"Scarborough Fair" is a traditional English ballad. The song lists a number of impossible tasks given to a former lover who lives in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. The "Scarborough/Whittingham Fair" variant was most common in Yorkshire and Northumbria, where it was sung to various melodies, often using Dorian mode, with refrains resembling "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme" and "Then she'll be a true love of mine." It appears in Traditional Tunes by Frank Kidson published in 1891, who claims to have collected it from Whitby.
"Tom o' Bedlam" is the title of an anonymous poem in the "mad song" genre, written in the voice of a homeless "Bedlamite". The poem was probably composed at the beginning of the 17th century. In How to Read and Why Harold Bloom called it "the greatest anonymous lyric in the [English] language."
"Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser", also called the "Kaiserhymne", was a personal anthem to Francis II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and later of the Austrian Empire, with lyrics by Lorenz Leopold Haschka (1749–1827) and music by Joseph Haydn.
The "Lyke-Wake Dirge" is a traditional English folk song and dirge listed as number 8194 in the Roud Folk Song Index. The song tells of the soul's travel, and the hazards it faces, on its way from earth to purgatory, reminding the mourners to practise charity during lifetime. Though it is from the Christian era and features references to Christianity, much of the symbolism is thought to be of pre-Christian origin.
"Frog Went a-Courtin'" is an English-language folk song. Its first known appearance is in Wedderburn's Complaynt of Scotland (1549) under the name "The Frog cam to the Myl dur", though this is in Scots rather than English. There is a reference in the London Company of Stationers' Register of 1580 to "A Moste Strange Weddinge of the Frogge and the Mouse." There are many texts of the ballad; however the oldest known musical version is found in Thomas Ravenscroft's Melismata in 1611.
"Matty Groves", also known as "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" or "Little Musgrave", is a ballad probably originating in Northern England that describes an adulterous tryst between a young man and a noblewoman that is ended when the woman's husband discovers and kills them. It is listed as Child ballad number 81 and number 52 in the Roud Folk Song Index. This song exists in many textual variants and has several variant names. The song dates to at least 1613, and under the title Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard is one of the Child ballads collected by 19th-century American scholar Francis James Child.
"Streets of Laredo", also known as "The Dying Cowboy", is a famous American cowboy ballad in which a dying ranger tells his story to another cowboy. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.
"The Mermaid" is a traditional folk ballad. Originating around the mid-18th century, this song is known by a number of names, including "Waves on the Sea", "The Stormy Winds", "Our Gallant Ship", and "The Wrecked Ship".
"The Two Sisters" is a traditional murder ballad, dating at least as far back as the mid 17th century. The song recounts the tale of a girl drowned by her jealous sister. At least 21 English variants exist under several names, including "Minnorie" or "Binnorie", "The Cruel Sister", "The Wind and Rain", "Dreadful Wind and Rain", "The Bonny Swans" and the "Bonnie Bows of London". The ballad was collected by renowned folklorist Francis J. Child as Child Ballad 10 and is also listed in the Roud Folk Song Index. Whilst the song is thought to originate somewhere around England or Scotland, extremely similar songs have been found throughout Europe, particularly in Scandinavia.
"The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry" or "The Grey Selkie of Sule Skerry" is a traditional folk song from Orkney and Shetland. A woman has her child taken away by its father, the great selkie of Sule Skerry which can transform from a seal into a human. The woman is fated to marry a gunner who will harpoon the selkie and their son.
"Fair Margaret and Sweet William" is a traditional English ballad which tells of two lovers, one or both of whom die from heartbreak. Thomas Percy included it in his 1765 Reliques and said that it was quoted as early as 1611 in the Knight of the Burning Pestle. In the United States, variations of Fair Margaret were regarded as folk song as early as 1823.
"The Wind That Shakes the Barley" is an Irish ballad written by Robert Dwyer Joyce (1836–1883), a Limerick-born poet and professor of English literature. The song is written from the perspective of a doomed young Wexford rebel who is about to sacrifice his relationship with his loved one and plunge into the cauldron of violence associated with the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. The references to barley in the song derive from the fact that the rebels frequently carried barley or oats in their pockets as provisions for when on the march. This gave rise to the post-rebellion phenomenon of barley growing and marking the "croppy-holes," unmarked mass graves into which rebel casualties were thrown. To many Irish nationalists, these "croppy-holes" symbolised the regenerative nature of resistance to British rule in Ireland. Barley growing every spring was said by nationalist authors to symbolize continuous Irish resistance to British rule, particularly in nationalist literature and poetry written about the rebellion.
The King's Disguise, and Friendship with Robin Hood is an English ballad of Robin Hood. It is a relatively late work in the corpus, found in the Forresters Manuscript from the 1670s. The work seems loosely based on the 7th and 8th fyttes of A Gest of Robyn Hode which recounts the end of Robin Hood's outlawry after an encounter with the king. Unlike Gest, the king is not acting out of the need to suppress Robin; additionally, The King's Disguise and Friendship uses the 17th century updates to the legend that places Robin as contemporaneous with King Richard's reign. In the late 1800s, Francis James Child included it in his influential collection, the Child Ballads, as #151.
"The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond", or "Loch Lomond" for short, is a Scottish song. The song prominently features Loch Lomond, the largest Scottish loch. In Scots, "bonnie" means "fair" or "beautiful".
Robyn and Gandeleyn is an English ballad. The poem is in Sloane Manuscript 2593, a document of lyrics and carols which dates from around 1450. It was first printed by Joseph Ritson in his 1790 collection Ancient Songs. It was later republished in the second half of the 19th century in an anthology of traditional English and Scottish ballads by Francis James Child known as the Child Ballads, where it is Child Ballad 115. Child also divided the continuous text into seventeen stanzas.
"O Sacred Head, Now Wounded" is a Christian Passion hymn based on a Latin text written during the Middle Ages. Paul Gerhardt wrote a German version which is known by its incipit, "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden".
The Gower Wassail is a wassail song from Gower in Wales. Wassailing is a midwinter tradition wherein either orchards or households are blessed by guisers, which came to Wales through exposure to English custom. The song is printed in A.L. Lloyd's book Folk Song in England (1967), having been heard from Phil Tanner. Structurally, the song is in 6/8 time with bacchius trisyllables, a Balliol rhyme scheme, and the "ffal de radl" musical syllables characteristic of much of Welsh folk songs. Some of the lyrics closely resemble other popular wassailing songs, such as the 'Gloucestershire Wassail'.
"The Rose of Tralee" is a nineteenth-century Irish ballad about a woman called Mary, who because of her beauty was called The Rose of Tralee. The Rose of Tralee International Festival had been inspired by the ballad.
The Jüngeres Hildebrandslied or Das Lied von dem alten Hildebrand is an anonymous Early New High German heroic ballad, first attested in the fifteenth century. A late attestation of Germanic heroic legend, the ballad features the same basic story as the much older Hildebrandslied, but was composed without knowledge of that text. Rather, it reworks the oral legend of the warrior Hildebrand and his fight against his son in accordance with late medieval and early modern taste. It is highly sentimentalized and focuses on Hildebrand's return home rather than the tragic conflict of the older tradition.
The Gloucestershire Wassail, also known as "Wassail! Wassail! All Over the Town", "The Wassailing Bowl" and "Wassail Song" is an English Christmas carol from the county of Gloucestershire in England, dating back to at least the 18th century, but may be older.
