Singing the Child Ballads
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The Ballads of the Southern Mountains and the Escape from Old Europe
B AR B ARA C HING Happily Ever After in the Marketplace: The Ballads of the Southern Mountains and the Escape from Old Europe Between 1882 and 1898, Harvard English Professor Francis J. Child published The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, a five volume col- lection of ballad lyrics that he believed to pre-date the printing press. While ballad collections had been published before, the scope and pur- ported antiquity of Child’s project captured the public imagination; within a decade, folklorists and amateur folk song collectors excitedly reported finding versions of the ballads in the Appalachians. Many enthused about the ‘purity’ of their discoveries – due to the supposed isolation of the British immigrants from the corrupting influences of modernization. When Englishman Cecil Sharp visited the mountains in search of English ballads, he described the people he encountered as “just English peasant folk [who] do not seem to me to have taken on any distinctive American traits” (cited in Whisnant 116). Even during the mid-century folk revival, Kentuckian Jean Thomas, founder of the American Folk Song Festival, wrote in the liner notes to a 1960 Folk- ways album featuring highlights from the festival that at the close of the Elizabethan era, English, Scotch, and Scotch Irish wearied of the tyranny of their kings and spurred by undaunted courage and love of inde- pendence they braved the perils of uncharted seas to seek freedom in a new world. Some tarried in the colonies but the braver, bolder, more venturesome of spirit pressed deep into the Appalachians bringing with them – hope in their hearts, song on their lips – the song their Anglo-Saxon forbears had gathered from the wander- ing minstrels of Shakespeare’s time. -
University Microfilms International 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 USA St
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Gender Representations in “The Ballad of Tam Lin”
International Journal of Culture and History, Vol. 3, No. 3, September 2017 Gender Representations in “The Ballad of Tam Lin” Evgeniia Ermakova and Sabina Likhareva etc. It is due to being rooted in the national mentality that Abstract—The present paper addresses a highly relevant gender representations are so fixed in the cultural memory of issue of gender representation in literature that generates much the nation. academic interest as well as practical implications. The material for analysis is the text of the medieval ballad “Tam Lin” as published in the “Child Ballads”. Investigation methodology includes semantic, linguocultural, sociocultural and literary II. MATERIAL AND METHODOLOGY analysis. The findings have been categorized to show how a man As well as myths and fairy-tales, ballads, in spite of and a woman are perceived and portrayed in the English belonging to a plot-driven genre, represent complex culture. The paper would be of interest for scholars and multilevel structure full of implicit cultural senses. The practitioners dealing with gender issues, English and culture studies. material of the present study is comprised by text version A (Robert Burns’ version) of “The Ballad of Tam Lin”, taken Index Terms—Culture, gender, representation, semantics. from “The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1882-1898” edited by F. J. Child, otherwise known as “Child Ballads” [4], although the first mention of the plot dates back to as early as I. INTRODUCTION 1549. It can be addressed as a monument of both English and Ballads are poetical narratives frequently having medieval Scottish culture; while the setting, characters and main plot legendary background and performed to music. -
Barbara Allen
120 Charles Seeger Versions and Variants of the Tunes of "Barbara Allen" As sung in traditional singing styles in the United States and recorded by field collectors who have deposited their discs and tapes in the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. AFS L 54 Edited by Charles Seeger PROBABLY IT IS safe to say that most English-speaking people in the United States know at least one ballad-tune or a derivative of one. If it is not "The Two Sisters, " it will surely be "When Johnny Comes Marching Home"; or if not "The Derby Ram, " then the old Broadway hit "Oh Didn't He Ramble." If. the title is given or the song sung to them, they will say "Oh yes, I know tllat tune." And probably that tune, more or less as they know it, is to them, the tune of the song. If they hear it sung differently, as may be the case, they are as likely to protest as to ignore or even not notice the difference. Afterward, in their recognition or singing of it, they are as likely to incor porate some of the differences as not to do so. If they do, they are as likely to be aware as to be entirely unconscious of having done ·so. But if they ad mit the difference yet grant that both singings are of "that" tune, they have taken the first step toward the study of the ballad-tune. They have acknow ledged that there are enough resemblances between the two to allow both to be called by the same name. -
English 577.02 Folklore 2: the Traditional Ballad (Tu/Th 9:35AM - 10:55AM; Hopkins Hall 246)
English 577.02 Folklore 2: The Traditional Ballad (Tu/Th 9:35AM - 10:55AM; Hopkins Hall 246) Instructor: Richard F. Green ([email protected]; phone: 292-6065) Office Hours: Wednesday 11:30 - 2:30 (Denney 529) Text: English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. F.J. Child, 5 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: 1882- 1898); available online at http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com/the-305-child-ballads.aspx.\ August Thurs 22 Introduction: “What is a Ballad?” Sources Tues 27 Introduction: Ballad Terminology: “The Gypsy Laddie” (Child 200) Thurs 29 “From Sir Eglamour of Artois to Old Bangum” (Child 18) September Tues 3 Movie: The Songcatcher Pt 1 Thurs 5 Movie: The Songcatcher Pt 2 Tues 10 Tragic Ballads Thurs 12 Twa Sisters (Child 10) Tues 17 Lord Thomas and Fair Annet (Child 73) Thurs 19 Romantic Ballads Tues 24 Young Bateman (Child 53) October Tues 1 Fair Annie (Child 62) Thurs 3 Supernatural Ballads Tues 8 Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight (Child 4) Thurs 10 Wife of Usher’s Well (Child 79) Tues 15 Religious Ballads Thurs 17 Cherry Tree Carol (Child 54) Tues 22 Bitter Withy Thurs 24 Historical & Border Ballads Tues 29 Sir Patrick Spens (Child 58) Thurs 31 Mary Hamilton (Child 173) November Tues 5 Outlaw & Pirate Ballads Thurs 7 Geordie (Child 209) Tues 12 Henry Martin (Child 250) Thurs 14 Humorous Ballads Tues 19 Our Goodman (Child 274) Thurs 21 The Farmer’s Curst Wife (Child 278) S6, S7, S8, S9, S23, S24) Tues 24 American Ballads Thurs 26 Stagolee, Jesse James, John Hardy Tues 28 Thanksgiving (PAPERS DUE) Jones, Omie Wise, Pretty Polly, &c. -
Singing the Child Ballads Leave It to Our Readers to Challenge, If They Want To
one of the canon, we‟ll take your word for it and Singing the Child Ballads leave it to our readers to challenge, if they want to. So to start with we invite you to send us your Rosaleen writes: favourite singing versions of the first eight Child ballads. With luck we‟ll have some of your Someone asked me recently which Child ballads I submissions to print in the next issue, along with our sing and I couldn‟t make a very satisfactory reply at second batch from my repertoire. We do hope that the time. But that started me wondering, so I‟ve been you will join me in this “quest for the ballad” by checking them out and I found quite a few in my sharing your versions of these well-loved songs. Here repertoire. Some are versions that stay close to one of are a few notes on my versions: Child‟s texts, others are composites created by revival singers or myself. Some I have known since 1. Riddles Wisely Expounded. My text is a composite my teens or early twenties; others I have only from Child‟s versions A and B. I‟ve known the tune recently learned, and still others I‟ve picked up since at least the early 1960s but I previously used it somewhere along the way, most often from for “The Cruel Mother” (I now sing a different recordings or from a handful of well-thumbed books version of that ballad). I picked up the melody in my possession. aurally, but it is almost the same as that first printed in d‟Urfey‟s Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719-20). -
English Folk Ballads Collected By
Journal of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University English Folk Ballads Collected by Cecil James Sharp < 79 http://jpnu.pu.if.ua Vol. 1, No. 2,3 (2014), 79-85 UDC 821.111:82-144(292.77) doi: 10.15330/jpnu.1.2,3.79-85 ENGLISH FOLK BALLADS COLLECTED BY CECIL JAMES SHARP IN THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIANS: GENESIS, TRANSFORMATION AND UKRAINIAN PARALLELS OKSANA KARBASHEVSKA Abstract. The purpose of this research, presented at the Conference sectional meeting, is to trace peculiarities of transformation of British folk medieval ballads, which were brought to the Southern Appalachians in the east of the USA by British immigrants at the end of the XVIIIth – beginning of the XIXth century and retained by their descendants, through analyzing certain texts on the levels of motifs, dramatis personae, composition, style and artistic means, as well as to outline relevant Ukrainian parallels. The analysis of such ballads, plot types and epic songs was carried out: 1) British № 10: “The Twa Sisters” (21 variants); American “The Two Sisters”(5 variants) and Ukrainian plot type I – C-5: “the elder sister drowns the younger one because of envy and jealousy” (8 variants); 2) British № 26: The Three Ravens” (2), “The Twa Corbies” (2); American “The Three Ravens” (1), “The Two Crows”(1) and Ukrainian epic songs with the motif of lonely death of a Cossack warrior on the steppe (4). In our study British traditional ballads are classified according to the grouping worked out by the American scholar Francis Child (305 numbers), Ukrainian folk ballads – the plot-thematic catalogue developed by the Ukrainian folklorist Оleksiy Dey (here 288 plots are divided into 3 spheres, cycles and plot types). -
The Ballad/Alan Bold Methuen & Co
In the same series Tragedy Clifford Leech Romanticism Lilian R Furst Aestheticism R. V. Johnson The Conceit K. K Ruthven The Ballad/Alan Bold The Absurd Arnold P. Hinchliffe Fancy and Imagination R. L. Brett Satire Arthur Pollard Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse G. S. Fraser Realism Damian Grant The Romance Gillian Beer Drama and the Dramatic S W. Dawson Plot Elizabeth Dipple Irony D. C Muecke Allegory John MacQueen Pastoral P. V. Marinelli Symbolism Charles Chadwick The Epic Paul Merchant Naturalism Lilian R. Furst and Peter N. Skrine Rhetoric Peter Dixon Primitivism Michael Bell Comedy Moelwyn Merchant Burlesque John D- Jump Dada and Surrealism C. W. E. Bigsby The Grotesque Philip Thomson Metaphor Terence Hawkes The Sonnet John Fuller Classicism Dominique Secretan Melodrama James Smith Expressionism R. S. Furness The Ode John D. Jump Myth R K. Ruthven Modernism Peter Faulkner The Picaresque Harry Sieber Biography Alan Shelston Dramatic Monologue Alan Sinfield Modern Verse Drama Arnold P- Hinchliffe The Short Story Ian Reid The Stanza Ernst Haublein Farce Jessica Milner Davis Comedy of Manners David L. Hirst Methuen & Co Ltd 19-+9 xaverslty. Librasü Style of the ballads 21 is the result not of a literary progression of innovators and their acolytes but of the evolution of a form that could be men- 2 tally absorbed by practitioners of an oral idiom made for the memory. To survive, the ballad had to have a repertoire of mnemonic devices. Ballad singers knew not one but a whole Style of the ballads host of ballads (Mrs Brown of Falkland knew thirty-three separate ballads). -
MJ06-National Copy.Indd
Vita-final 4/7/06 4:44 PM Page 52 VITA Francis James Child Brief life of a Victorian enthusiast: 1825-1896 by john burgess rancis james child, a.b. 1846, was a model of nineteenth- and their American and Canadian variants. That demanded pa- century academic achievement. Named Harvard’s Boylston tience in tracking manuscripts across continents, judgment in in- professor of rhetoric and oratory at 26, he was one of his terpreting and clarifying textual discrepancies, and persistence in Fcentury’s leading Chaucer scholars and received honorary degrees dealing with collectors ranging from the high-born Lord Rose- from his alma mater, Columbia, and Göttingen. His close friends bery to the eccentric Devon clergyman Sabine Baring-Gould. included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry and William James, and In all, Child collected 305 ballads, ultimately published in five Charles Eliot Norton. Yet today he is better remembered than volumes (1882-98), including “Lord Randall,” “Sir Patrick Spens,” many distinguished colleagues because, at the height of his career, and a good three dozen variations on the adventures of Robin he decided to apply a gift for scholarship honed on the study of Hood. Some, like “Barbara Allen,” had been in print for generations traditional literature to the oral traditions of the folk ballad. and were sung from London to Appalachia. Others, like “Thomas That a sailmaker’s son achieved eminence of any sort was large- the Rhymer” or “Tam Lin,” evoke a world of magic that survived ly because the Boston of his youth was progressive enough to o≠er outside the written record for centuries. -
Singing the Child Ballads
Singing the Child Ballads Rosaleen Gregory This was initially going to be my final quartet of jubilant taunting as verses 7 and 8. I‟ve printed Child ballads. There are no other ballads from the last verse in Stephen Sedley‟s version, but as Child‟s canon in my repertoire but I do have a it was clearly added by a disgruntled male I leave few variants learned to illustrate Dave‟s it out in performance. As Sedley says, the story, conference papers. So there will be one last set in like “Our Goodman,” is found throughout Euro- the next issue of Canadian Folk Music. I can pean folklore (and, I would think, further afield as think of one of them already and I nearly included well). The tune was collected by Hammond from it, but as it‟s a variant of „„The Braes of Yarrow,” William Bartlett in Wimborne, Dorset, and is of which I gave a version before, I‟ll set it aside in accompanied by the comment that it is “a mixture favour of the following. None of these four of the „Morning Dew‟ and „Blow away ye ballads has previously appeared in this column. morning breezes.‟” Child #228: “Glasgow Peggie” Child #46: “Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship” Guitar accompaniment. My version of both text and tune I learned years ago as an undergraduate Guitar accompaniment, from Stephen Sedley‟s at Keele University, from whom I have The Seeds of Love (Essex Music Limited in completely forgotten, but it was one of those association with the E.F.D.S.S., 1967). -
CHILD BALLADS TRADITIONAL in the UNITED STATES Edited by Bertrand H
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Music Division -- Recording Laboratory Issued from the Collections of the Archive of Folk Song Long-Playing Record L57 CHILD BALLADS TRADITIONAL IN THE UNITED STATES Edited by Bertrand H. Bronson Preface All the songs on this and the following long-playing record (L58) are members, circulating within recent decades in various parts of the United States, of the classic and authoritative canon of traditional narrative-songs of Eng lish and Scottish growth now universally known as the "Child Ballads," after the great nineteenth-century scholar who first assembled and edited them: Professor Francis James Child of Harvard University. Child had a vast and historic knowledge of balladry, defying barriers of language and ranging familiarly through the centuries. After the most strenuous efforts, prolonged for decades, to recover every record of value, he concluded that only a handful were still traditionally alive. What would have been his delighted amazement to learn -- a fact that has been discovered only in our own century and which is spectacularly demonstrated in the Archive of Folk Song -- is that scores of his chosen ballads are even today being sung in strictly traditional forms, not learned from print, across the length and~breadth of this country, in variants literally innumerable! The aim of the present selection is to display some of the Archive's riches, a representative cross-section from the hundreds of Child variants collected by many interested field workers and now safely garnered in the Library of Congress. References for Study: Professor Child set forth his ballad canon in tne monumental English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Boston, Boughton, Mifflin, l882=r898, 10 parts in 5 volumes; reprinted in 3 volumes, New York, Folklore Press, 1956). -
Ballad of the Month: Lamkin (Child #93)
34 Lamkin (Child #93) Editor: The gruesome tale of the wronged stonemason entering the castle of the greedy nobleman and extracting his revenge by murdering the nobleman's wife and baby with the help of the nurse is one I've been reluctant to sing. Not being one to shy away from the usual tabloid exploits of the Child ballad, with their rapes, murders, infanticide, and incest, I am at a loss to explain my reluctance. So it is with pleasure that I welcome Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat's discussion of this ballad. After reading their discussion and hearing Northwest Territory balladeer Moira Cameron sing it, I'm ready to tackle it. Almost. It's Lamkin was a masongood As everbuilt wi' stane, He built Lord Wearie'scastle But payment he got nane. But the nourice was a fause limmer As e'er hung on a tree,' She laid a plot wi' Lamkin, Whanher lord was o'er the sea. She laid a plot wi' Lamkin, Whenthe servantswere awa' Loot him in at a little shot-window And brought him to the ha '. "Oh whare's the lady 0' this house That ca's me Lamkin?" "She'sup in her bowersewing But we sooncan bring her down. Then Lamkin's ta 'en a sharp knife That hung down by his gair And he has gien the bonny babe A deepwound and a sair. Then Lamkin he rocked, And the fause nourice sang Till frae ilka bore0 ' the cradle The red blood out sprang. "Oh still my bairn, nourice, Oh still him wi' the pap!" "He winna still, lady, For this nor for that." "Oh still my bairn, nourice, Oh still him wi' the bell!" "He winna still, lady, Till ye c;omedown yoursel." Oh the {irsten step shesteppit She steppit on a stane; But the neistenstep shesteppit She met him -- Lamkin.