For week 24 I've recorded not one but two Child ballads; I could have gone up to four without breaking the theme.

The bonny hind is Child 50, and if there's a sadder song in the world, I'm not sure I've heard it. It's sung here with melodica and flute, in an arrangement copied fairly slavishly from Tony Rose's version on On Banks of Green Willow.

Sheath and knife is Child 16; another of the four ballads collected by Child on the theme of brother-sister incest. There's an odd little network of resemblances among the four ballads. In Lady Jean and the Bonny Hind, the two sibs are unknown to each other and are horrified to realise that they are related; both Lizzie Wan and Sheath and Knife feature a long-term incestuous relationship, with pregnancy as the trigger for the crisis. The Bonny Hind and Sheath and Knife both focus on the brother's state of mind after the sister is dead, and in particular his inability to talk about it; in Lizzie Wan the brother is unwilling to talk, but his mother gets the story out of him. The sister's death is suicide in the Bonny Hind and Lady Jean, murder in Lizzie Wan and a kind of suicide-by-proxy in Sheath and Knife. If I had to draw a diagram I would say that Lady Jean and Lizzie Wan were composed separately, with the Bonny Hind developing out of Lady Jean, and Sheath and Knife combining the basic setup of Lizzie Wan with elements of the Bonny Hind. But this is speculation.

This version is also based on work by Tony Rose, who recorded it on Under the greenwood tree and (even more effectively) on Bare bones. It's sung unaccompanied, with double-tracking to emphasise the impersonality of the refrains.

52 Folk Songs is at http://www.52folksongs.com