![]() ![]() Tate, under the title ‘Song of the Angels, at the Nativity of our Blessed Saviour.’ 4 Taken from the Gospel of Luke II: 8–15, it is a metrical version in quatrains, known as common metre or ballad metre (see Fig. The text of the carol has been dated to 1700 when it was first published in A Supplement to A New Version of the Psalms of David, edited by N. The contrasting perspectives of the insider/performer and the outsider/researcher have been encapsulated in two terms ‘etic’ and ‘emic’ coined by the linguist Kenneth Pike (1967). They see the tradition as a whole, the components of the repertoire as constituent parts of a unitary body, its expression as consistent, its performance context as rooted, and its evolution as timeless. To the participant in the tradition such an analytical approach is somewhat alien. Like most musical traditions, the carolling tradition of the English Pennines presents the researcher with a palimpsest of complex data from which to draw a narrative that gives an insight into their context, meaning, function, and performance. My aim is to demonstrate, as Lomax (1968, 298) has noted, how such a paradigm as a carol can characterise a culture in terms of its basic structural elements (text and tune), and its wider complexity, including its role in social interaction, its transmission through oral tradition and print, its resonances and purposes, and an understanding of the enactment milieux, including style and aesthetics (Stone 2008, 3–11). Firstly because the chosen carol is a model of its genre, or a very clear and typical example of it ( Oxford English Dictionary 1986), but also because at a deeper level this research embodies the importance of an approach that combines ethnographic fieldwork of the vernacular tradition of carol singing with grounded historical research based on documentary evidence. I have chosen the term ‘paradigm’ for very conscious reasons. Carollers at the Black Bull in Ecclesfield, 15 December 2011. ![]()
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