‘Do you remember, Lord Gregory?’: The Agency of Memory in Scottish Ballads by Thomas A. McKean

“…The Child ballads begin famously and characteristically, in medias res, in the middle of the action, with a great deal of backstory unknown, or, perhaps, assumed. I have shown how, in some cases, the backstory is provided by communal cultural knowledge or by explicit narration before the song is sung and during its performance (McKean 2015), but through the device of recall, the backstory can sometimes make an appearance within the body of the song, forming a complex concatenated structure that unfolds in performance and upon apprehension by a listener into a multivalent constellation of action and meaning. …”
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