Do you remember, Lord Gregory?’: The Agency of Memory in Scottish Ballads

This article looks at the agency of memory and remembering, mental mechanisms that serve diverse functions within the ballad tradition, and which allow characters, and us as listeners, to shade experience from the past into the present, bridging time, and distance, and leading us to rehearse the future, as Bill Nicolaisen puts it. 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. I will explore remembered action, recalled relationships, and retained loyalties in relation to the unfolding of the ballad story and its narrative repercussions, looking at how memory serves as a fulcrum, a catalyst, and a narrative device.