Child's Ballads Week 12: England - Assignments - Reading - Resources - Images

Resources

Ballads

Francis J. Child's five volumes of English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898) are one of the most important folk music collections in the European tradition. Unfortunately, it is no longer in print, but you can find the ballads online:

• Sacred Texts Archive: Although it does not contain all of Child's notes and all the variations, this is the easiest Child resource to use.

• Making of America (University of Michigan): There are complete page scans here, allowing you to see all of the recorded variations, along with Child's notes: Volume 1    Volume 2 - Volume 3 - Volume 4 - Volume 5 - Volume 6 - Volume 7 - Volume 8   

• There is a "concordance" of the ballads available for download, thanks to Cathy Lynn Preston. This allows you to find all the occurrences of a given word in the ballads.

The Contemplator's Child Ballads site is where many of this week's texts (and MIDI files) originated. It does not contain all the ballads, but the MIDI files are helpful, and there are also very interesting notes about the ballads.

Sir Walter Scott. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.  A digital edition at electricscotland.com.

The Oxford Book of Ballads by Arthur Quiller-Couch (1910). A complete online edition of the book at Bartleby.

A Collection of Ballads by Andrew Lang (1910).

Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasntry of England edited by Robert Bell (1846). A collection of ballads that predates Child's.

A Handful of Pleasant Delights by Clement Robinson and Divers Others (1584) - selections from a 16th century collection of ballads.

Thomas Deloney's The Garland of Good Will (1631) and his Strange Histories (1602) are 17th century ballad collections.