XXI. The English Ballad in Jamaica: A Note Upon the Origin of the Ballad Form

In collecting stories and songs from the Jamaica negroes during the summer“ of 1919 and the winter of 1921, I was constantly on the lookout for traditional English ballads, some of which I hoped to find handed down in their older forms as a result of two hundred and fifty years of English occupation of the island. A fair number of secondary ballads were easily accessible, some of them preserved with an English intonation which proved them to have been memorized from cultivated English singers. Among these were the Wurlean Woman, and the ballad of Adinah sung to the same tune as the New England ballad of Springfield Mountain. But of traditional ballads of the better class, both words and music, I secured only the widespread song of Little Musgrove. Naturally I asked myself what had become of old ballad forms in Jamaica.