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The Child Ballads are 305 traditional ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, anthologized by Francis James Child during the second half of the 19th century. Their lyrics and Child's studies of them were published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The tunes of most of the ballads were collected and published by Bertrand Harris Bronson in and around the 1960s.
Peter Buchan was a Scottish editor, publisher, and collector of ballads and folktales.
"The Three Ravens" is an English folk ballad, printed in the songbook Melismata compiled by Thomas Ravenscroft and published in 1611, but the song is possibly older than that. Newer versions were recorded up through the 19th century. Francis James Child recorded several versions in his Child Ballads.
The Battle of Otterburn, also known as the Battle of Chevy Chase, took place according to Scottish sources on 5 August 1388, or 19 August according to English sources, as part of the continuing border skirmishes between the Scots and English.
"The Elfin Knight" is a traditional Scottish folk ballad of which there are many versions, all dealing with supernatural occurrences, and the commission to perform impossible tasks. The ballad has been collected in different parts of England, Scotland, Ireland, the US, and Canada. As is the case with most traditional folk songs, there have been countless completely different versions recorded of the same ballad. The first broadside version was printed before 1674, and the roots of the song may be considerably older.
"Bonny Portmore" is an Irish traditional folk song which laments the demise of Ireland's old oak forests, specifically the Great Oak of Portmore or the Portmore Ornament Tree, which fell in a windstorm in 1760 and was subsequently used for shipbuilding and other purposes.
"Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" is the English common name representative of a very large class of European ballads.
"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.
"The Twa Magicians", "The Two Magicians", "The Lady and the Blacksmith", or "The Coal Black Smith" is a British folk song. It first appears in print in 1828 in two sources, Peter Buchan's Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland and John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae #40. It was later published as number 44 of Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads. During the 20th century, versions of it have been recorded by a number of folk and popular musicians.
John of Hazelgreen or Jock o' Hazeldean is an English-language traditional folk song. Jock of Hazeldean is a poem and song by Sir Walter Scott based on a fragment of the ballad. Versions of the ballad were published by Chambers, Kinloch and Buchan. The version printed by John S. Roberts (1887) was compiled from those of Kinloch and Buchan.
The Knight's Ghost is a traditional English-language folk ballad. It tells the story of a woman who learns that her husband has died in battle, after which she locks his men in a cellar and throws the keys in the sea. Her husband's ghost appears to ask that she release his men, assuring her they fought bravely. Francis Child drew the ballad from Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland.
Sweet William's Ghost is an English ballad and folk song which exists in many lyrical variations and musical arrangements. Early known printings of the song include Allan Ramsay's The Tea-Table Miscellany in 1740 and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. Percy believed that the last two stanzas of the version he published were later additions, but that the details of the story they recounted were original.
"The Maid and the Palmer" is an English language medieval murder ballad with supernatural/religious overtones. Because of its dark lyrics, the song was often avoided by folk singers. Considered by scholars to be a "debased" version of a work more completely known in European sources as the Ballad of the Magdalene, the ballad was believed lost in the oral tradition in the British Isles from the time of Sir Walter Scott, who noted a fragment of it having heard it sung in the early years of the nineteenth century, until it was discovered in the repertoire of a living Irish singer, John Reilly, from whom it was collected in the 1960s, although subsequently other versions have surfaced from Ireland from the 1950s to the 1970s; an additional full text, collected and notated in around 1818, was also recently published in Emily Lyle's 1994 Scottish Ballads under the title "The Maid of Coldingham", having remained in manuscript form in the intervening time. Based on a tape of Reilly's performance provided by the collector Tom Munnelly, the singer Christy Moore popularised the song under its alternate title "The Well Below the Valley" with the Irish folk band Planxty and later solo performances/recordings, this song providing the title of that group's second album released in 1973; the song has subsequently been recorded by a number of more recent "folk revival" acts.
Willie's Fatal Visit is an English-language folk song, most likely originating in Scotland.
Broughty Wa's or (Burd) Helen is a traditional folk song.
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is an anthology of Border ballads, together with some from north-east Scotland and a few modern literary ballads, edited by Walter Scott. It was first published by Archibald Constable in Edinburgh in 1802, but was expanded in several later editions, reaching its final state in 1830, two years before Scott's death. It includes many of the most famous Scottish ballads, such as "Sir Patrick Spens", "The Young Tamlane", "The Twa Corbies", "The Douglas Tragedy", "Clerk Saunders", "Kempion", "The Wife of Usher's Well", "The Cruel Sister", "The Dæmon Lover", and "Thomas the Rhymer". Scott enlisted the help of several collaborators, notably John Leyden, and found his ballads both by field research of his own and by consulting the manuscript collections of others. Controversially, in the editing of his texts he preferred literary quality over scholarly rigour, but Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border nevertheless attracted high praise from the first. It was influential both in Britain and on the Continent, and helped to decide the course of Scott's later career as a poet and novelist. In recent years it has been called "the most exciting collection of ballads ever to appear".
"The Dowie Dens o Yarrow", also known as "The Braes of Yarrow" or simply "Yarrow", is a Scottish border ballad. It has many variants and it has been printed as a broadside, as well as published in song collections. It is considered to be a folk standard, and many different singers have performed and recorded it.
The (Bonnie) Rantin' Laddie or Lord Aboyne is a traditional Scottish folk ballad telling of the valiant rescue of his lover by a noble Highland lord.
Thomas o Yonderdale is an English-language folk song, catalogued as Child ballad number 253 and Roud number 3890. Child assessed that this "apocryphal" ballad seemed like a recent fabrication from a pastiche of other ballads.
"The False Lover Won Back" is a Scottish ballad, cataloged as Child Ballad 218.
References
- ↑ Francis James Child (1898). English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company . Retrieved 27 August 2012.
- ↑ Buchan, Peter (1828). Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland, hitherto unpublished, with explanatory notes. Vol. 2. W. & D. Laing, and J. Stevenson. p. 139. Retrieved 27 August 2012.
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