Phillips Barry

Author

1880 – 1937

15

Who was Phillips Barry?

Phillips Barry was an American academic and collector of traditional ballads in New England.

Barry was born in Boston and attended undergraduate and graduate school at Harvard University for folklore, theology, and classical and medieval literature. After graduating, he began collecting variations of both American and Anglo-American ballads in the northeast United States. In 1930 he founded the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast. He would edit and regularly contribute to the group's Bulletin, which printed twelve issues from 1930 until Barry's death in 1937. In an obituary printed in 1938, folklorist George Herzog described his theory of "communal re-creation" as a significant contribution to the study of ballads in the field:

Mr. Barry, and Professor Louise Pound, attacked the theory of "communal ballad origin" according to which ballads were supposed to have originated through improvisation, by a group acting in concert. Mar. Barry suggested instead a theory of "communal re-creation," a process according to which songs created by individuals and handed down by tradition became remodeled and changed by practically each individual who sang them.

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Born
1880
Education
  • Harvard University
Died
1937

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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