Stories beyond the Text: Contextualizing Narratives and 'The Jolly Beggar'

This paper looks at the relationship between sung and spoken narrative in a present-day Scottish Traveller family, focusing on a series of family stories about King James V (1512–42). The stories are told in relation to a pair of ballads, “The Jolly Beggar” and “The Gaberlunyie Man” (Child 279 and 279 Appendix) and through them I explore the function, meaning, and continued relevance of contextualizing narratives, which fill in gaps in plot, anchor a song in time, or develop a didactic message.