American Folk Ballads

This course will explore the often ignored narrative poetry of the American underclass. We will begin with the Scottish origins of the ballad. Slave songs, prison hollers, chain-gang work-songs, the Joe Hill songs of the labor movement, and the depression-era dust-bowl ballads will constitute the bulk of the course. Students will study the socioeconomic circumstances that gave rise to each of these traditions, and will be asked to place them within the literary landscape of their time. Finally, we will examine more contemporary incarnations of the folk ballad with particular attention to the narcocorridos currently thriving along the U.S./Mexico border.