The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #131826 Message #2977569
Posted By: Brian Peters
01-Sep-10 - 12:02 PM
Thread Name: Child Ballads survived in oral trad.
Subject: RE: Child Ballads survived in oral trad.
Presumably what Roberto is getting at is that a good number of the 305 were never collected beyond the end of the 19th century - bearing in mind that Child himself died before the work of Sharp, Greig, Gardiner, the Hammonds et al had begun. There is scant eveidence for certain Child ballads ever having possessed a sung tradition: Nos. 29, 30 and 31, for instance, are based on the 17thC Percy Folio MS alone. Bronson in the introduction to 'Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads' states that Child himself deliberately erred on the side of inclusiveness, and casts doubts on the authenticity of around sixty of Child's canon (including several of the Robin Hood ballads).
Bronson (whose volumes cover mostly 20th century sources and are a good, though not definitive, guide to ballad survival in that century) estimated that there was a known musical tradition for about two thirds of the collection. However, one or two examples previously not collected with tunes have turned up since Bronson went to press, notably #21 'The Maid and the Palmer' (from John Reilly) and #264 'The White Fisher' (in the Carpenter collection). It would be a relatively simple, if time-consuming, matter to leaf through Bronson and check how many Child numbers he found tunes for. I know it was 43 out of Child's first 53.