Balladmongering and Social Life

      Peddling Ballads

      When John Greenleaf Whittier was a boy, the routine on his family’s isolated farm was periodically interrupted and enlivened by the appearance of “Yankee gypsies,” a motley parade of beggars, peddlers, vagrants, and wanderers, who broke the monotony of farm life by stopping over to beg, preach, sell their wares, sing, or sleep in the barn. One of these gypsies, “a ‘pawky auld carle’ of a wandering Scotchman,” introduced Whittier to the songs of Burns, which would become his most important literary model: “after eating his bread and cheese and drinking his mug of cider he gave us Bonny Doon, Highland Mary, and Auld Lang Syne. He had a rich, full voice, and entered heartily into the spirit of his lyrics.” But Whittier reserved his warmest memories for a different character:

      Twice a year, usually in the spring and autumn, we were honored with a call from Jonathan Plummer, maker of verses, pedler and poet, physician and parson,—a Yankee troubadour,—first and last minstrel of the valley of the Merrimac, encircled, to my wondering eyes, with the very nimbus of immortality. He brought with him pins, needles, tape, and cotton-thread for my mother; jack-knives, razors, and soap for my father; and verses of his own composing, coarsely printed and illustrated with rude wood-cuts, for the delectation of the younger branches of the family. No lovesick youth could drown himself, no deserted maiden bewail the moon, no rogue mount the gallows, without fitting memorial in Plummer’s verses. Earthquakes, fires, fevers, and shipwrecks he regarded as personal favors from Providence, furnishing the raw material of song and ballad. Welcome to us in our country seclusion as Autolycus to the clown in Winter’s Tale, we listened with infinite satisfaction to his readings of his own verses, or to his ready improvisation upon some domestic incident or topic suggested by his auditors. When once fairly over the difficulties at the outset of a new subject, his rhymes flowed freely, “as if he had eaten ballads and all men’s ears grew to his tunes.”¹

      Whittier’s essay, despite its sheen of ironic nostalgia, portrays a rural culture defined by vagrancy, homelessness, and decentralization, a depiction of New England at odds with the colonial mystique that emerged during the postbellum years, when Whittier’s best-selling poem Snow-Bound (1866) strongly impressed a domestic ideal of early New England rusticity upon the public imagination.² In Snow-Bound, Whittier characterized his youth as a world of songs and lore, told and retold around the fireside by an intimate domestic circle of family and friends. In “Yankee Gypsies,” however, traditions of song and poetry come from outside the home and hearth, in the person of the traveling peddler, a figure that combines cultural and economic exchanges in complex ways. Before being perceived as literature, Plummer’s “verses of his own composing, coarsely printed and illustrated with rude wood-cuts,” are objects on sale, just like the “pins, needles, tape, and cotton-thread … jack-knives, razors, and soap” that also come out of his pack, and the poems’ performance as goods for purchase helps incorporate the Whittiers into an economic system of exchange.

      Yet Whittier’s description of the balladmonger occludes the relationship between the economic and the poetic: although Whittier may have meant the “Yankee gypsy” to seem quaint to his readers, itinerant peddlers like Plummer were actually agents of modernization in rural New England. According to William J. Gilmore, peddlers were part of an “informal” circulation system that helped bring both print reading and market economies to all but the most remote areas of New England. Peddlers not only interrupted the “country seclusion” of rural farms but also purveyed an array of matter uncommon to life there, and the almanacs, broadsides, and chapbooks that constituted the majority of a peddler’s print stock provided rural readers with “the key bridge between traditional intensive reading fare and novels, travel accounts, and other newer forms of reading matter.”³ The vagrant peddler in Whittier’s essay is pure “outside”: coming from somewhere else, he destabilizes the insularity of the home, bringing the world in and pulling the family out. Yet though he sells “the raw material” of news, scandal, and gossip, he seems an irruption from antiquity, encircled with “the very nimbus of immortality.” His liminal position secures this power, and its medium is the ballad. Residing in and out of literature, and in and out of time, the balladmonger and his wares condense an image of decentralized culture and the grassroots dissemination of news and knowledge.

      If broadside poems like those sold by Jonathan Plummer helped to pull the rural world into the orbit of a more modern and urban realm, then it is all the more striking that Whittier identifies the peddler with exotic and older modes of tradition—gypsy, troubadour, minstrel—rather than with the contemporary “Yankee peddler,” which by the 1840s typified (in the figure of “Sam Slick,” for example) the New Englander as an amoral sharper.⁴ For Whittier, Plummer’s verses and the exchange value they accrue emblematize a history he locates in “the ballad”: “His productions answered, as nearly as I can remember, to Shakespeare’s description of a proper ballad,—‘doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant theme sung lamentably.’”⁵ “The ballad” figures Whittier’s conflicted representation of a poet whose wares seem not to be “poetry” in any secure sense. Plummer, after all, is a source for both printed objects and songs sung spontaneously: in the essay, the economic exchange of broadsides is complemented by Plummer’s “ready improvisation” on a suggested topic, which succeeds so wonderfully that Whittier imagines him creating the very possibility of oral culture itself. Blending these modes of circulation creates a poet with an eccentric relation to space and time. Plummer is “a Yankee troubadour” and the “first and last minstrel of the valley of the Merrimac,” akin to Autolycus, the archetype of early modern balladry. Each of these terms—troubadour, minstrel, and balladeer—places Plummer in an imagined poetic culture of unspecified antiquity. But his poems report current events—drownings, epidemics, fires, executions, and so on—and his creative performances supplement the objects (including the broadside poems) that are, literally, his stock-in-trade.

      “Yankee Gypsies” vacillates between young Whittier’s enchantment with the sale of printed broadsides and his enthusiasm for Plummer’s minstrel-like performances of ballads. The essay therefore offers an outlook—however obscured and ambivalent—upon a rural, local culture of poetry constituted by a system of hybrid exchanges (economic and bardic, print mediated and oral, ephemeral and ancient); such a system necessarily lies outside the institutionally sanctioned, author-centered, national tradition that Whittier and his fellow Fireside Poets were later imagined to have inaugurated. The circulation of poems in this other poetic culture was a social process facilitated by exchanges of cheap print, old tunes, and new songs and made up of genres like execution sermons, shipwreck poems, disaster laments, satirical ballads, and mournful elegies. Whittier’s description gives further insight into the protocols of this world: he cherished the memory of Plummer selling and singing his songs to the gathered family but made no mention of anyone privately reading these poems alone in their room. And despite the “nimbus of immortality” encircled around Plummer’s brow in Whittier’s young eyes, Plummer’s poems seem to have no intrinsic value as “literature”—their meaning and value lay in their social transmission, the way they retold scandals or disasters to a group gathered to hear them sung. Aesthetic distinction, formal or linguistic complexity, and the celebration of universal or national ideals are not criteria of merit because consuming (“reading” seems not the right word) a peddler’s poems offered other kinds of pleasure.

      Sarah Emery, who grew up in nearby Newburyport around the same time, recalled that in her girlhood, “an old lame peddler named Urin … came round five or six times a year.”

      Old Urin was quite a character. He would stump in, usually near dusk, with a bag and basket, and sinking into the nearest chair, declare himself “e’en a’most dead, he was so lame!” Then, without stopping to take breath, he would reel off, “Tree fell on me when I was a boy, killed my brother and me jest like him, here’s books, pins, needles, black sewing silk all colors, tapes varses, almanacks and sarmons, thread, fine thread for cambric ruffles, here’s varses on the pirate that was hung on Boston Common, solemn varses with