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Child Ballads

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.[1]

For the album, see Child Ballads (album).

Subjects of the ballads[edit]

Child Ballads are generally heavier and darker than is usual for ballads. Some of the topics and other features characteristic enough of Child Ballads to be considered Child Ballad motifs are these: romance, enchantment, devotion, determination, obsession, jealousy, forbidden love, insanity, hallucination, uncertainty of one's sanity, the ease with which the truth can be suppressed temporarily, supernatural experiences, supernatural deeds, half-human creatures, teenagers, family strife, the boldness of outlaws, abuse of authority, betting, lust, death, karma, punishment, sin, morality, vanity, folly, dignity, nobility, honor, loyalty, dishonor, riddles, historical events, omens, fate, trust, shock, deception, disguise, treachery, disappointment, revenge, violence, murder, cruelty, combat, courage, escape, exile, rescue, forgiveness, being tested, human weaknesses, and folk heroes.


On one extreme, some Child Ballads recount identifiable historical people, in known events, embellished for dramatic effect.[10] On the other, some differ from fairy tales solely by their being songs and in verse; some have been recast in prose form as fairy tales. A large part of the collection is about Robin Hood; some are about King Arthur. A few of the ballads are rather bawdy.[11]

Part 1, ballads 1–28

Part 2, ballads 29–53

Child's 1882–1898 publication includes, in its final volume's second half, 55 music scores for 46 (of the 305) ballads.

[16]

(2009) [1st pub. Princeton University Press, four volumes, 1959–72]. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads: With Their Texts, According to the Extant Records of Great Britain and North America. Northfield, Minnesota: Loomis House Press.

Bronson, Bertrand Harris

Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976. Northfield, Minnesota: Loomis House Press, 2009 reissue)

The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads: Digital Edition (New York: Camsco Music, 2009) is a CD-R of a scan of Bronson's above-listed four-volume publication.

List of the Child Ballads

Border ballad

List of folk song collections

Roud Folk Song Index

List of folk songs by Roud number

English Folk Dance and Song Society

Mudcat Café

Würzbach, Natascha and Salz, Simone M. Translated by Gayna Walls (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1995). Alphabetical list of 163 motifs that cites the ballads in which each one occurs.

Motif Index of the Child Corpus: The English and Scottish Popular Ballad.

and Rieuwerts, Sigrid, eds. Ballads into Books: The Legacies of F.J. Child (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997). Twenty-one of the papers presented at the 26th International Ballad Conference (1996, Swansea, Wales)

Cheesman, Tom

Atkinson, David. in the above-listed Ballads into Books: The Legacies of F.J. Child. This is a survey of academic research– not a guide for reading lyrics. But many of the articles in its bibliography are interpretations of an individual ballad.

"A Child Ballad Study Guide with Select Bibliography and Discography"

. The Ballad as Song (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). Eighteen essays, first published between 1940 and 1968, on the music and singing of the Child Ballads and related topics, written by the compiler of four thousand Child Ballad tunes

Bronson, Bertrand Harris

of Child ballads, mostly unaccompanied, from 1956 to 1976 in Arkansas, Missouri and thereabouts: 137 recordings of 43 ballads by 69 singers, with each recording's version of the lyrics displayed on that recording's webpage. The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection of the Ozark Mountains

Amateur audio of amateur solo singing

Archived 3 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine, listed under Child's index number (one of 1 through 305) for that ballad; all 305 lists in one list. Each version's title is the one given in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which was the title given by the source (published, manuscript or oral) from which Child received that version. Each title in this list is a link to the lyrics (in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads) of that version. Child's commentary on each ballad is omitted. The University of Sydney's English Poetry Fulltext Database

The title of each version of each Child ballad

An alphabetical list of every word in the ballads, showing (and citing the source of) the few words before and after every occurrence of it in any of the ballads. To use the concordance on a Macintosh computer, its four PDF files need to be downloaded to a Windows PC, then de-compressed on a Windows PC and then copied to a Macintosh. Cathy Lynn Preston

Concordance to the Child ballads.

(his correspondence and other archived papers) for his two ballad collections. Harvard University's Houghton Library

Lists of Child's research materials

Child Ballad Illustrations