Of Poets, Mermaids and Brownies

This chapter turns to ballads and folksong, forms whose supposed proximity to ‘the voice of the people’ allowed them to claim a special place in emergent discourses of cultural regionalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The chapter begins with a discussion of Robert Burns’s relationship to Dumfriesshire as mediated by his song collecting, before suggesting that related combinations of ‘creation’ and ‘curation’ characterise the work of William Nicholson and Allan Cunningham, poets who became strongly identified with Galloway and Dumfriesshire respectively. The centrepiece of the chapter is a new reading of Cunningham’s contributions to R. H. Cromek’s Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (1810), a key exemplar of the authenticity debates and editorial sleights-of-hand associated with Romantic-era song production. What emerges in this material is a circular logic in which doubts around authority and authenticity by turns undermine, support and are irrelevant to the work of cultural representation.