The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #131826 Message #2978756
Posted By: Steve Gardham
02-Sep-10 - 04:26 PM
Thread Name: Child Ballads survived in oral trad.
Subject: RE: Child Ballads survived in oral trad.
Hi Brian, I can't place my hands on the exact figures for the moment, but yes there are several categories of songs that are suspect when it comes to counting survivals or ever having been sung in an unsophisticated oral tradition. A considerable number of the ballads were suspect to start with as Child himself points out and even a few of those that were suspect subsequently entered oral tradition. Of course many of the ballads (Robin Hood ones for instance) have no evidence of oral tradition. Child only included them because they showed some evidence of the characteristics of traditional ballads. Also later on in the collection he included many ballads that have no greater claim to fit his criteria than thousands of other broadside ballads. It is after all just one person's collection, albeit only surpassed by Bronson's.
Now Bronson is readily available again at a reasonable price, I strongly recommend it, even above any edition of Child. The only extra Child will give you is lots of nerdy info on the ballads' equivalents in other countries and versions from the old collectors which haven't got the tunes with them. Please don't get me wrong, Child is still the deity I worship.
The 'Brake of Briars' is one of the more popular broadside ballads in oral tradition. Unfortunately the broadside, which it undoubtedly is, hasn't survived. I would give a strong guess that it was issued c1750 on one of those 4 column broadsheets of the type Dicey and Marshall issued. There are some very full early versions from America, and it is of course a refacimento of the first part of the 'Isabella' story from the Decameron. I don't think Child was aware of it. If so it would be wrong to say he rejected it.