Text and Memory in the “Oral” Transmission of a Crime and Execution Ballad: “The Suffolk Tragedy” in England and Australia

Abstract

The murder of Maria Marten by her lover, William Corder, in May 1827 became the object of intense public interest and frenzied media attention immediately upon the discovery of the body eleven months later in the subsequently notorious “red barn” where he had buried her. While popular interest persisted much longer—and indeed continues—the case itself culminated with Corder’s trial and execution by public hanging in August 1828 and prompted the publication of no fewer than nine different broadside ballads—sensational journalistic accounts in the form of songs printed on a single sheet and sold cheaply at stalls or by itinerant balladmongers.1 Two of these songs offer significant insights into the nature of oral tradition; having been printed, sold, sung, remembered, and passed on by word of mouth for many decades, they have subsequently been recorded from country singers, starting with the first great wave of folksong collection in the decades immediately prior to the First World War and continuing on into the 1990s. This situation does not represent the “pure” oral tradition sometimes encountered in the field, as the songs were composed in writing and initially diffused in print, and some of the singers were undoubtedly literate, but this interlacing of literate and oral transmission has been the norm in English folk tradition throughout its recorded history. Juxtaposing the words of the songs as recorded from singing with the texts of the originals as published permits us to determine exactly what the processes of memorization, performance from memory, and voice-toear transmission can do over time to verbal narrative material originally in the form of texts. Of those two songs, “The Murder of Maria Marten” (Roud 215), with issues from at least six London printers, several more from the provinces, and yet others without imprint, was by far the more successful. Its preeminent market penetration is confirmed by the score or more recordings of the song, about half with texts, from folk tradition. In 1979 the versions of this Oral Tradition, 28/1 (2013): 5-34