Alliance and Defiance in Scottish and American Outlaw-Hero Ballads

Abstract

As scholars of the 'Anglo-American ballad' tradition have frequently observed, ballads have proved to be ideal carriers of cultural information. During periods of emigration from Scotland to North America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ballads that crossed the Atlantic – whether transmitted orally by singers or printed in broadsides and chapbooks – retained markers of their Scottish origins while also adapting to new circumstances, a process aided by the ballad’s combination of compelling themes and formal strategies for containment and transmission. This chapter considers a particularly enduring strand of the tradition: the outlaw-hero ballad as developed in Scotland and the United States. Comparing Scottish and American outlaw-hero ballads reveals cultural factors that govern variation in the character type and its representations. And while acknowledging the common attributes of outlaws across cultures, this approach complicates the notion of an abstract, universal 'social banditry'.