In 1855, an obscure writer named J. J. Trux published an article in Putnam’s entitled “Negro Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern.” In appropriative gesture endemic to American culture, Trux sets himself up as a judge of the difference between “genuine” and imitative African-American song. His title alludes to Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), which self-consciously juxtaposes oral traditional ballads collected in rural areas—mostly from women performers—with “imitations of the ancient ballad” composed mainly by Scott himself.  Ever since Thomas Percy defined the medieval minstrel ballad in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), the ballad has been central to debates about heritage, race, and ethnicity: while Percy emphasized Nordic and Anglo-Norman origins, James Macpherson and others appealed to ancient Gaelic traditions, and traditional ballads were a key part of Celtic revivals in both Ireland and Scotland. Scott, and to some extent Robert Burns, marketed Scots verse to English readers as the product of an authentic oral tradition. In the U.S., Trux was only one in a long line of mostly white entrepreneurs who marketed African-American music and verse in the same way. We will spend some time studying minstrelsy in its racist (blackface) incarnation on both sides of the Atlantic and then wrap up the course with a look at the American folk music and jazz movements, which developed two very distinct definitions both of African-American culture and of the ballad as a form. Course materials will include Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), Lyrical Ballads (1798), James Francis Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1898), John Lomax’s Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (1947), and writings on blues and jazz by Angela Davis and A. X. Nicholas, among others.