Child Ballads

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As Child Ballads ( Child Ballads ) was announced a collection of 305 traditional ballads of England and Scotland with American variants of Francis James Child in the second half of the 19th century, collected under the title The English and Scottish Popular Ballads were published . The melodies for most of the ballads were collected and published by Bertrand Harris Bronson in the 1960s . The Child Ballads have been since the "folk revival" in the middle of the 20th century Part of the repertoire of numerous folk musicians.

The ballads

Arthur Rackham : Illustration from Ballad 26, The Twa Corbies

Various collections of English and Scottish ballads had already appeared before Child's collection, in particular the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry by Thomas Percy (1765) as a pioneering work . In designing his collection, Child oriented himself to Svend Grundtvig's Danmarks gamle Folkeviser , classifying and numbering the ballads thematically and juxtaposing different versions to make comparisons easier. A child number can therefore cover different ballads which, in Child's view, represent variants of the same story. On the other hand, ballads, which are classified under different numbers in Child, can contain individual identical verses.

No other collection of English-language ballads before Child was as extensive. The ballads are of different ages; for example, while the manuscript of Judas is from the 13th century, a version of A Gest of Robyn Hode was printed in the late 15th or early 16th centuries. Most of the ballads, however, date from the 17th and 18th centuries. Only a handful can be determined with certainty that they were made before 1600. In addition, most of the melodies are more recent. For many ballads, Child used broadsides , commercial leaflets from the 16th and 17th centuries. He only wanted to include “true folk ballads” in his collection, which he distinguished from the works of “professional ballad makers”. Among other things, the themes of “true” ballads according to Child are not “disgusting”, their style is unaffected, neither rambling nor vulgar. Child's criteria for “true folk ballads” are criticized in an article by Dave Harker in the Folk Music Journal as a “web of arbitrary claims”. According to Harker, Child mainly used negative criteria for his definition that corresponded to the bourgeois taste of his time. In any case, his collection was highly regarded; In 1933, Thelma G. James wrote in the Journal of American Folklore that Childs 305 ballads had been canonized "mysteriously" superior to any other English folk song .

The ballads move in a broad spectrum, both in terms of content and style. Its contents range from the dramatized rendering of historical events to fairy tales. Many ballads are dedicated to Robin Hood , some to King Arthur . According to Thelma G. James, in view of the spectrum of content, style and quality, it is inappropriate to speak of child ballads as a specific type of ballad, rather a child ballad is simply a ballad collected by Francis J. Child.

Modern recordings

The “Folk Revival” in the middle of the 20th century brought the Child Ballads back to a wider audience. In 1949 , Burl Ives recorded the two ballads Lord Randall and The Divil and the Farmer for his album The Return of the Wayfaring Stranger . In 1956, Ewan MacColl and AL Lloyd released 72 Child Ballads in four double albums entitled The English and Scottish Popular Ballads . In 1960 John Jacob Niles published The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles , in which he linked folk songs that he had collected in the southern United States and the Appalachians in the early 20th century with the Child ballads. This release formed another basis for the folk revival. Joan Baez sang ten child ballads across her first five commercially successful albums. British electric folk groups such as Fairport Convention , Pentangle and Steeleye Span made extensive use of the Child ballads for their repertoire. Harry Everett Smith included some in his Anthology of American Folk Music .

Child ballads are occasionally performed by music groups that are not otherwise associated with folk, for example Ween's version of The Unquiet Grave (Child 78) under the title Cold Blows the Wind or versions by Barbara Allen (Child 84) from the Everly Brothers , Art Garfunkel and John Travolta (in the soundtrack to the film Lovesong for Bobby Long ).

expenditure

Child first published a collection under the title English and Scottish Ballads in eight volumes in 1857/1858 , which contains a smaller number of variants for the individual ballads and a commentary that is much more modest compared to the later ten-volume edition. However, the selection of ballads also differs - both editions contain around 100 ballads that cannot be found in the other. A second edition of this edition appeared in 1860.


The English and Scottish Popular Ballads in ten volumes (1882–1898) annotates 305 ballads in an encyclopedic way, compares the different versions of the ballads and puts them in context with other ballads and prose works in thirty languages. On average, five different versions are offered per ballad. In addition, the work contains a glossary of archaic and Scottish words and an extensive list of sources. The ten volumes were originally numbered as five volumes in two half volumes each. This edition has been reprinted several times.

  • The English and Scottish Popular Ballads . Houghton, Mifflin & Co, Boston / New York 1882–1898.

The copyrights have expired; Both editions are freely available as digital copies, for example in the Internet Archive or at Project Gutenberg . They are also part of the much more comprehensive folk song database Roud Folk Song Index .

literature

  • Thelma G. James: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads of Francis J. Child . In: The Journal of American Folklore . vol. 46, no. 179 , 1933, pp. 51-68 , JSTOR : 535849 .
  • Bertrand Harris Bronson: The Ballad as Song . University of California Press, Berkeley / Los Angeles 1969 ( full text online at Google Books ).
  • Dave Harker: Francis James Child and the Ballad Consensus . In: Folk Music Journal . vol. 4, no. 2 , 1981, p. 146-164 , JSTOR : 4522084 .
  • Tom Cheesman, Sigrid Rieuwerts (Ed.): Ballads into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child . Peter Lang, Bern 1997, ISBN 3-906757-34-X .
  • Raimund Borgmeier: Twelve Popular Child Ballads. Texts and Interpretations . Scientific publishing house, Trier 2015, ISBN 978-3-86821-601-1 .

Web links

Commons : Child Ballads  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Child's Ballads  - sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dave Harker: Francis James Child and the 'Ballad Consensus' . In: Folk Music Journal . vol. 4, no. 2 , 1981, p. 148 , JSTOR : 4522084 .
  2. ↑ a b Dave Harker: Francis James Child and the 'Ballad Consensus' . In: Folk Music Journal . vol. 4, no. 2 , 1981, p. 162 , JSTOR : 4522084 .
  3. ^ Dave Harker: Francis James Child and the 'Ballad Consensus' . In: Folk Music Journal . vol. 4, no. 2 , 1981, p. 150 , JSTOR : 4522084 .
  4. ↑ Thelma G. James: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads of Francis J. Child . In: The Journal of American Folklore . vol. 46, no. 179 , 1933, pp. 58 , JSTOR : 535849 .
  5. ↑ Thelma G. James: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads of Francis J. Child . In: The Journal of American Folklore . vol. 46, no. 179 , 1933, pp. 57-58 , JSTOR : 535849 .
  6. ↑ Thelma G. James: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads of Francis J. Child . In: The Journal of American Folklore . vol. 46, no. 179 , 1933, pp. 59 , JSTOR : 535849 .
  7. ↑ Ewan MacColl & AL Lloyd: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume I. In: Ewan MacColl's Discography. Retrieved August 14, 2014 .