The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #162666   Message #3940688
Posted By: Steve Gardham
31-Jul-18 - 02:48 PM
Thread Name: New Book: Folk Song in England
Subject: RE: New Book: Folk Song in England
Sharp's broadside collection is on the Full English. It wasn't massive and was largely the common mid-19thc stuff. Baring Gould's knowledge and collection were far superior. He was very wrong about the Irish broadsides. By the late 18th century printers like Goggin in Limerick were printing a mixture of native Irish, Irish-English ballads and some derived from the pleasure gardens, including a fair amount of macaronic material. In the north there were printers printing Irish songs like Willy Leonard, Polly Vaughan, Fanny Blair, Streams of Nantsian which came across to England via Liverpool. Baring Gould also spent a lot of time in The BL looking at broadsides from 16th to 19th centuries. It would be far fairer to say there was an exchange of ballads between the 2 countries (actually one country at the time)

All those quotes show is that he knew very little compared with Baring Gould, who would have been well aware of the earlier Irish ballads.