Ballads & Broadsides
True Thomas ·
Tam Lin ·
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads edited
by Francis James Child is the premier collection of ballads and ballad commentary
in the English language. The texts of 305 ballads (plus variants) from the out-of-print
five-volume Dover Press facsimile edition of the
Ballads based on files of Cathy Lynn Preston are available on line in three formats:
Press has now issued the fourth volume of The English and Scottish
Popular Ballads in a "corrected edition" prepared by Mark Heiman
and Laura Saxton Heiman. The "corrections" incorporate all of
Professor Child's post-publication corrections and additions into their
proper places in the text (rather than in an Appendix); ballad tunes
drawn from Child's original sources and his 1877 essay "Ballad Poetry"
have also been included.
Loomis House Press also has new edition of the one-volume abridgement, the
English and Scottish Popular Ballads edited from the Collection of
Francis James Child: Students' Cambridge Edition by
Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge, in preparation.
Francis J. Child Ballads: Biography, Lyrics, Tunes
and Historical Information is another large online collection, with 105 texts
organized by volume and number. It's part of Lesley Nelson's Folk
Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and America.
English and Scottish Popular Ballads offers an introduction to the collection, a biographical
sketch of Child, and commentary on the influence of Child Ballads
by Jack B. Nimble, fiddler, web designer, and senior writer for The
Green Man Review: Roots & Branches of Music & Literature; the page also
features Chuck Lipsig's commentary on The Traditional Tunes of the Child
Ballad by Bertrand Harris Bronson.
Many versions of individual Child ballads are
available online at divers sites, in various degrees of modernization.
Among these are:
Representative Poetry On-Line
at the University of Toronto (look under author "anonymous").
a learning library of bardic music (see "Pre-1600" and "Traditional").
- Jedburgh Online includes texts of several outlaw border ballads,
with historical references.
Child's Legacy Enlarged: Oral Literary Studies at Harvard Since 1856
by David E. Bynum. "For 116 years, Harvard College has been collecting oral traditions and
disseminating knowledge about them to anyone who could use that knowledge
to good purpose. Three men of the Harvard faculty launched this brilliant
movement in American intellectual life. They were Francis James Child,
George Lyman Kittredge, and Milman Parry. The following pages
are about those three men, their ideas, and their continuing
impact on the life of our own time." [Thanks to Ian Myles Slater for this link.]
to Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, in downloadable format, by Cathy Lynn Preston, University of Colorado.
Child Ballads, an introduction by Dani Zweig.
Other Ballad Collections
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry by the
Reverend Thomas Percy (1729-1811), Bishop of Dromore from 1782,
is the wellspring of ballad collecting and ballad scholarship in
England. The source for the Reliques is a
seventeenth-century manuscript dubbed the Percy Folio,
which is now in the British Museum.
The three-volume Dover Press issue of the 1886 critical edition
is out-of-print, but a facsimile edition is available from
Selections are available at
at the University of Toronto (under author "Thomas Percy").
The Englisah Broadside Ballad Archive features facsimile images of 1,857 ballads in the Samuel Pepys collection at the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, with transcriptions, backgropund
essays, and notes. At the University of Santa Barbara.
Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England
edited by Robert Bell, the 1846 Percy Society edition, from Project
Gutenberg. 108 traditional works, some of them ballads, with short notes.
A Book of Old English Ballads
with an Accompaniment of Decorative Drawings
by George Wharton Edwards and an Introduction by Hamilton W. Mabie (1896), part of
the Internet Sacred Text Archive's
English folklore collection.
Collection of Ballads by Andrew Lang, the
1910 Chapman and Hall edition. 53
historical and supernatural ballads, with commentary. Downloadable text
from Project Gutenberg.
The Oxford Book of Ballads,
edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, 1910, at Bartleby.
General Ballad Resources on the Net
Traditional Ballad Index: An annotated source to folk song
from the English-speaking world. "The Traditional Ballad Index is a collaborative effort designed to help people find reference information
on ballads. It is not itself a source of song texts or of discussion
of ballads, although it contains some
summary information." This site provides a keyword-search index and
a complete file for download or online viewing.
Ballads: A Work in Progress.
"Much attention is paid to post-1600 ballads, both traditional and
broadsides, but only a few sixteenth
century ballads are known. Of the ones which are known,
most are not printed with the lyrics and tunes
together, so are not very accessible to the casual reader."
The goal of Greg Lindahl's project is to produce a collection
of "interesting" ballads from before 1600, containing sheet
music and lyrics, both in their original form,
and in a form intelligible to a modern listener. Includes his list
of documentation for pre-1600
Seventeenth Century Broadside Ballad
Collections: Incomplete Contents Listing of 17th Century Broadside Ballad
Collections, With a Few Ballads and Garlands of the 18th Century.
Wm. Bruce Olson writes: "In 1987 The Pepys Ballads
was published in facsimile in five volumes, but without an Index.
I got very tired of thumbing through the volumes to
relocate a text in which I had some interest, so decided to make a rudimentary Index.
After I had it, I thought I might as well throw in the
Wood and Manchester collections for which I had made a contents
list, and also the BL 'Book of Fortune' collection which I had
seen many years earlier...." The result is one humungous text file,
situable for searching.
Library Broadside Ballads Project at Oxford University
makes digitized copies of the library's unparalleled collection
of broadside sheets and ballads available over the internet.
Notes on the Illustrations ·
7 August 2005 (updated 29 May 2010)