Broadside Ballads Catalog

Introduction
Broadside Ballads Catalog

Related indexes:

Introduction

Street Literature and Broadside Ballads: Definitions and Characteristics

Broadside ballads are a sub-genre of "street" literature. Leslie Shepard, the preeminent historian of street literature ^[1] offers this broad definition: "Street literature is concerned with the cheap ballad sheets, pamphlets and other ephemera of the masses, which circulated from the dawn of printing right up to the end of the nineteenth century ..." ^[2] In the twentieth century, street literature, once the province of itinerant vendors and hawkers, who literally sold their wares in the streets, survives albeit in somewhat altered forms. The cheap dream books and household hints on sale at the supermarket checkout, innumerable posters and handbills found on city streets, the many "zines" or ephemeral and (somewhat) periodical publications circulated by private individuals, are all in some sense modern versions or analogues of the street literature of earlier eras.

The "broadside ballad," which Shepard notes is one of the most widespread and enduring forms of street literature, is defined as a narrative song or poem printed on one side of a single sheet of paper. Occasionally both sides of the sheet will be printed, and, somewhat more frequently, a broadside will contain two or more songs or poems. The ballads were usually topical in nature, that is, they comment on or commemorate current events. Broadside ballads are frequently compared to newspapers in that they usually concerned events of current interest. Moreover, in common with the modern "tabloid" press, broadside ballads tended to dwell on the more sensational news of the day: crimes, executions, natural disasters, scandals, battles, etc. And, as with newspapers, the market for broadside ballads was stimulated by the urgency of the events they covered. Thus, for instance, in the United States, large numbers of ballads were produced and sold during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. More than just reporting the news, however, broadside ballads usually reported it with attitude, editorializing freely, often satirically, as they described the latest sensation. This makes them of interest as a mirror of popular contemporary attitudes to historical events.

While many thousands of broadside ballads were printed in the United States, the market, especially in the nineteenth century, was dominated by a few printers. In Philadelphia, A.W. Auner and J.H. Johnson were the most prolific. In New York, Henry De Marsan and his predecessor, J. Andrews, predominated, followed closely by the Wehman Brothers and Magnus. These printers were active publishers of a variety of street literature. A typical De Marsan imprint reads: "H. De Marsan, Publisher of Songs, Ballads, Valentines, Juvenile & Toy-Books, Motto Verses, Stationery, Playing-Cards, A-B-C Cards, &c., 60 Chatham Street, New York." The Wehmans concentrated somewhat more on song publishing, while Auner and Johnson in Philadelphia advertised their services as job printers.

As noted earlier, the term broadside ballad usually connotes a song or poem (occasionally more than one) printed on one side of a single sheet of paper. Sold in the streets by itinerant vendors, broadside ballads ranged in size from tabloid-sized and larger sheets to small 4" x 8" slips of paper. As a general rule broadside ballads were, like newspapers, intended to be ephemeral, and were usually printed on the cheapest, thinnest papers. The quality of printing was usually poor: typographic errors, mixing of type faces and styles, and irregularity of punctuation were commonplace. This suggests that getting the ballads published and on the street while the news was still fresh was of primary importance.

Occasionally ballads had crude illustrations, occasionally on topic, but often seemingly drawn from a store of stock engravings. Sometimes this led to highly inappropriate choices, such as the use of an engraving of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments to illustrate a ballad about the 1846 Chicago fire.^[3] In the nineteenth century topical illustrations became less common, although type-ornament borders were often used. H. De Marsan, the great New York ballad printer, used a series of stock engravings to form a pictorial border around his ballads.^[4] These borders were often printed in colored inks for greater visual appeal. During the Civil War, printer Charles Magnus of New York published large numbers of ballads with elaborate color illustrations. The use of color illustrations and colored inks was more the exception than the norm in broadside ballad printing. Occasionally colored papers were also used, again presumably to enhance visual appeal and promote sales.

Who wrote the broadside ballads? Where composers are not credited, it can be assumed that the printers themselves wrote some verses, or purchased the work of freelance songwriters and poets. Most ballads were published without musical notation, and many were written to the tunes of popular songs. In such cases, the printer would note the tune or "air" below the title, confident that the buying public would know it. Some broadside ballads, especially in the nineteenth century, were simply re-printings of current popular hits, often published in connection with theatrical, minstrel-show or music-hall performances. In such cases the composers were sometimes credited, as were music publishers and copyright-holders and even performers.

Occasionally a broadside poet escaped anonymity and became known for his or her skill at memorializing current events in verse. One such poet, whose work is represented in the New York State Library collection, was Henry Backus, the "Saugerties Bard." An itinerant from the Catskill mountain town of Saugerties, Backus became well-known for his topical songwriting in the middle part of the nineteenth century.^[5] He would commonly sell his privately printed songs as he traveled up and down the Hudson Valley. For a time in the 1850s he was employed regularly by printer J. Andrews in New York, who issued many of his ballads. A few years later in the century, Bloodgood H. Cutter, "The Long Island Farmer-Poet," made his name as an oracle of local history and culture in the towns and villages of Long Island, by virtue of his many ballads on local subjects.^[6] Other nineteenth-century lyric writers known in the broadside ballad trade included John C. Cross, John Ross Dix, Eugene T. Johnson, Tony Pastor, Archibald Scott and Charles Carroll Sawyer. Such cases were uncommon, however, and for the most part broadside ballads were anonymous compositions.

Apart from their contemporary uses, some broadside ballads have attained more lasting popularity and even have entered the traditional song repertoire. Such ballads have been catalogued and studied by scholars of folksong.^[7] However many folklorists, insisting somewhat narrowly on studying texts gathered exclusively from oral tradition, have often been uncomfortable with the notion of studying broadside ballads which clearly represent a print-based culture. This has changed in recent years as the scholarly borders between folklore and popular culture studies have become less distinct. Nevertheless, as a general rule, broadside ballads have been mainly studied by historians and literary scholars. In library collections, where they are collected at all, they have usually been considered ephemera.

The New York State Library Broadside Ballads Collection

The core of the New York State Library's collection of broadside ballads consists of approximately 1,500 pieces acquired in 1925. The source of the original acquisition is unrecorded, and the library's accession book indicates no specific number of ballads. Most of the ballads in this core collection date from the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Concentrating mainly on events surrounding and during the Civil War, these include many battle pieces, along with patriotic and regimental odes, political commentary, comic ditties, and minstrel show and theatrical numbers. Notable are several pieces from the Confederate states, championing the cause of the Confederacy, or commenting on the progress and politics of the war from the Southern viewpoint.

Additional broadside ballads have been added to the collection over the years by purchase from collectors and dealers, as well as through gifts. A number of photostat copies of Revolutionary War-era ballads from originals in the Boston Public Library, were added in the 1940s. Several British broadsides - mainly dealing with celebrated murders - from the late eighteenth century also have been added. Perhaps the oldest original broadside in the collection is a Dutch piece concerning the beheading of England's King Charles I in 1649 (SCO BD1652). However, there are a few photostat copies of earlier-dated pieces, the oldest of these being an epitaph upon the death of an Italian merchant, Benedict Spinola, printed in London in 1580 (SCO BD1725).

Uses of the collection

The earliest documented uses of the collection were in Masters' dissertations written at the New York State College for Teachers in the 1930s.^[8] Jones' 1942 study of Henry Backus (see above, note 5) was based on ballads in the State Library collection. Backus' life and writings continue to stir the interest of scholars and writers interested in the history of the Catskill Mountains.

One particular ballad from the collection, "Bill Snyder" (SCO BD1633), has figured prominently in historical studies, museum programs and exhibits and performances concerning the so-called "anti-rent wars," which took place in upstate New York in the 1840s.^[9] Along with other "anti-rent" broadsides it continues to be used in this regard down to the present.

The Civil War pieces in the collection were among the items consulted by Stephen Currie for his book Music in the Civil War (Cincinnati: Betterway Books, 1992). Schenectady singer and folklorist George Ward has scoured the ballad collection for songs on diverse historical subjects as the War of 1812, the Erie Canal, and the anti-rent wars. More recently the collection has been used for research into grass roots politics in mid-nineteenth century New York, musical life in ante-bellum New York State, and popular conceptions of the Civil War.

Access to the collection

The broadside ballads collection in the New York State Library, by virtue of the ephemeral nature of the material, has been housed in the Manuscripts and Special Collections (formerly Manuscripts and History) section of the library. Although some were filed and indexed with other, mainly prose, broadsides, the main collection has been accessed through a first line index on 3" x 5" catalog cards. The present catalog, indexed by title, composer, added entry, subject and printer/publisher, represents the first attempt to comprehensively treat the library's broadside ballads as a single collection. Since so many of the broadsides were published as songs, it is expected that they will ultimately be cataloged individually as music scores in the library's online catalog.

Using this guide

This guide initially was compiled as a database using dBase III+ software. It is subject to whatever limitations exist in the software.

Ballads are listed in order by accession number. The first 1,300 or so accessions were filed alphabetically by title (with some exceptions). Later numbers are not uniformly alphabetized. Hence the need for a title index. Initial articles (the, a, an, le, la, les, die, der, etc.) were not entered in the database and do not figure in the title index. Occasionally no clear title appears on the sheet. In such cases a title is supplied by the compiler (usually the first line or an abbreviated version of the first line) and the substitution noted in the "notes" section of the main entry.

Subject indexing is subjective by nature. At least one heading is intended to convey the overall subject emphasis - e.g. love song, Civil War - with further subject analysis reserved for topics of more specific interest. It is certain that headings will overlap, and, depending on the interests of users, appear to be misapplied. However, most users, it is hoped, will find the subject index at least somewhat helpful.

While subject headings and terms may resemble, and in many cases be drawn from standard library subject headings, this is not a universal guideline. For instance "Civil War" has been used for the sake of brevity, as opposed to the more cumbersome - if standard - library heading "United States-History-Civil War, 1861-1865." In other cases headings such as "sentimental songs" have been made up out of whole cloth, to cover ballads for which no appropriate standard heading was found.

Name headings in the composer and added entry indexes are drawn from the broadsides with little or no searching in standard authorities. While some attempt has been made to regularize names that appear in different forms on more than one piece, there have almost certainly been lapses and errors. Birth and death dates have been supplied where available, subject to limitations in the size of the name fields in the original database. In most cases, field size also accounts for what might seem to be the haphazard use of initialisms instead of full given names.

Users of this guide will doubtless develop their own search strategies, combining the various indexes with the main entry listings to find the materials they need. Other related sources may also prove helpful. For instance, users may wish to consult the folk ballad indexes compiled by G. Malcolm Laws (see above, note 7), for broadside ballads which have survived in traditional reportoires. The ballads catalogued by Edwin Wolf (see note 4) from the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia parallel and in many cases duplicate those in the New York State Library collection. Wolf's index can thus serve as a useful adjunct to this catalog. Finally, users are directed to the studies mentioned above, which analyse and explore various segments of the State Library's ballad collection.

[1] See his books: History of Street Literature (Detroit, 1973); John Pitts: Ballad Printer of Seven Dials, London, 1765-1844 (1969), and The Broadside Ballad: A Study in Origins and Meaning (1969).

[2] Shepard, History of Street Literature (1973), p. 13.

[3] "Lines written on the dreadful fire ... in Chicago ..." (Dublin, 1846) SCO BD1448.

[4] The various border styles used by De Marsan and is contemporaries in the ballad trade are cataloged exhaustively by Edwin Wolf 2^nd, in American Song Sheets, Slip Ballads and Poetical Broadsides, 1850-1870: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia. (Philadelphia, 1963).

[5] See Patricia Edwards Clyne, "The Bard of Saugerties," Hudson Valley, Vol. XXVI: No. 4 (August 1997), pp. 19-23; and, Louis C. Jones, "Henry Backus, the Saugerties Bard," New York History, Vol. XXIII: No. 2 (April 1942), pp. 139-148.

[6] The New York State Library collection contains over 70 of Cutter's self-published ballads. They were also issued in collected form as The Long Island Farmer's Poems. (New York: N. Tibbals, 1886).

[7] See for example the catalogs compiled by G. Malcolm Laws, Jr.: American Balladry from British Broadsides (Philadelphia, 1957); and Native American Balladry (Philadelphia, 1964).

[8] See, for example, Kirkland Leroy Irvis, The Negro in Civil War Song Ballads (1939) and M. Marjorie Loomis, Irish Songs and Ballads in New York State (1938).

[9] The ballad was reproduced prominently in Henry Christman's popular history of the anti-rent wars, Tin Horns and Calico: A Decisive Episode in the Emergence of Democracy (New York: Henry Holt, 1945).