German Ballad Catalog
Introduction
Purposes:
The Balladenkatalog provides an Index to find and explore specific ballads or groups of ballads, be they in your own or in another’s culture. The Index and Catalog also help discover ballads which are unknown to you, but are nonetheless relevant to your endeavors, be they academic or performative. It is a part of the European Ballad Index project and is closely linked to the collections of the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv (DVA).
The German Ballad Catalog is both a finding tool and a catalog of German narrative folk songs. As such, it serves several masters: Offering a guide for finding each individual ballad type, providing a thorough description, showing its relationship in general to the subjects (and songs) in the rest of the catalog, to its own or to other traditions; and at the same time it should be useful both to the scholar and to the performer. Not least, although a work of collection, every attemp has been made to respect the songs and their performers.
The Search page finding tool offers a classified index of narrative Themes – standardized search terms – selectable from pull-down menus. Included are several alternative access methods. (See also the Instructions and Guide)
The Catalog provides in-depth descriptions of each song type (content, distribution, bibliography, etc.), as well as an example. The individual catalog entries are designed to provide an overview of each song's tradition and to facilitate further research. (See also more information about the ballad entries. )
Historic - even offensive - material has been treated as "historic documentation," that is, it is documented as received, without editing, bowderlizing, or modernizing. As a consequence, the user will encounter offensive language, attitudes, points of view, etc., and should be forewarned. I felt it important to document accurately, trusting that the user beware. If "history repeats itself," it does more damage when it comes as a surprize. I expressly distance myself from all hate-speech and misuse of historical terms for current political aims. I encourage my users to do the same.
Basics:
Texts are what tell the story, but texts (especially in the details) are more variable than the stories. Many songs may share the commonplace beginnings "Come all ye bold..." or "Come you fair..." (“Höret zu, ihr Christenleut‘...“) to introduce otherwise unrelated texts and stories. The one thing that all ballads have in common is narrative. The key to accessing the ballad stories are what the stories "mean," what makes them valuable over such extenses of time and geography.
The finding tool uses a classified indexing system (Thesaurus) of narrative Themes to locate ballads according to what their stories are about. Central to this ballad index and finding tool is the concept of "Theme:" traditional plot ideas distilled from plot actions and events observed in many ballads but fulfilling similar functions within their plots. For example, actions such as shams, fraud, fakes, lies, substitutions, bribes all function as "Tricks" (Theme 440).
A ballad narrative is not limited to just one Theme; one ballad story will sing about many themes. Likewise the characters in a ballad can simultaneously have several functions, or Roles, perhaps as Family, as Lovers, or as Supernatural figures. Searching for combinations of these Themes and Roles will net the researcher broad insights into groups of ballads, as well as precisely locate individual ballad types.
These Themes and Roles are organized as a controlled vocabulary in a Thesaurus in order to enable a systematic, logical and thorough search of the data base. The Thesaurus encompasses a wide range of narrative Themes (actions and events), as well as the Roles (functions) of the actors involved. Access the Themes and Roles from the Search Page's menus to perform searches on the Catalog of German Ballads' data base.
What's in the "ballad" that your search returns.
The references in the lists will let you know the title and the call numbers (identifiers) of the ballad, as well as a very short summary of the contents (so you know what it's about) along with the classified Themes (TU) and Roles (DP) catalogued. Clicking on the "Full Text" link will show you the entire ballad entry, detailing i.a. its content, distribution, selected bibiography and an example. (For details, cf. ballad entry descriptions).
The "ballad" being described is actually a "ballad type," that is, although reports may vary slightly amongst themselves, you still recognize each individual variant as belonging essentially to one particular song. Both text and story will vary somewhat, but the concept of a “ballad type” is one which emphasizes textual coherence more than narrative coherence. The ballad entries attempt to describe some major variations (textual and narrative) occuring within that individual ballad type.
All the information in the ballad entry stems directly from the DVA's files. Every effort has been made to honor the raw data in those files, especially the sung material and its performers.
What sources flowed into this catalog?
The source for the material in this catalog is the Deutsches Volsksliedarchiv ("DVA"), which has now been integrated into the Zentrum für Populläre Kultur und Musik ("ZPKM") as one of its divisions.
The Deutsches VolksliedArchiv possesses the overwhelming percentage of reports of (or about) any German folksong. Anyone serious about finding out "everything" about a ballad should consult the DVA.
Founded by John Meier in 1914, the German Folk Song Archive's stated goal was to collect all the German language folksong material. Over the next 100 years, the Archive amassed hundreds of thousands of reports from fieldwork (professional and amateur) from all over Europe where German speakers sang (or sing) their songs. Along with the Austrian and Swiss national folksong archives and the Institut für Volkskunde der Deutschen des östlichen Europa (IVDE), regional branches of the DVA collected intensively in this or that cultural region ("Liedlandschaft"- "songscape"), irrespective of politics or whether a "songscape" was within German political borders (e.g., Rheinland, Silesia, Banat, Ukraine, Bavaria, Berlin or Pennsylvania). Published books with songs were collected, chapbooks, broadsides, songsters, postcards, and academic collections. Sound documents were collected, transcribed musical notes, wax cylinders, LP records, CD's and mp3's. All of them were fed into the DVA's file system ("Mappensystem"), which attempted to bring together all the reports of a particular song into a central, main file, as well as index the various sources. There is no better resource.
Obviously, "collecting everything" is an impossible goal, but nobody else has ever come within shouting distance of that goal for German language song.. Theirs is the collection to index.
On the other side of the coin, this index and catalog is also consrained by its sources, which are a product of the times they came from. Mostly there is no information given as to the song performance context or the performer - except maybe the name. A book or collection title "Spinnstubenlieder" ("songs of the spinning bee" tells us a little (i.e., songs reputed or assumed to be from spinning bees). A song report telling us the singer was a certain "Eva M." leads us to suspect a female singer - but no solid, specific information about how old, what social status, under which circumstances, etc.
As irritating as this lack of information from historical sources is, at least we have songs: text and often melody. Glad as we are to have that, it must be remembered that the texts and melodies were often hand recorded by amateurs or teachers minimally trained (in music). Often enough - especially in melody - what was sung was "corrected" by the recording person.
Although the material is not always up to today's standards of folklore collection, I would argue that what we do have is still worthwhile. Like the glass daguerrotype photographs in a museum which cannot match the megapixel resolution of modern images, these ballads can still provide valuable insights into our informal culture. Perhaps that is especially true when surveying large vistas of culture.
The songs change over time in the "folk process." And while one change, by forgetfullness, whim or design, is in itself insignificant, in the aggregate the changing song will move ever more towards the center of that society's culture. "Wrong changes" are rejected (either overtly, or by neglect), while "right changes" are preferred and repeated. And since "wrong" or "right" are defined by the culture of those performing and listening to these songs, the "traditionally processed" song can still tell us, as extremely complex as these relationships are, much about the society which produced it.
More information about the history and methodology of this project may be found here:
ölkj
What is included or excluded from the DBK?
Ballads are narrative folk songs sung to a rounded melody. While melodies are (obviously) essential, one song text may be sung to different melodies, and one melody may serve several different songs. Although melodies reveal important connections between various performances, these connections often suggest quite different connections than the texts' narratives do. Pursuing both these "dimensions" at once would surpass the scope of this current project. In this catalog the melodies must therefore necessarily take a back seat to the texts.
Songs that merely reference stories known to the singer or listener (or scholar!) are not themselves songs which tell the story, and so are not included in this catalog. Songs which merely describe a situation or person (e.g. "John Henry was 6 feet tall, weighed 200 lbs, and was always a good man" or a bluesy 'litany' of bad circumstances) without telling a story about them are not included in this catalog.
Songs that tell stories by strong implication are included, such as DBK 09.1-01, "Schlangenköchin" which unfolds its story through dialog alone (as does Child 12).
Some few songs that appear in "important" ballad collections and discussions but that scarcely tell a story are included for the sake of completeness (e.g., DBK 03.A1-03 "Tanzlied von Kölbigk"). In similar fashion, some ballads only recovered in Dutch language or context are included for the same reasons, or if the Low Germanic cultural region gives some support to this.
Printed or recorded sources, mass media:
were included and some excluded for the reasons stated above. Of course if these belong to the specific textual tradition of one of the ballads included, these variants (or a representative selection) were included. If there is only one report and no internal textual or stylistic reason to suspect the publication is "folklore" or "traditional" I did not include it. Just because a song is old (or because it proclaims "everybody wants it") does not mean it is folklore. And the mass media then, as today, was driven by profit rather than any desire to document what "the people" were singing. A broadside ("A True Account of ...", "Ein warhafftig Bericht von ...") may have given us a verse narrative, but its publication alone makes it no more "folk-traditional" than it makes it "true"- in spite of its claims or an early date. Following scholarly, academic traditions, I have included more of these than I am particularly comfortable with. As a guideline I have tried to err on the side of inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness.
Conversely, mass media publication of ballad variants can be viewed as inputs into the tradition, and thus I attempted to accommodate such reports, at least suggestively. John Meier, the founder of the DVA, showed in his seminal work, Kunstlieder im Volksmund (Art Songs Sung by the Folk), that many famous German folk songs developed out of literary songs by known authors. I was guided by my similar American experience in trying to give a sense of the tradition being documented. The Carter Family enjoyed a huge popularity in the US in the 1930's. In order to supply the band with material, A.P. Carter collected aggressively amongst his friends, family and acquaintences in Poor Valley, Virginia. Much of that material was traditional. A.P. often reworked that material, re-writing and re-casting it. Many "Carter songs" A.P. wrote from scratch. Not a few of these "Carter Family Songs" have become fairly traditional or have influenced traditional songs in the US and been recorded by later folklorists from musicians who regarded the material as "traditional." Many other songs have woven back and forth between commercial and traditional transmission. Thus I thought it important to document to some degree the "popular" record from and input into "traditional" narrative song. All this is impossible to document in detail in a broad based undertaking. But I hope to have at least left some "bread crumbs."
Consult the Instructions for more insights into how to use this index and catalog.
Go to the top.
Go to the Search Page
Go to the Instructions and Guide