I wonder if classical scholars crosspollinate their reading with scholarship about American ballads from Dixie? There’s a wonderful little essay by Eric McHenry on the origins of Mississippi John Hurt’s murder ballad that goes through fragments and traditions to get to the story of Louis Collins, subject of Hurt’s ballad with the refrain: “angels laid him away.” It is a songline where poetry, fact and misprision intermingle, and isn't this how how the Trojan war became a subject of the two enduring Greek epics? And American epics seem drawn to the Mississippi?
I think the Cohn brothers, with their knowledge of folk song, saw this: which is why O Brother where art thou is far more successful than any peplum flick at getting the Homeric impulse down. Same counts of course for James Joyce, who understood something about how to graft the Irish crooner lyric onto the Odyssey.
What is an epic, after all, than a murder ballad writ large?
The McHenry essay, The Bully in the Ballad, is here.
3 comments:
If you haven't yet read it, give Howard Waldrop's A Dozen Tough Jobs a try sometime. Waldrop gets "marketed" (nominally) as science fiction but his referential romps are in a more eccentric tradition, like a lower-brow Guy Davenport.
Wow, thanks for the tip! Howard Waldrop sounds like my kind of writer. I am trying to picture a low-brow Guy Davenport. Hmm. Sheer the references from Davenport and def he would be a stranger writer.
To give you some idea, Waldrop's heroes include Fats Waller (performing on a zeppelin), Peter Lorre, Mantan Moreland, and The Little Moron (as in "Why did the Little Moron...?").
Post a Comment