Dick : Exactly what value judgement did I attach to ballads? You must have seen that by calling "Leader of the pack" a "sort of ballad" was not meant to include it along with classical Child ballads. If you didn't, I apologise for not expressing myself clearly. But I have to say that I don't quite understand what you are criticising. You agree the "Leader of the pack" is banal garbage, then seem to say it's worth listening to simply because it's a story of sorts. So is Humpty Dumpty, who ended up in much the same situation.

WLD : Do you ever actually read other people's posts? I said "It becomes objectionable when the stuff a PROFESSIONAL AGENT is pushing". A bit earlier I said " .. a pop ballad whose main purpose was to make a RECORDING EXEC a lot of money". I never mentioned the poor sods who starve because they think they are good enough to make a living in the music market, mainly because I was trying to keep to the subject. Some of us like to keep to the subject. Next time you feel the urge to blast someone who is trying to make a serious contribution, just stop for a minute and slo-wly read what they've written, not what you think they've written, or exoect them to write.

And I ain't middleclass, never have been. Got a low-grade tech qualification and spent my working life doing what professional people told me to. I am now a pensioner living almost on the breadline. Try to keep your irrelevant and outdated attitudes on "class" to yourself.

Everyone else : Apologies for the detour. I hope we can leave the pop/rock scene for once and all.

I haven't read anything Child wrote, but I do know his contemporary Francis Gummere said that Child never concerned himself with origins. Gummere also listed some technical (perhaps I should say academic) features which he thought were diagnostic of ballads from 14th century, and which I mentioned in passing above. They are concerned with stanza construction, metre, rhyme, alliteration etc. (Plus narrative, and absence of description or emotive passages). I assume that at that stage no-one suspected that some of the Child ballads had actually been written 100 years earlier, or even less. If the question had arisen, I suppose Gummere would have looked for these features to help him decide the new from the old, and I imagine that Child used the same technical features to distinguish Classic from Broadside ballads.

Gummere had quite a bit to say about origins, most of it quotes from other theorists of the time who tended to present their wildly different opinions as incontrovertable fact, but he did say (this is from memory) that there were no longer any purely orally-evolved ballads in Europe anymore. If get him aright, he believed that as soon as printing became wide-spread the character of ballads changed enormously because professional bards with their different style of composition became widely known, and when oral transmission combined with print, something like the classic ballad became standard. But I might have misunderstood him - he isn't easy reading. In any case, it's only another theory. How could he know that an older type of ballad had disappeared if it had never been recorded in the first place?

It's interesting though that in discussing the idea of indidual composer v communal composition - a question that worried that generation of scholars a lot - he mentioned the early association of communal song and dance, in Iceland, Scotland and Germany, among other places. People actually sang while they all danced together, and part of the dance seems to have been gestures appropriate to the words. There might have been an association between singing and ball games too. But at least some of these songs were obviously not narrative ballads.

Not everyone agonised over the origins of ballads. Walter Scott took the view that the minstrel was quite sufficient to account for minstrlsy.

I would be extremely interested to hear the evidence that some of the Child ballads were composed very late. Not that I am in any position to judge - just curious.

20 years later Quiller-Couch, another lover of ballads, hints that perhaps a new classic age of balladry could be beginning with two well-known authors, Coleridge and Kipling. For me too, they are fine balladeers. Non-Childean, but the power of the text is there. Now that Kipling's Barrackroom Ballads have been given tunes, a lot of them anyway, does anyone fancy setting "The rime of the ancient mariner" to music? That could be worth hearing!