There Will Be No More Ballads

Join us tonight (8pm CDT) on the Facebook timeline of Plains Folk (facebook.com/plainsfolk) for the livestream of Willow Creek Folk School No. 119. In the meantime, I'm posting here the full text of my recent paper on Great Plains balladry presented at the annual conference of the Western History Association, meeting in San Antonio. I don't ordinarily post text of conference papers, but this is an exceptional case in that the paper is intimately connected to a public event, the Willow Creek Folk School, which has an interested public, including some folks who might wish to wade through the scholarly presentation. The paper is a progress report and overall rationale for work on its subject, the heyday of balladry on the Great Plains. All rights reserved, of course.

There Will Be No More Ballads: Revisiting the Efflorescence of Folksong on the Great Plains