Albert B. Lord "Songs and the Song"

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).

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 (Briggs). Foley published work on theory and history of oral poetry (Briggs). Additionally, Foley wrote Lord's obituary for Old English Newsletter (Foley).

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.

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

In the introduction to The Singer of Tales, Lord highlights the exploration and realization of Homer's oral tradition, which is a good starting point for exploring the way we think about poetry and authorship,

“It is a strange phenomena in intellectual history as well as in scholarship that the great minds herein represented, minds which could formulate the most ingenious speculation, failed to realize that there might be some other way of composing a poem than that known to their experience….They always thought in terms of a fixed text or a fixed group of texts to which a poet did something for a reason within his own artistic or intellectual self. They could not conceive of a poet composing a line in a certain way because of necessity or because of the demands of his traditional art…” (11).

“…for he will find singers who have memorized songs from these collections. In spite of authentic manner of presentation, in spite of the fact that the songs themselves are often oral poems, we cannot consider such singers as oral poets. They are mere performers. Such experiences has deceived us and have robbed the real oral poet of credit as a creative composer; indeed to some extent they have taken from epic performance an element of vital interest… When we realize that the performance is a moment of creation for the singer, we cannot but be amazed at the circumstances under which he creates” (14).

There are two ways to explore Nahuatl poetry through this lens. The poet was the singer and the composer, so if the Cantares Mexicanos uses a specific performance by a specific singer, than that is what is meant by authorship, as the quote above with Lord. The poet is creating the song and is authoring it anew with each performance. From León-Portilla's perspective in Fifteen poets of the Aztec World, there is enough information historically, in the text, and the glossary notes to say that the specific words captured were ones said during a specific performance, i.e. making that specific person the 'author'. The idea of authorship does not fit with the concept of oral tradition. Lord tries to bridge that gap by saying, “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'” (102).

The following is opinion:

This is further complicated by the fact that performances often had multiple singers. The idea of authorship seems to have implanted itself in a tradition that is far removed from the preoccupations of ownership. The singers were receiving the flowers and songs from heaven during collaborative ceremonies, and yet, the modern critic still attempts to introduce the individual into the mix. The individualistic perspective does not align with the circular view and the collectively made works. While Lord argues that each performance is an author, I would go further and say that there is no author and there does not need to be one. The beauty of the poetry, even as removed as it is, does not come from knowing which specific poet we are attributing the song to. In fact, I believe that placing the idea of authorship into the reader's head, sets them up from the beginning to misunderstand the culture, purpose, and tradition of oral poetry. To put authorship on Nahuatl poetry is like trying to explain the way we think of time to someone in Hopi. Just like there are no words for past, present, and future in Hopi, a square peg does not fit into a round hole.

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.

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