Thanks, Bill, for resurrecting this thread, which I somehow missed the first time round.

> there aren't many fairy-tale stories or critters in English ballads <

To deal with that first, in F J Child's 'English and Scottish Popular Ballads', you can find dragons or firedrakes (Laily Worm, Kemp Owyne), elves and fairies (Tam Lin, Elfin Knight, Thomas the Rhymer, The Wee Wee Man), witchcraft (Willie's Lady, Alison Gross), demons (James Harris, King Henry), magic (Two Magicians), speaking corpses or body parts (Young Benjie, Two Sisters), mermaids (Clerk Colvill and, er, The Mermaid) and the Devil himself (Riddles Wisely Expounded, Farmer's Curst Wife), let alone any number of ghosts. Child himself was an admirer of the work of the Brothers Grimm and drew many parallels between his ballads and their analogues in Scandinavia and elsewhere. Nonetheless, the supernatural is represented in only a small proportion of the ballads he identified, and many of the above were known only in Soctland.

This thread, however, is asking us what happened to all those supernatural phenomena when the ballads migrated across the Atlantic. There's something fairly basic that doesn't seem to have been pointed out so far, which is that the supernatural elements were lost in the British versions of many of these ballads as well.

[Kent Davis, 05.02.08 wrote:]
>> "The Devil's Questions" ("Riddles Wisely Expounded", Child #1)
The title indicates that the questioner is the Devil, but the text gives no such indication. <<

Child himself didn't regard this as a 'Devil Ballad' until he belatedly discovered the 15th century copy 'Inter Diabolus et Virgo' just in time for it to be included with his appendices. Of the examples listed under 'Riddles Wisely…' in ESPB vol. 1, three out of four - the oldest dating from the 17th century - contain no reference to the Devil. Of course FJC wasn't to know that a text including a spectacular appearance by Old Nick would turn up in (I think) Wiltshire after his death (see Willams 'Folk Songs of the Upper Thames'). But even Kent Davis's statement isn't actually correct. The original version of "The Devil's Nine Questions", collected in 1922 in Virginia, includes the threat "I'll take you off to Hell alive", which could hardly be clearer.

Under 'The Elfin Knight' (#2), Child lists twelve examples, only four of which have an elfin character setting the impossible tasks. In one other the setter may be the Devil. The ballad continued in English oral tradition in the well-known 'Scarborough Fair' form, and also the 'Acre of Land' form, neither of which have any supernatural element. Elvish versions were still being sung in 20th Century Aberdeenshire, however.

For 'Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight' (#4) only one version of out six in Child actually contains an elf-knight (which FJC himself believed might represent contamination from #2). Again this ballad has a vigorous history in English oral tradition, but without any netherworld connotations.

James Harris (The Demon Lover, Child 243) is generally agreed to represent the template for the common North American ballad 'The House Carpenter'. But here too the picture isn't straightforward. One of the older (English) texts listed by Child contains no hint that the vengeful lover is any kind of demon or ghost, although the Scots versions he prints generally do. And although the demon has disappeared more or less completely in the North American versions – many of which derive from a specific broadside in which the supernatural wasn't represented – there is nonetheless a single notable exception with a specific diabolic reference. I refer you to Clinton Heylin's fascinating, if rather scattergun, book 'Dylan's Demon Lover' for further discussion.

I could go on. 'The Grey Cock (248)' made it to Newfoundland complete with walking corpse, but in North Carolina the 'Pretty Crowin' Chickens' versions of the same ballad have become simple night-visiting songs. 'The Suffolk Miracle' (272) is a ghost story on either side of the Atlantic. 'The Two Sisters' (10) exists in supernatural and rationalized versions on both sides of the pond. 'Young Hunting' (68) seems to have lost its supernatural elements before it crossed over. Many of the more gothic magical ballads have never been found in North America at all ('Tam Lin' actually did turn up there once, according to Bronson, who hints that book-learning may have been involved).

To summarize, whether we choose to regard the waning of supernatural elements in the ballads as the result of ecclesiastical pressure or the growth of rationalism, it's something that happened on both sides of the Atlantic, and was not a straightforward linear process in any case. It's also important to realise that many of the ballads will have crossed the ocean more than once, very likely in versions already differing significantly from one another.