Hesitantly I put myself forward as part of the ballad crew.

I have sung and loved the traditional ballads since I was about 12, some 55 years ago, many of them sung to me on collecting trips in the south by the oldtime singers like Horton Barker, Buell Kazee, Bascom Lamar Lunsford and so on.   Others I learned in song circles in New England, Wyoming and California.

Salt Water Sea (Lady Ishbel and the Elf-Knight), False Knight on the Road, Barbara Ellen, Lord Thomas and Fair Elinor, Two Magicians, Lord Bateman, Golden Willow Tree, Cherry Tree Carol, Bow and Balance (Two Sisters), Georgie O (Geordie), Little Margaret, Great Silkie, Old Bangham, plus non-Child ballads like Johnny Dorrall/Doyle, Far Fanil Town, William Reilly and Colleen Bawn, and Young and Growing, are only a few of many I love and still sing. I no longer perform publicly, and thus really don't count among your current singers, but I still sing the ballads for myself -- I wouldn't be without them.

Then too back in the early 70s I was guilty of issuing an LP of reworked Child ballads called "Son of Child" -- Devil in the Garden (Riddles Wisely Expounded), Patrick Spencer (Sir Patrick Spens), Chevy Chase, Red Robber (Jellon Grame), Don't You Know Your Old Sweetheart the Best (Hind Horn), Heist Her in the Basket (Keach in the Creel), Johnny Armstrong's Last Goodnight, and a bunch of others.

Some of my ballad versions are still circulating. My version of "Sheath and Knife," called "Rosianne," has lately been recorded by Sara Grey, who should be on any list of current ballad singers. Jean Redpath recorded my "Captain Hanley and Sweet Mazie" (Captain Wedderburn's Courtship), and others of my versions have been covered by other revival singers.

A side note: I'm now preparing a biography of a 1950s revival singer, Paul Clayton, who loved and sang the old Anglo-American ballads. Paul put a good many of them on record for the Stinson, Folkways, Riverside, Elektra and Tradition labels, bringing them alive for people of the midcentury, some of whom picked them up and carried them on.

The ballads are the interior furnishings of my life.

Bob