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Table of Contents
Albert B. Lord "Songs and the Song"
Biography
Lord's Influencers
Albert B. Lord was greatly influenced by Milman J. Parry, a Harvard professor who collected oral tales from Yugoslavia (“Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature”). Lord's title stems from Parry's unfinished work on Homeric odes to cultural heroes (Stenbock-Fermor 159-160). Like Lord, Parry ventured to parts where epic songs were still sung and recorded them (Stembock-Fermer 160). In fact, Lord assisted Parry in his research in Yugoslavia (Kirsch). (Parry's work considered questions of author and legends: “how were the Homeric poems composed? Was Homer the creator of a work which used old legends or the greatest performer in the epic tradition of Hellas? And, if the latter be true, who wrote down in their definite form the 27,000 hexameters of The Iliad and The Odyssey?[sic]” (Stembock-Fermor 159). Parry argued that since these works were performed, they were not solely written by Homer (Kirsch).
Poets Influenced by Lord's Work
Gregory Nagy published Lord's posthumous sequel, //The Singer Resumes the Tale// in 1996(?) (Powell). While Nagy's work draws on both works from both Lord and Parry, Nagy's work most resembles Parry's in centering on Greek oral tradition (“Gregory Nagy”).
John Miles Foley was one of Albert Lord's students who also studied oral poetry (“Foley, John Miles”). Foley published work on theory and history of oral poetry (“Foley, John Miles”). Additionally, Foley wrote Lord's obituary for
Central Ideas
One of Lord's central premises in the excerpt of “Songs and the Song” (taken from the larger work The Singer of Tales) is the elimination of the idea of an “original” in the case of orally performed songs, poetry, or traditional folk epics. The basis of his claims is the inherently unique quality of performance. Lord specifies, “Any particular song is different in the mouth of each of its singers. If we consider it in the thought of a single singer during the years in which he sings it, we find that it is different at different stages in his career” (159). The oral work is thus being remade as a new piece each time it is performed. Lord concludes, “From that point of view a song has no 'author' but a multiplicity of authors, each singing being a creation, each singing having its own single 'author'…” (161). This statement recalls the work of literary theorist Roland Barthes on The Death of the Author. Although, it is crucial to note that Barthes claimed the reader rather than the author determined the meaning of a written work, and therefore would most likely attribute the meaning-making role to the listener rather than the performer, as Lord does.
Examples
The song “O Holy Night” was first written and composed in the year 1847 by the poet Placide Cappeau and the composer Adolphe Adam and subsequently translated from French to English in the year 1855 by John Sullivan Dwight. Although there is no existing recording of the “original performance,” this song (a traditional Christmas piece) has been performed countless times in the more than a century since. The song offers an opportunity for testing Lord's philosophy that there is no such thing as an “original” oral piece. Each of the below performances might be seen as being the same song; yet Lord would claim each is a new piece, created by the singer at a certain period in time.
“O Holy Night” Perry Como, 1968
“O Holy Night” David Phelps, 2000
“O Holy Night” David Phelps, 2007
“O Holy Night” Emmett O'Hanlon, 2015
Works Cited
Briggs, Ward W. Jr. “Foley, John Miles.” Rutgers, https://dbcs.rutgers.edu/all-scholars/8702-foley-john-miles.
Foley, John Miles. “In Memoriam: Albert Bates Lord (1912-91).” Old English Newsletter, 1991, https://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/print.php/memorials/lord/.
“Gregory Nagy.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 17 Jan., 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Nagy.
Kanigel, Robert. “Milman Parry.” Harvard Magazine, September-October 2022, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/08/feature-vita-milman-parry.
Kirsch, Adam. “The Classicist Who Killed Homer.” The New Yorker, 7 June, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/14/the-classicist-who-killed-homer.
“O Holy Night”. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 16 November 2004, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Holy_Night
“Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature.” Harvard Library, https://library.harvard.edu/collections/milman-parry-collection-oral-literature.
Powell, Barry. “1996.1.9, Lord, The Singer Resumes the Tale.” Bryn Mawr Classical Review, https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1996/1996.01.09/.
Stenbock-Fermor, Elisabeth. “Review of The Singer of Tales, by A. B. Lord.” The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 5, no. 2, 1961, p. 159–61. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/304469. Accessed 18 Feb. 2025.
