve,
nao s6 nas hist6rias

mas em tudo que a gente faz,

deve-se sempre olhar
fazer o bem sem olhar a quem.
Porque numa hora dessa a gente e sempre feliz.

One day
there was a girl in a hut.
And she was playing in ...
in ...

in the yard, when a young man passed by.

Then he turned to her
and asked her to take him to his house
because
he was blind,
and he didn't know how to get there.
So the girl went and asked her mother if she could take him.
Her mother said: 'That's right. Fine, daughter. Since the place isn't far awa
You go ahead,
take that poor young man."
Then she took his hand

and left with him, right? She left, arrives at a certain pla-
in a certain amount of time, she told him that she was very tired.
So he sang:

1. Walk Naninha just a little bit more

Because I'm a poor blind man who walks alone

And with that they went on walking. When she was very tired
she asked him to take pity: [laughs]

2. Walk Naninha just a little bit more

Because I'm a poor blind man who walks alone

But enough of that,

for that young man,
he had that mission to fulfill,
because of a bad fairy who had put a spell on him,
that he would only be happy again
when he found a girl who was good,
docile,
and lovely,
and who would take him to his palace.

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GENRE AND THE BALLAD 161

For he, because he didn't know where his palace was anymore.
And he found that girl
by the way she was very pretty, she was called Linda [Beautiful].
And

she took him and ended up arriving at the palace.

When she saw that...

that sumptuous house, she was amazed, right? to see a little blind man, r
because she thought he was a blind man and meanwhile she was in fron
prince.
He was going then ...
he confessed to her that he was a prince,
that he was not a beggar, that he was only fulfilling a fate
and that,
from that day on,
that he was going to marry her because she deserved him.
Not only did she do a good deed for him but also she deserved from him
everything he was going to give her:
wealth,
position,
and everything else.
I believe that story really was ...
is a form of showing that good is always rewarded.
Those who always do good,
always the person is rewarded by something,
and because of this we should,
not only in stories,
but in everything we do, we should always try
to do good without caring for whom.
Because at a time like that we are always happy.

Clearly, Hildete, or her grandmother, had thought the story through.

Everyone in her fairytale telling is good and honest. The blind man is not
disguised in order to fool anyone, but is instead an enchanted prince fulfilling
his unhappy destiny, searching for the perfect woman to lead him to his
palace, for he is really lost. Naninha (or Linda, as she is called in the prose)
is an unsophisticated (and, by the way, pretty) girl with a heart of gold
despite the poverty of her simple home. There is no knocking. In fact, all
that remains of the ballad, besides a remarkable interpretation of its story, is a
single stanza, sung twice, in the style of a cante-fable, its first line replete with
internal rhyme, in which the putative blind man urges Naninha on just a little
farther, and, again, just a little farther, and she charitably walks on despite her
exhaustion. Curiously, this is precisely the stanza (number 6) that is vesti-
gial in Maura's rendering, and that has completely disappeared from the
other two performances I recorded in Espirito Santo. It is, however, funda-
mental to Hildete's understanding of the ballad, for it is the moment in which
Naninha's charity is tested and retested, and in which she proves her worth.

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162 Judith Seeger

Naninha is more active than her mother in this rendering, taking the
initiative of asking her mother's permission to help the blind man. The
mother is a kind and generous woman, concerned both for the poor blind
man and for her daughter's welfare. She approves Naninha's request to lead
the blind man to his home, adding, somewhat mysteriously (in what may be
a trace of the duplicity seen in other versions of the story or what may simply
be an attempt to rationalize an action that unexplained would lack verisi-
militude), that the place is not very far away.5
Naninha expresses no response except amazement at the revelation that
the man who has abducted her is a prince who intends to marry her because
she deserves him and all his wealth. In the absence of comment, it is
probably safe to assume that, unlike the daughters who accuse their mothers
of betrayal, she is delighted. In any case, the question of deception on the part
of the mother never arises, since the idea to help the blind man was Naninha's.
Hildete herself, whose own life work has been charity, steps in at the end
of the rendering to state and interpret the moral of the story. Doing good, as
she sees it, is at least its own reward, and there is always the possibility that if
we are good and docile and charitable (and it probably does not hurt to be
beautiful) we may be rewarded in more tangible ways as well. Her story,
which generically is clearly not a ballad, expresses a widespread Brazilian
belief that strangers, particularly needy strangers, appearing at one's door,
should be treated well. In secular stories the mysterious stranger is often a
prince in disguise; in sacred stories it tends to beJesus.
But we should remember that things do not always work that way. At the
other extreme to Hildete's interpretation of 'The Blind Man" is that of the
two women I mentioned earlier who were trying to reconstruct the ballad.
Their performance was the product of a joint effort at remembering. One
afternoon I went with a friend and a colleague of hers, Maria Helena de
Deus Silva, who taught religion at the institute Hildete directed, to visit a
friend of Helena's youth who had been a beloved storyteller. Maria Almeida,
seventy-five years old, was originally from the small town of Maruim, Sergipe.
When we visited her, however, she lived in the home of her son and
daughter-in-law in Aracaju, confined by age and crippling diabetes to a dark,
windowless room so small that two single beds left only a narrow path into it,
leading to a dresser. Maria was astonished to see Helena, whom she had not
seen in years, and she greeted us with tears and laments about her life now
compared to what it once had been. Helena, forty-three years old, was
cheerful and ebullient. She had dressed up for the visit, which for her was a
social occasion despite our goal of recording ballads. I had recorded Helena
on other occasions, and had observed that she was a performer who, rather
than becoming tongue-tied when she seemed unsure of what came next,
would embrace the spirit of the piece as she understood it. The piece would
come to life, sometimes in startling ways, as she talked. 'The Blind Man"
provides a good example of her technique, as well as of Maria's increasing

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 GENRE AND THE BALLAD 163

participation. Both women re

grandmothers.
I have numbered three stanz
ballad narration. The ballad d
opening characteristic of many
ter calls her mother to awaken and come see the blind man at the door. It
took Helena and Maria a while to recall this verse, but not quite so long as it
took them to remember the second verse, in which the blind man refuses
bread and wine and asks for Aninha to show him the road. Maria jumped
ahead to the man's revelation that he is not blind, and the hemistich in
which he proclaims that he is not blind, once tried, had to be rejected in
order for the story to proceed. The stanzas I have numbered 3a and 3b are
characteristic of Portuguese popular song in expressing a single situation
with two different rhyming words, in this case providing two different clues
that the "blind man" is not what he seems. In the first Aninha exclaims over
the many horses she has suddenly spied; in the second, sung by Maria alone,
she expresses surprise that a blind man is out walking so late.
The two women began to sing 'The Blind Man" after Maria finished
telling a long, involved story about a prince who married a young woman
who received him well when he was disguised as a poor man, and the
numerous tribulations she had to undergo before they could finally be
happy. Helena's voice is dominant on the tape, but though many of Maria's
remarks are faint or unintelligible, she was a definite presence. She and
Helena were very much talking to each other as well as performing for me.
The tune, as one would expect in a rendering performed under these
conditions, was far from fixed. That of the first two stanzas was, very roughly,
the following:

J Iu +u i J. rI mTIr4L
r? Jif .rit r I f l L Ii
That of the third stanza was different:

t r r X E J J J j J i fr r r
r ru f r r r i JIr I TL.

r r Ir r 'rrrr l 4
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 164 Judith Seeger

Very likely neither of th

tune would have been if Maria and Helena had had time to work it out

before being recorded,just as the text is not that of a polished performa

Maria e Helena:
1. Acorda acorda mamae e deixa de tanto dormir

Venha ver o cego (Maria: o pobre cego) que esti da ...

Helena e Maria: Como e?

Helena: Venha ver o cego que esta chorando a pedir

Ai ela, ele ai vem. Ela diz, "Vai la na cozinha e traz pao e vinho."
levar.

Maria:

2. Eu nao sou cego e nem quero teu vinho ...

Helena: Eu nao sou cego ...
Maria e Helena:

Nem quero teu pao e nem quero teu vinho

Eu quero que Aninha me ensine o caminho
Eu quero que Aninha me ensine o caminho
Helena: Ela ai disse:

Helena e Maria:
3a. Valei-me Nossa Senhora valei-me Santa Maria

Eu nunca vi cego com cavalaria

Eu nunca vi cego cor cavalaria
[Maria ri.]

Helena: Ai ele seguiu o caminho, ne?

Seguiu o caminho.
Seguiu o caminho. Ela: "Acorda, acorda, mamae..." e pedia p'ra
acordar

pa' poder ver o ceguinho. A mie continuava dormindo. A mie era

preguicosa. Nao se levantava.
Dejeito nenhum!
Ela dormindo por vida. Ela nao gostava de dar esmola.
Era!

Ai o velho seguiu,
chegava nas porta,
pedia esmola,
e saia, saia.
Ate que acertou o caminho. Que o velho vinha pedindo e se perdia. O
velho era cego.
Agora quando nao queria esmola, ele pedia a pessoa p'ra ensinar o caminho.
Sabe? E na cantiga ele dizia assim.

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GENRE AND THE BALLAD 165

Judy: Mas ele nao queria casar-se com ela?

Maria: [?]

Helena: Ai ele pediu no final pa' casar com ela.

Ja!
Essa e curtinha.

Era a mulher que nao gostava de dar esmola.

Maria: ... nao tem cantiga, nao.

3b. Valei-me Deus e Nossa Senhora

Eu nunca vi cego andar essa hora

Essa era a bichinha.

Helena: Era. Quando ele pedia, pediu ela pa' casar.

Ai ela dizia isso:

"Nunca vi cego."

Judy: Ai ela se casou com ele?

Helena: Nao.

Nao chegou a se casar com ele, nao. Ele seguiu a viagem s6, q
de mato, tinha medo, n'era?
Era assim ese pessoal que mora no mato assim na roca. Eles a
amedrontado quando chega uma pessoa de fora, nao e?
Entao esse pessoal como criado como indio, ne?
Nao tem civilizacao, ne? Nao sabem ler...

Maria: Tnm medo.

Helena: Sao completamente analfabeto, ne? Nao sao como n6s

quando uma pessoa que chegava na porta eles corriam.
Ne?

Judy: Ai ela nao foi com ele?

Helena: Nao foi com ele, nao. Ele seguiu viagem sozinho.
Maria, (a Helena): Mas voce 'ta linda! 'ta muitojovem!
Maria and Helena:

1. Wake up wake up mama and stop sleeping so much

Come see the blind man (Maria: the poor blind man) who is

Helena and Maria (to each other): How does it go?

Helena: Come see the blind man who is crying to beg

So she, he goes there. She says, "Go into the kitchen and bring bread
wine." So she goes to get it.

Maria (uncertainly):

2. I'm not blind and I don't want your wine ...

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166 Judith Seeger

Helena: I'm not blind ...

Both (more confidently):

I don't want your bread and neither do I want your wine

I want Aninha to show me the way
I want Aninha to show me the way
Helena: So she said:

Both:

3a. Save me Our Lady save me Saint Mary

I never saw a blind man with horses
I never saw a blind man with horses

[Maria laughs.]

Helena: So he kept on going, right?

He kept on going.
He kept on going. She: "Wake up, wake up mama..." and she was asking
her mother to wake up
so she could see the little blind man. The mother kept on sleeping. The
mother was lazy. She wouldn't get up.
No way!
Sleeping her life away. She didn't like to give alms.
That's right!
So the old man went,
he came to the doors,
he asked for alms,
and he went on,
he went on,
until he found the way. Because the old man came begging and he got lost.
The old man was blind.

Now when he didn't want alms, he asked the person to show him the way.
You know? And in the song he said that.

A confused conversation ensues, within which Judy can be heard asking

"But didn't he want to marry her?" Maria's response is unintelligible, but
Helena takes control:

So at the end he asked to marry her.

Right!
That's a little short one. It was the woman who didn't like to give alms.

Maria:... there isn't any song. [Then she sings]:

3b. Save me God and Our Lady
I never saw a blind man walking at this hour

That was the little girl [using the affectionate diminutive bichinha, often used
for children, literally "little animal"].

Helena: It was. When he asked, he asked her to marry him.

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GENRE AND THE BALLAD 167

So she said that:

"I never saw a blind man."

Judy: So did she marry him?

Helena: No.

She didn't marry him. He went on his journey alone, because s

of the forest, she was afraid, right? She was like those people wh
forest, on small farms. They're usually shy when a person co
outside, right?
So those people are brought up like Indians, right?
They aren't civilized, right? They don't know how to read . . .

Maria: They're afraid.

Helena: They're completely illiterate, right? They're not like

a person arrived at the door they ran.
Right?

Judy: So she didn't go with him?

Helena: No, she didn't go with him. He continued his journey alone.

Maria, fondly, to Helena: You look so beautiful! You're very young!

This is truly an emergent text. Unlike Maura's "Blind Man," which dif-
fered only slightly from another local rendering, maintaining even the
peculiar musical division, or Hildete's, whose words and style of delivery
were nearly identical in two performances more than a week apart, this
particular rendering surely was never heard before and will never be heard
again. The prose intercalations take various forms. The first consists simply
of Maria and Helena asking each other how the song goes. The second is
Helena's prose paraphrase of the mother's instructions to her daughter to
go fetch bread and wine. The third identifies a speaker. But in the fourth,
Helena seems to take the story and run. This is the first of two relatively
lengthy prose segments, one within the performance proper and one
outside of it. Helena's speech when she is within the story is rhythmical,
repetitive, and marked with exclamations. As it proceeds, however, the plot
seems to change abruptly. She asserts that the mother was so lazy that in fact
she never even got up. Furthermore she did not like to give alms. The blind
man suddenly becomes an old man.
At this point I was drawn into the performance as well, for I was so
surprised at the turn the story seemed to be taking that I could not resist
asking if the blind man did not want to marry the daughter. Out of a
confused and largely unintelligible conversation can be heard Helena's
admission that he did. But when I asked if she married him, Helena replied
that not only did she not marry him, she did not even go with him. We are
now in the second lengthy prose segment, which falls outside the perfor-

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168 Judith Seeger

mance proper. Less rhythmical than the preceding segment, it is strongly

marked with repeated rhetorical appeals for agreement as to why the
mother and daughter were so frightened of the stranger: They were forest
people, like Indians, always fearful, especially with strangers, unable to read.
In short, they were not civilized like us.
Generically this piece seems to fall somewhere between Maura's render-
ing of 'The Blind Man," whose printed text would be classified as a ballad
despite arising from a dramatic tradition, and Hildete's, which is generically
a cante-fable. But essentially it defies classification. This "Blind Man" was
born and grew in a particular situation, from which it cannot be extracted
without suffering substantial damage.
As in any living performance, more than one thing was going on. Maria
and Helena, in addition to trying to please me (though not too hard, for
they more and more forcefully denied the assumption, implicit in my
questions, that the man married the young woman), were getting reac-
quainted with each other after many years. Maria, who began the afternoon
in tears, ended it in delighted laughter, a transformation which can be seen
as the performance unfolds. There seems as well to be a message directed
specifically to me, as if to assure me that though Maria and Helena might
appear to be no more than poor repositories of a rural and old-fashioned
tradition, we were essentially the same-civilized and educated-and in this
respect unlike others, notably including the people in the story. Our visit
was, as I said earlier, a social occasion. Maria, though bedridden and
surprised by our unexpected arrival (for she had no telephone), was as
gracious a hostess as she could be. Her daughter-in-law brought us coffee,
and between stories and songs we chatted about other things. "The Blind
Man" as interpreted by her friend Helena reinforced the message that,
despite apparent differences, we were all equal in the ways that mattered.
The performance in all its manifold significance was very rich. If I tried to
extract the ballad in traditional generic form from its context and setting I
would find myself holding only the most pitiful of what have been called
fragments, and the heart of Helena and Maria's verbal art would be lost.
Most of the other renderings I have recorded are more amenable to
removal from their settings, and yet Maria and Helena's is only an extreme
example of the general case. Consider for a moment the setting of Hildete's
rendering. I have no doubt that at some level her "Blind Man" also was
aimed directly at me: a stranger from a rich country who had come to her
door seeking a kind of charity. I wished that in appreciation for her assis-
tance with my project I could help fix the institute's leaky roof or aid it in
some other way. I am sure she did, too. Her rendering may, however, be
lifted from its particular setting without doing as much violence to it as
would be done to Helena and Maria's, unless I were to try also to extract the
"ballad" from the prose, in which case I would again be left with a single
verse, a paltry "fragment."

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GENRE AND THE BALLAD 169

Maura's rendering was the one performed in the most nearly neutral of
settings: Some friends of mine called her and asked her to sing, and she
complied. She very likely had an interpretation of the story, but she volun-
teered no information about it and was asked for none. Of the three
performances I have transcribed, hers provided the only text one w
find in a typical traditional ballad collection. And yet many of the "ballad
I recorded in Brazil more nearly resembled the renderings of Hildet
Maria and Helena than that of Maura. Both Antonio Lopes' ballad co
tion from the state of Maranhao andJackson da Silva Lima's collection fro
Sergipe also include pieces in which prose is mixed with sung verse.
may fill out a sketchy sung narrative more or less elaborately and m
clude a message for the collector. But does it have any legitimacy within
ballad-performing tradition? And what are ballad collectors to make of it
In order to respond to these questions I would like to consider m
closely what appears to be ongoing generic transformation of the bal
Brazil, specifically the apparent increasing prevalence of prose, wh
structured like Hildete's or emergent like that of Helena and Maria. T
seem to be three possibilities. Perhaps the Brazilian ballad is becom
increasingly prosified with respect to its own past and other traditio
perhaps it is not, and only appears to be doing so because of chang
collecting interests and techniques. Or, perhaps, both things are hap
ing, for there is suggestive, though not conclusive, evidence for each
tion. Support for the first hypothesis involves the nature of the b
performing community, while support for the second focuses on the bal
collecting community. I will consider the first one first.
The differences between the ballads I recorded in Brazil and those I
recorded in Spain, as well as those I have read in ballad collections, are
striking. All the ballads I recorded in Spain in 1985 were metrical narrations,
occasionally quite long, either sung or recited. One woman who sang for me
had written down a number of ballads she knew. Others simply remembered
them. None were professional singers, but all were recognized in their
communities as people who knew ballads as well as other songs. Theirs wer
the sorts of performances I would have expected from what I knew of
balladry. Listening to them was almost like hearing texts straight from ballad
collections. Ballad collectors had visited the towns where I recorded, so th
people understood what I was seeking. To what extent those collectors,
whose single goal was to record as many texts as possible, had influenced
performance style I am unable to say. My impression was that the metric
texts I heard had their own integrity and were, indeed, legitimate ballads in
canonical form.
Ballads I recorded in Brazil were another matter altogether. In the firs
place, people who knew them were much more difficult to locate. I neve
did find anyone who knew more than two or three, and rarely were they in
the form I regarded as generically pure. The ballad called 'Juliana e dom

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170 Judith Seeger

Jorge," known to Hispanic tradition as "El veneno de Mariana" (Mariana's

Poison), was well enough known that it could occasionally be elicited by
name, as could 'The Blind Man." The only, but by no means foolproof, way
to elicit others was to ask for "sung stories," perhaps singing a line or two, or
providing a plot synopsis. The best performances I recorded of the ballad of
"Count Claros" arose spontaneously in performances during storytelling
sessions,6 both from women who had denied knowing any ballads. These
pieces, which their performers evidently considered stories, included spo-
ken prose; but they also included entire narratives in sung verse. Had I been
so inclined in the interest of generic purity, I could have excised these
sections without compromising the development of the plot. From the
perspective of the generically pure ballad, the prose was superfluous. And
yet, it seemed wrong to disregard it. In neither instance was the prose
provided to help me, an outsider, understand what was going on, for in both
cases the performers had large audiences, and in one, the rendering was
generally recognized as being that of a particular individual, who was not
the performer. As far as the performance community was concerned, these
were, thus, not only acceptable but even appreciated renderings of "Count
Claros."

Unsure how to categorize these hybrid pieces, I was intrigued when I

encountered Roger Abrahams' article, "Child Ballads in the West Indies:
Familiar Fabulations, Creole Performances" and Martha Beckwith's earlier
article, "The English Ballad in Jamaica: A Note upon the Origin of the
Ballad Form." Both authors include transcriptions of performances much
like the ones I recorded, in which sung verse and spoken prose seem to have
melded into a form with an integrity of its own. In addition, Beckwith cites
similar story-songs recorded by other collectors in Jamaica and the Baha-
mas(1924:456). What was most suggestive was that both authors deal with
traditions having English and African roots, just as the tradition I recorded
along the coast of Brazil seemed quite plausibly a combination of Portu-
guese and African verbal art forms. The states of Espirito Santo and Sergipe,
like much of northeastern and coastal Brazil, had been divided into large
sugar plantations during the time of slavery and would have been settings
for contact between European and African cultures. Further, the coast of
Espirito Santo, because so much of it had been inhospitable malarial
swamp, had sheltered maroon settlements. Finally, when I was there the
populations of both states included large numbers of people either of
African or mixed African and European descent. It seems not at all unrea-
sonable that in such a situation of ongoing intercultural contact between
Europeans and Africans, mixed art forms would arise and take hold among
the local population, and that these would resemble traditions in other
countries and languages, such as the English-language tradition of the
Caribbean, where similar histories and conditions obtain.

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GENRE AND THE BALLAD 171

There are, to be sure, differences in detail between the Caribbean and

the Brazilian situations, which preclude at this point a definitive statement
of relationship. The Brazilian story-songs I recorded, for example, do not
have refrains, and in no case did anyone sing along with the principal
performer, much less dance, as both Beckwith (1924:458) and Abrahams
(1987:126) report. Moreover, the concept of the marketplace, which seems
fundamental to Abrahams' understanding of context and setting for story-
songs, does not translate readily into the Brazilian situation, except perhaps
as a general metaphor for intercultural mingling. There are in Brazil no
Christmas sports or tea meetings, wakes, or fetes to provide regular settings
for creole performance events. In Brazil most story-songs are performed at
home, on small or large farms, to while away the evening. In any case,
Brazilian story-songs are not confined to people of a single ethnic back-
ground. The performers I recorded range from a leader of an Afro-Brazilian
candomblg center to the daughter of a wealthy cacao plantation owner, who
was not of African descent, but who almost certainly grew up with servants
who were. Yet, despite the differences between the settings and styles of
Caribbean and the Brazilian African-European story-song traditions, the
existence of such similar pieces in both places suggests that cultural min-
gling may have been crucial for providing a strong living context in which
story-song traditions, including ballads, could flourish. Their existence
strongly suggests, further, that the prosification I have observed in Brazil is a
genuine, widespread African-American phenomenon.
We must still deal with the possibility that prosification of ballads in an
African-American context does not tell the whole story, for we have no way
of knowing to what extent ballad collectors themselves have skewed the
situation either by refusing to print renderings deemed faulty because they
contained prose or by omitting prose from the texts they have published.
Until we confront the practices of the ballad-collecting community we
cannot say to what extent prosification is a real phenomenon rather than an
artifact of collecting and publishing biases.
I observed above that what I have called prosification is limited neither to
Brazil nor to this century. Celso de Magalhaes noted and deplored it in
Brazil in his articles for the newspaper O Trabalho, published in Recife in
1873.7 Writing in the same year for the journal Romania, Adolfo Coelho
regretted observing the same phenomenon in Portugal (1874:263) as did
Jose Leite de Vasconcellos, writing in 1885 (1958-61:5-6). Such observa-
tions were not limited to the Luso-Brazilian tradition. To give a nineteenth-
century British example, it is only necessary to cite William Motherwell's
characterization of ballads from the Lowlands of Scotland:

Reciters frequently, when any part of the narrative appears incomplete, supp
the defect in prose. Where the ballad naturally terminates, they can tell wh

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172 Judith Seeger

became of some inferior or subordinate character mentioned in it, whom the

minstrel has passed over in silence, as interfering with the interest which
should be exclusively concentrated around the principal personages. Some
pieces, too, are prose and rhyme intermixed; the dialogue and those parts
purely lyrical are in metre, while the narrative and descriptive portions are
given in such humble prose as the reciter can furnish. (1846, 1: 19)

Motherwell goes on to cite an example of such a rendering, which looks, in

its combination of prose and verse, very much like some of those I have
collected (1846, 1: 20-21).
The most striking feature such references have in common is their
devaluing of prose as compared to verse. Motherwell's "humble prose" is
moderate compared to the despair of Coelho and Vasconcellos, for whom
part-prose renderings of ballads were signs of degeneration, or to the
vituperation of Magalhaes, who regarded the inroads of prose into balladry
as indicative of the stupidity, decay, and depravity which were only to be
expected when what he considered a bad "race" (the Latin) mixed with what
he considered a worse one (the African), creating the unfortunate Brazil-
ian. Speculations as to the sources of prose "invasions" aside, however, it is
clear that if verse is what is valued in mixed performances, verse is what will
be printed.
The attitudes behind such remarks raise the question of generic purity in
a larger forum than the Brazilian. And we should not suppose that they are
limited to the nineteenth century. For example, the collector of a modern
Portuguese rendering of 'The Blind Abductor" prefaces it with a short prose
explanation of its background given by the performer before beginning to
sing and then remarks that this preface was not recorded (Galhoz 1987:
333). One can only wonder how many other ballad performances from any
tradition have included prose introductions or intercalations that have not
been published or even mentioned. It has long been the custom of scholars
and collectors to deplore ballad collections in which the texts have been
polished, as it were, by combining verses from various renderings to com-
plete the story, or by improving vocabulary or constructions regarded as
rude, boorish, or in some other way deficient. But is it not possible that in
our zeal to reproduce ballad texts in what has been considered their pure
generic form we have, in effect, not heard the prose that has been there all
along, just as for many years, to judge from numerous ballad collections, we
seemed not to hear the music?

I cannot answer this question. Certainly, the account that postulates only
apparent (as opposed to real) prosification in the modern Brazilian ba
does not have complete explanatory power at this point any more than does
the account based on the intercultural character of the Brazilian ballad-
performing community. It is simply not true that all traditional ballads

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GENRE AND THE BALLAD 173

couched in prose. Those that are performed as dramas or songs have no

reason to be. Still, it is impossible to evaluate ballad performances that
include prose until we know to what extent prosification is a legitimate
phenomenon and to what extent the absence of prose in published ballads
is a manifestation of the "deafness" or the editorial decisions of collectors
and publishers.
Ballads exist in many contexts, a legitimate and lovely one of which is
published collections. If, however, we are interested in determining what
the ballad means to its performers in its oral performance context and
setting, we must take all of its features into account. This requires as a
minimum a thorough transcription of the entire performance. Though I
recorded only nine versions of 'The Blind Man," they reveal a variety o
performance styles and interpretations, only exemplified by the three above,
which were both striking and humbling with respect to any aspirations
might have to say what this ballad "means."
In this paper, therefore, I have intended only to raise the question of a
ballad's generic identity, for I am unable, on the basis of my small collection,
to answer it. The hypothesis of an African-American origin for hybrid forms
consisting of sung verse and spoken prose is compelling. Yet without further
fieldwork and investigation, including self-investigation, it is not possible to
provide a definitive answer to the questions regarding genre and perfor-
mance context and setting that 'The Blind Man" and other ballads have
suggested. It seems clear, however, that we should follow the lead of the
ballad-performing community and not allow rigid generic strictures to
determine our approach to the oral traditional ballad. If we in the ballad-
collecting community broaden our vision to include what is really there in
the ballad-performing community, the field of ballad studies can achieve
new vitality. If we do not, we will bind ourselves to the futile task of studying
a figment of our own imaginations.

St. John's College

Annapolis, Maryland

NOTES

A precursor to this paper was delivered at the Twenty-Third International Ballad Co

of the Kommissionfiir Volksdichtung (Societe Internationale d 'Ethnologie et de Folklo
title was "Ballads & Boundaries: Narrative Singing in an Intercultural Context. " T
will be published in the Proceedings of the conference. I am very grateful to some partic
that conference for their help: to Sheila Douglas for calling to my attention the blin
ballads in the British tradition and to Luisa Del Giudice and Tom Cheesmanfor observ
dramatization and prosification can be seen in the Italian and German ballad tradi
particularly endebted to William McCarthy for directing me to Motherwell's observa

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174 Judith Seeger

mixed prose and verse in Scottish ballads and to John Niles for raising the question of
"prosification" vs. "textification. " I would also like to thank Richard Bauman for his useful
suggestions on a very early draft of this paper, and, especially, Anthony Seeger, who read and
questioned repeated drafts of it. I am grateful to Ruth House Webberfor her constant support
and assistance in all my research and writing.
The paper draws on three periods offieldwork and archival research. Myfieldwork in Brazil
from 1977 to 1979 was financed by a joint grant from the Social Science Research Council and
the Fulbright-Hays Commission. The Comite Conjunto Hispano-Norteamericano para la
Cooperacion Cultural y Educativa/Council for the International Exchange of Scholars sup-
portedfive months offieldwork and archival research in Spain in 1985. I am indebted as well
to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which I shared with Richard
Bauman,John McDowell, Ronald Smith, andJoan Gross, and which enabled me in 1989 to do
thefieldwork in the states of Sergipe and Espirito Santo on which most of this paper is based. All my
tapes are availablefor consultation in the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music.

1. A good source of fundamental studies of the oral traditional romance is An-

tonio Sanchez Romeralo, Samuel G. Armistead, and Suzanne H. Petersen's Biblio-
grafia del Romancero Oral, 1/ Bibliography of the Hispanic Ballad in Oral Tradition, 1
(Madrid: Catedra Seminario Menendez Pidal, 1980). This list includes works of
Ram6n Men6ndez Pidal and Diego Catalan that are considered primary for the de-
finition of the romance.

2. Judith Seeger, Count Claros: Study of a Ballad Tradition (New York and London:
Garland Publishing, 1990).
3. The transcriptions and translations are mine. The music was copied by
Christina Davidson.

4. I recorded two other renderings of "The Blind Man" the night I record
Maura. Both were performed from a text someone had written to aid the memory
the singers, who had not sung it in some time (though I had to rewrite the text i
verse form for them, following the instructions of one of the singers, as the scr
had written the words without punctuation from one edge of the paper to the oth
and the singers were unable to translate them directly into a song). One render
was performed by three women singing together in unison, to a tune only slightl
different from Maura's. In it the stanza I have numbered 5, in which Helena speak
to the blind man, is cut in half just as Maura's is, and the song continues with
stanza I have numbered 7, without a trace of stanza 6. The singers simply sang
incomplete stanza to the first half of the melody, and then sang the same tune ag
at the beginning of the next stanza, apparently unperturbed by the half-stanza
the other rendering the reaction to the half-melody was different. Three teen-ag
girls sang this performance, each taking one of the roles. Since it came from t
same text, it, too, was missing Maura's stanza 6. The girl who was singing the part
the Helena ended stanza 5, as she had to, singing only half the melody. This posed
problem for the girl who was singing the part of the blind man, whose turn
suddenly was to sing. Her solution, for she was an imaginative and competent sing
was to create and repeat her own melody for the first half of the stanza, bef
resuming the regular melody in the second half of the stanza.
5. In most of the published Portuguese texts of "The Blind Abductor" I hav

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GENRE AND THE BALLAD 175

seen, the mother tells her daughter to take a distaff and thread with her when she
leaves to show the blind man the way. Presumably the thread is tied to the house to
help the daughter find her way back home, for when the thread runs out the
daughter tells the blind man "there is the road." He abducts her anyway, and the
ballad ends, as did Maura's rendering, with the daughter accusing her mother of
treachery. No Brazilian version of "The Blind Man" I recorded included the motif of
the distaff and thread.

6. For a fuller account of this, see eitherJudith Seeger, 'The Living Ballad in
Brazil: Two Performances," Oral Tradition 2-3 (1987), pp. 573-615, reprinted in
Ruth H. Webber, ed., Hispanic Balladry Today. (New York and London: Garland
Publishing, 1989), pp. 175-217, orJudith Seeger, Count Claros: Study of a Ballad Tra-
dition. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1990), particularly pp. 171-225.
7. Magalhaes, Celso de, A Poesia popular brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: MEC/DAC/
BN, 1973). This is a centenary edition of articles originally published in 1873.

REFERENCES CITED

Abrahams, Roger D.
1987 "Child Ballads in the West Indies: Familiar Fabulations, C
mances."Journal of Folklore Research 24:107-34.
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Magalhaes, Celso de
[1873] 1973 A Poesia popular brasileira. Introduction and notes by Braulio do
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176 Judith Seeger

Seeger, Judith
1987 "The Living Ballad in Brazil: Two Performances." Oral Tradition 2-
3:573-615. Reprinted in Webber, Ruth H., ed. 1989. Hispanic Balladry
Today. The Albert Bates Lord Studies in Oral Tradition, 3. New York
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Oral Tradition, 4. New York and London: Garland Publishing.
Vasconcellos, Jose Leite de
1958-61 Romanceiro portugues. [Coimbra]: Universidade.

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