Child Ballads

The Child Ballads are a collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, collected by Francis James Child in the late 19th century. The collection was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads between 1882 and 1898. The ballads vary in age; for instance, a version of "A Gest of Robyn Hode" was printed in the late 15th or early 16th century, and the manuscript of "Judas" dates to the 13th century. The majority of the ballads, however, date to the 17th and 18th century; although some probably have very ancient influences, only a handful can be definitively traced to before 1600. Moreover, few of the tunes collected are as old as the words. While many of them had been individually printed, e.g. as broadsides, Child's collection was far more comprehensive than any previous collection of ballads in English. (However, there were comprehensive ballad collections in other languages, like the Danish collection Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, which Child referred to in his comments.)

For a listing of all the Child ballad types, and links to more information on each individual type, see List of the Child Ballads.

One Child number may cover several ballads, which Child considered variants of the same story, although they may differ in many ways (as in "James Hatley"). Conversely, ballads classified separately may contain turns of phrase, and even entire verses, that are identical.

The Child Ballads deal with subjects typical to many ballads: romance, supernatural experiences, historical events, morality, riddles, murder, and folk heroes. On one extreme, some recount identifiable historical people, in known events. 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 collections is about Robin Hood; some are about King Arthur. A few of the ballads are rather bawdy.

Child Ballads in modern popular culture

Many Child Ballads remain a live part of contemporary post-folk culture. British folk rock groups such as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span drew heavily on the Child Ballads in their respective repertoires. Harry Smith included a number of them into his Anthology of American Folk Music; they figured prominently in the early recordings of Joan Baez, and they crop up even in the work of bands not usually associated with folk material, such as Ween's recording of "The Unquiet Grave" (Child 78) under the title "Cold Blows the Wind", or versions of "Barbara Allen (song)" (Child 84) recorded by both the Everly Brothers and (on the soundtrack of the 2004 film A Love Song for Bobby Long) John Travolta.

Besides the use of individual ballads, in Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn, Captain Cully, a robber chief, sets out to make himself another Robin Hood by immortalizing himself in ballads. He misidentifies another character as "Mr. Child" and tries to get him to collect the songs, and tells him that writing them himself is legitimate.

In 1960 John Jacob Niles published The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles, in which he connects folk songs which he collected throughout the southern United States and Appalachia in the early 20th century to the Child Ballads. Many of the songs he published were revived in the Folk music revival, for example "The Riddle Song" ("I gave my love a Cherry"), which he connects with Child No. 1, "Riddles Wisely Expounded".

Media

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See also

• List of folk song collections
• Roud Folk Song Index

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