The difficulties Vuk Stephanovitch met with in collecting these wonderful ballads, were not small.  He was often hardly able to prevail on the young men and girls to recite, still less to sing them before him; partly from a natural shyness to exhibit themselves before a stranger; partly because his search after effusions which had so little value in their eyes, and his attempt to fix them by writing, seemed to them an idle and useless occupation.  The only reason which they could conceive for it was, that the learned idler meant to ridicule them; and his request was frequently answered by the words:  “We are no blind men to sing or recite songs to you.”

Of the heroic poems, he tells us, that they are not only chanted, but often recited, as we are accustomed to read; and that in this latter way, old people teach them by preference to the children.  His own father, grandfather, and uncle, were wont to recite and to sing them; and the two latter even composed not a few.  Among those from whose lips he took down the present collection, were lads, peasants, merchants, as also hayduks, i.e. highwaymen, in Servia a mode of life less disreputable than with us, and somewhat approaching to heroism.  Further, at least seven or eight were blind men; all of them professional bards, and almost the only persons willing to satisfy him.  The shenske pjesme, or female poems, he had to catch by chance; and short as they are, it was easy to keep them in memory after having heard them once or twice.

While these latter poems are mostly sung without any instrumental accompaniment in the spinning-rooms, in the pastures, or at the village dances; on the other hand the tavern, the public squares, the festive halls of the chiefs, are the places where the Gusle is heard which accompanies the heroic ballads.  The bard chants two lines; then he pauses and gives a few plaintive strokes on his primitive instrument; then he chants again, and so on.  He needs these short pauses for recollection, as well as for invention.  Although these ballads are chiefly sung by blind men, yet no hero thinks it beneath him to chant them to the Gusle.  Pirch, a Prussian officer, who travelled in Servia some twenty years ago, tells us, that the Knjas, his host, took the instrument from the hands of the lad, for whom he had sent to sing before his guest, because he did not satisfy him, and played and chanted himself with a superior skill.  Clergymen themselves are not ashamed to do it.  Nay, even Muhammedan-Bosnians, more Turks than Servians, have preserved this partiality for their national heroics.  The great among them would not, indeed, themselves sing them; but they cause them to be chanted before them; and it happened, that a Christian prisoner in Semendria obtained his liberty by their intercession with the Kadi, which he owed merely to their fondness for his ballads.  A considerable number of fine songs are marked in Vuk’s collection as having been first heard from Muhammedan singers.