Another Collection Of Traditional Folk Songs This Time From The Child Index
From Mainly Norfolk Complete With Child Numbers
Introduction
This piece was inspired by a comment by Sally Whytehead in The Ballad Tree: Traditional Folk Ballads and Songs who provided this link to
Index of Songs and Tunes from Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music
Basically, I am going to choose songs from the Child Ballads link below which I got from the link above. The link to the song details will be in the "More Here" links under each song link. Some of the songs are modern rather than original recordings but they are all on the Child Index and in the Spirit of the original.
The Child Ballads are a collection of 305 traditional ballads that originated in England and Scotland, but spread to North America, Ireland, and other parts of the English speaking world. The name comes from the man who researched and catalogued them, Francis James Child (1825-1896), an American scholar and folklorist.
Apologies I can't make the links open in new windows.
Anais Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer - "Riddles Widely Expounded" (Child #1)
Jon Loomes sang Riddles Wisely Expounded in 2005 his Fellside CD Fearful Symmetry. He noted:
Or the Devil and the smart-arse. This comes from Bronson’s Tunes for the Child Ballads and the lyric is a composite from a load of different versions. It used to be a 17th century “ballatta” but I ditched the “falala” bit as, frankly, it was silly. Talking of Devils, take a good long look at a barcode next time you see one, then go and read the Book of Revelations. It’s all a bit scary.
Lori Watson sang Riddles Wisely Expounded on her 2006 CD Three. She noted:
A witty ballad, the words fell into this old tune.
Bonnie Koloc - "Devil's Nine Questions" (Child #1)
This is another variation "Riddles Wisely Expounded" hence the same Child Number.
Texas Gladden of Salem, Roanoke County, Virginia, sang The Devil’s Nine Questions in August 1941 to Alan and Elizabeth Lomax. This recording was included in 1978 on the Blue Ridge Institute album in their Virginia Traditions series.
See the link above for further information.
A L Lloyd - "Scarborough Fair (The Elfin Knight)" (Child #2)
I have shared this song previously but not by A L Lloyd. The number of songs that share the same Child Number is phenomenal but shows how songs can evolve over time.
A universal theme of both folk tale and ballad is that of impossible tasks. In this ballad, the form it takes is that of the courtship, with on flirtatious lover setting a series of tasks and his companion meeting the challenge by setting an equally difficult series.
Polly Paulusma - "Lady Isabel & the Elf-Knight" (Child #4)
Cecil Sharp believed this to be the widest circulated of all our folk ballads, “outlandish” here means coming from beyond the northern border—that is, Scotland. The story told is an ancient one of a beguiling lover who entices a whole sequence of girls to their deaths. Ballads on the same theme are known in Poland, Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, France; and perhaps the Bluebeard story is a first cousin to our song.
Sara Grey and Ed Trickett - "Fair Flower Of Northumberland" (Child #9)
I was looking for the Alex Campbell take on this, but there are a lot of performances on YouTube and this is a beauty.
Presumably set in the times when the Scottish and Northumbrian borders were full of warring clans and families (including border reivers the Unthanks), this song tells of a young Northumbrian girl deceived by a duplicitous Scotsman.
Cynthia Gooding - "The Twa Sisters" (Child #10)
The oldest versions of Twa Sisters emphasised the fact that an instrument was made of the dead sister’s hair and when the instrument was played, the story of her murder was related. The modern variants contain only vestiges of this myth and concentrate on the crime of the elder, uglier sister.
Marion Fleetwood - "The Rose And The Lily" (Child #11)
The idea is that the two siblings represent the two flowers of the family: both beautiful, one deadly. What has passed between them we don’t know, he could just be a selfish baddun. Or it could be an example of an old-style honour killing as the brother was not informed of her intended wedding.
Ewan MacColl - "Lord Randall" (Child #12)
Lord Randall has many different versions and often different names. The story is generally the same though, with the man being poisoned in some way by his lover, the events being told in conversation.
In the early 1960s Bob Dylan used the song's form as an allusion in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall". Dylan's ballad, however, utilizes the answer to spell out an apocalyptic fall of hard rain.
Paddy Tunney - "What Put the Blood on Your Right Shoulder, Son? (Child #13)"
An unaccompanied murder ballad.
Child considered this to be “one of the noblest and most sterling specimens of the popular ballad”. It was very well known (having 212 Roud entries: 20 from Ireland, 40 from Scotland, 130 from the USA—and some 40 sound recordings), yet seems not to have been so in England, and was recorded from oral tradition there only a handful of times in the whole of the twentieth century.
Nic Jones - "The Bonnie Banks of Fordie" (Child #14)
This vaguely reminds me of "Prince Heathen" in the general story.
Nic collected this version from verses to be found in Child and the tune was inspired by the one in Dean Christie’s Traditional Ballad Airs for The Laird of Drum. Child discovered five versions of this song and noted that the ballad could also be found in Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Faeroe Islands. Bronson reported eight versions including four from North America.
Thank you for giving me your time to read and listen.
Keep reading
More stories from Mike Singleton - Mikeydred and writers in Beat and other communities.
Hall of mirrors
Things used to matter, before all the noise. And at that time when things still had meaning, there had been dreaming too, when dreams still mattered. And the brightest dream from those times was full of mountains and seas and smiles and the types of passion that absorbs you the way a dog is absorbed by witnessing something for the first time: with absolute presence, and awe.
By Giulia Viti3 days ago in Fiction
Comments (3)
A great collection, Mike.
Really interesting, Mike! I’ll have to go back tonight and give those a listen.
"Devil's Nine Questions" has to be my favourite!!