By Gabrielle Penner
Picture yourself walking in downtown Santa Barbara, streets filled with strangers who are singing and storytelling, block after block, as if you were in a musical. Although it sounds like a fantasy, that was reality in late 16th and early 17th century England because of broadside ballads. These were large sheets of low-cost paper with songs, images, and stories printed on one side, often written in simple ballad form, that were recited and sung in communal areas.
Patricia Fumerton, UCSB English professor and scholar, founder and director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive.
Digging up the past, UC Santa Barbara English professor and scholar Patricia Fumerton has dedicated her life to discovering and unveiling the precious history of these hidden English broadside ballads.
She is the founder and director of the online database, English Broadside Ballad Archive, which has gained a generous amount of support through government grants since 2006, including the most recent donation of $350,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities in April 2020.
Fumerton is not only the world’s expert in a new discipline of study she pioneered, but also an enthusiastic educator for her students. She recently sat down for an interview to discuss the inspiration for her work, her fascination with the historic ballads, and her future ambitions.
Q: What prompted you to start studying literature such as the broadside ballads?
A: Someone once said to me, “Don’t you feel guilty that you are only working on 10% of the population of England because you are working on the aristocracy?” So, I went into a period of penance, in which I decided to go down and dirty and look at the lowest of the low literature and that is where I’ve been ever since. That took me to street literature and I discovered broadside ballads and pamphlets, and other forms of broadsides. What got me here was my seizing upon cultural criticism, which was looking at literature in the context of the culture and realizing that it shaped the culture and the culture shaped it.
Q: How did you begin the English Broadside Ballad Archives?
An example of a ballad found in the English Broadside Ballad Archive: Ballad Facsimile of EBBA 30348, "The Good-fellows Advice".
A: At the time I started wanting to work on it, I couldn’t get access to any. A new database had just started in the 1990s called Early English Books Online, and it was supposed to have every book that had ever been published in English or in England. But I couldn’t find any broadside ballads - so they lied! I knew the largest collection of Pepys Library was in Cambridge and just by sheer skin of my teeth and luck I got them to let me buy the digital rights and microfilm, and so I began the English Broadside Ballad Archives with, basically, only instructional development funding. Now you can search by images, by text, by themes, and now we have about 3,000 recordings of the tunes and 9,000 broadside ballads.
Q: What makes English Broadside Ballads unique and worth studying?
A: These things are text, cultural records, art, woodcut illustrations, and song. It addressed any topic you could imagine. The lower you go down in the classes the more precious they are. The ironic part is that they are extremely difficult to access because they were ephemera back then.
But today, things that disappeared because they weren’t preserved are now guarded under lock and key. What makes it so radical is that before what had dominated the study of ballads was folklore, and they believed in just the orality. This concept of pure oral ballads is fiction. There is an interplay between orality and print. Broadside ballads were the most published form of literature in the 16th and 17th century.
Q: How has the pandemic affected your teaching?
Patricia Fumerton, UCSB English professor and scholar, founder and director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive, interviewed on Zoom.
[Working with graduate and undergraduate students together] is a wonderful teaching experience but it’s also a wonderful incorporation to what a university really is, thinking across minds and an exchange of information and a raising of oneself. Even now during COVID, we are holding Zoom sessions with the students. But it’s still not the same as being in person, where they really get that excitement that’s in the room.
Q: What are your future plans for both you and the EBBA ballad archive?
A: My third book [The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics] is just coming out, which is exciting. The book is a culmination of my career in broadside ballads. We are supposed to build in the spring the most original printing press, which is modeled after the Gutenberg press, called the common press, made totally of wood which we are going to import from France and also run print courses at UCSB. We had to defer it, so hopefully it will get to happen.
Gabrielle Penner is a fourth-year student at UCSB pursuing a double-major in Dance and Communication. She wrote this article for her Writing Program class Journalism for Web and Social Media.