Ballads not included in Child

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 12 Sep 14 - 02:31 PM

If you're the only person who has recorded it I think you've answered your own question re inclusion in Child.

However, if you can post it here we can have a look and give you our opinions.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Gutcher
Date: 13 Sep 14 - 11:09 AM

Not necessarily Steve. As I understand it Child in his final collection had a main ballad followed by various variations and somewhere he may have included W & L M in that work. Perhaps someone may check this out.
My own 1861 edition of the English and Scottish Ballads does not have these variations, being confined to one named ballad per title.
Take a look at a letter dated 1.6.13 on the Musical Traditions Internet Magazine and on the CBDB site the second last item on the CD
gives the words as sung.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 13 Sep 14 - 05:35 PM

There is no ballad in ESPB with that title. All titles used are in the index. I'll follow your instruction and have a look at it.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 13 Sep 14 - 05:46 PM

Joe,
Please forgive my ignorance. CBDB? Child Ballad Database? The letter doesn't give us any extra information above what you've already posted. Googling the initials CBDB brings up all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff but nothing relating to folk ballads that I can see.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: GUEST
Date: 13 Sep 14 - 08:20 PM

Sorry Steve for the misinformation.
No. 70 in the record section of the Child Ballad Database gives details of W & L M which as far as I can see have no connection with the ballad named as No. 70.
To find the words of W & L M you have to go back to the MTIM site and look up article No. 076

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Reinhard
Date: 14 Sep 14 - 03:22 AM

Halewijn Vandijk's Child Ballad Database (CBDB) gives Joe Rae's "William and Lady Marjorie" as a (the only) recording of Child 70.

Musical Traditions notes on Joe Rae's album The Broom Blooms Bonny

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 14 Sep 14 - 12:08 PM

Ah, so your initial posting was an error then, Joe. It is in Child. No probs. Just glad it's sorted.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: GUEST,gutcher
Date: 14 Sep 14 - 03:04 PM

Ballad No 70 as far as I can see bears no resemblance to the one in question.
Is it given as a variation in the final Child collection under this number?.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 14 Sep 14 - 04:24 PM

Joe,
I'm sorry old mate, but the version you give is almost word for word Child's A version from Motherwell. It comes out of a book, no matter who passed it onto who afterwards.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 15 Sep 14 - 06:02 PM

Joe,
A further apology is needed here. You say the only person to have 'recorded' and I interpreted this wrongly to mean this was the only version of the ballad, interpreting 'recorded' as 'noted down', as both Motherwell and Peter Buchan claimed to have collected a version.

Your version seems to have come directly from Motherwell's version first published in 1827.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Jack Campin
Date: 15 Sep 14 - 07:11 PM

I looked through some related threads here and found one which had been pointlessly and counterproductively closed by a mod.

It contained this bit:

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday, Francis J Child
From: Bat Goddess - PM
Date: 01 Feb 01 - 01:50 PM

His grave is in the Sedgwick Pie (he was married to a Sedgwick) in the Stockbridge, Massachusetts cemetery. Very simple marker with his birth and death dates and the words, "Editor, English and Scottish Ballads."

Technology moves on in ways unimaginable to a censorious mod in 2001, and we can now all look at the Sedgwick Pie online and see exactly where Child's grave is.

Sedgwick Pie site

I couldn't find a photo of the gravestone, though. findagrave.com often has them but they don't know about him yet.

It caught my attention because I work in Stockbridge, Edinburgh; I knew about Stockbridge, Mass. because it features in one of Charles Ives's "Three Places in New England":

Ives on YouTube

The pictures used to illustrate the music are mostly gloomy dark brown. Doesn't look like a fun place.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: GUEST,Mike Yates
Date: 19 Sep 14 - 10:28 AM

Steve, your comment about Joe Rae's ballad, that it "is almost word for word Child's A version from Motherwell. It comes out of a book, no matter who passed it onto who afterwards." is confirmation of something that I have previously written about:

"When the American song collector Alan Lomax visited Scotland in the '50s he had this to say about the singers that he met:

The Scots have the liveliest folk tradition of the British Isles, but paradoxically, it is the most bookish. Everywhere in Scotland I collected songs of written or bookish origin from country singers, and, on the other hand, I constantly encountered bookish Scotsmen who had good traditional versions of the finest folk songs. For this reason I have published songs which show every degree and kind of literary influence."

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Lighter
Date: 19 Sep 14 - 10:55 AM

Thanks for bringing that passage to our attention, Mike.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: GUEST,gutcher
Date: 19 Sep 14 - 12:48 PM

I have been trying without success to obtain a look at the 1890s. Child canon. All I have is the CBDB which gives the title as William an Lady Maisrie, this I understood was a supernatural ballad unlike William and Lady Marjory which if nothing else relates to flesh and blood as shown in the verse:--
"It"s noo this couple tae bed are boun
Tae tak there pleasures there o
And it"s lang ere lang aa the play was ouwr
And Willie he slept soun o.

Robertson and Murray are not to be equated with your book learned collectors but as herds they were meeting folk of their own class who, though literate, were well versed in the oral traditions and songs of their area, where, in those days of limited travel, they were probably as much thirled to the area in which they were dwelling as were their flocks. Bearing this in mind and it being only 30 years or so earlier that the great harvest had been made who can say that the published version was known to their informant.

Thomas Murrays book of poems ran to some 7 editions.

Hello Mike---it must be ten years now since we last met.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: GUEST,Mike Yates
Date: 19 Sep 14 - 02:33 PM

Hi "Gutcher". hello again, then! Though, sadly, with that name, I am unable to remember who you are!!!

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: GUEST,Mike Yates
Date: 19 Sep 14 - 02:36 PM

Sorry, having re-read some entries, I now know who I am talking to! Sad to say that I am far from the Borders and now live in Wiltshire, though it would be nice to meet up again.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 19 Sep 14 - 03:17 PM

Hi Mike, Jon and Joe

Yes, thanks, I read that Lomax statement recently somewhere, perhaps on another thread.

Joe,
Now the ESPB (Child 1882-98) has recently been republished by Loomis copies are very easy to come by, worth a look out on EBay. The Dover pbk edition in 5 vols crops up frequently and odd vols can be obtained for a song. I have my old Dover set so I didn't bother with the Loomis edition. All they have done with this edition is put all the versions in the addendas into the appropriate places under the respective titles/numbers, for instance, all of the versions of a single ballad are now grouped together. Whilst this is useful I'm happy with my Dover. However I did check all of the addendas and the only versions of 70 are the 2 I mentioned.

Mike,
David C Fowler's book 'A Literary History of the Popular Ballad' is very illuminating on the subject of bookish origins for many of the ballads. Unfortunately it only goes as far as 1800 so it doesn't cover Motherwell and P Buchan. Even a very restrained Child had plenty to say on literary influence on the ballads in his headnotes.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Lighter
Date: 19 Sep 14 - 03:32 PM

I remember reading Fowler many years ago. Like Steve, I found it fascinating and illuminating.

Fowler, unlike some earlier ballad commentators, was a resolute skeptic in matters of "lost folk originals" and the presumed origins of many early ballads.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Richard Mellish
Date: 20 Sep 14 - 08:25 AM

Further to Mike Yates's 19 Sep 14 - 10:28 AM posting (but continuing the drift from the proper subject of this thread) Joe's version of The Daemon Lover is almost identical to the version in Scott's Minstrelsy, INCLUDING the four verses that Child attributed to William Laidlaw and therefore omitted from his version F.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Sep 14 - 08:43 AM

Seems strange that Lord Willoughby {aka Brave Lord Willoughby &c} does not seem to have been included, as it seems to fulfil all the criteria & is in Percy. I have refreshed an old thread on it to show what I mean.

≈M≈

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Sep 14 - 10:47 AM

Lighter - anybody
Does anyone know where can download a half=decent copy of Child's 'Ballad Poetry' article (thanks for that L) from Johnson's Dictionary?
I've tried 'Lightshotting' it but it's not clear enough
Thanks,
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 23 Sep 14 - 11:32 AM

Please double me in with Jim's request.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Lighter
Date: 23 Sep 14 - 12:53 PM

Jim, Steve, go here, p. 464:

https://archive.org/stream/johnsonsuniversa01adam#page/466/mode/2up/search/ballad+poetry

An interesting paper on Child and contemporaneous collecting:

auspace.athabascau.ca:8080/bitstream/.../david_gregory_fsac09short.doc

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Sep 14 - 12:55 PM

I understand it has been published in the new edition of Child which, in the words of the lovely Charles Reade poem "in my case, I have not got"
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Sep 14 - 12:58 PM

Henry Reed, I think you mean, Jim -- Lessons Of The War 1: Naming Of Parts.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: GUEST,gutcher
Date: 23 Sep 14 - 01:00 PM

On the subject of oral tradition. My own experience may enlighten some. During a discussion in an educated company I mentioned that my grandfather always stated that some people would walk 50 miles in a day, this was received with incredulity and derision by these folk,
However a few weeks later when reading a biography of Thomas Carlyle I found he stated that just prior to the advent of the railway system the longest walk he completed in one day was 54 miles, from Muirkirk in Ayrshire to the town of Dumfries.
Having just finished reading an NMS book entitled "From Kelso To Kalamazoo" the memoirs of George Taylor I find that Mr Taylor often walked 50 miles to Edinburgh in 14 hrs. and on one occasion he was accompanied by a sister taking the roughly the same time.
The ootby herd folk were the elite of the agricultural workers often owning a part of the sheep stock, this along with their own horses, dairy cows, pigs, hens and ducks made them in a lot of cases
independant of a monetary wage, this was evident in our own family by the fact my Grandfather always had his pony and trap and when in 1944 my two youngest uncles came of age to drive he became a car owner a thing almost unknown in that era for working folk.
My own formative years were unencumbered by outside alien cultures a fact for which I am eternally grateful.
As regards my Grandfathers generation and and those prior generations they, although literate, had a great store of oral stories and songs, the only drawback being, something which people nowadays find hard to comprehend, the isolation and difficulty of obtaining the books then on the market which along with there cost I would imagine made for a very small library in many cases.

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: GUEST,Mike Yates
Date: 23 Sep 14 - 02:37 PM

Walking 54 miles in one day is pretty impressive. As a young boy I was equally impressed when my grandfather told me that he and his parents once walked seven miles into Blackburn (Lancashire) to hear Marie LLoyd sing in a Saturday night Music Hall. They then walked the seven miles back home after the event. "What was she like?" I asked him. His reply, which I can still clearly remember, was, "Bloody good!"

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 24 Sep 14 - 12:38 PM

"It's forty miles I've been today.
I spied a cottage all on the way."

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 24 Sep 14 - 12:59 PM

Henry Reid it is Mike - lovely poem
Charles Reade - the other one 'Cloister and the Hearth?
Must go off and- in the middle of easing the spring
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Ballads not included in Child
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 25 Sep 14 - 03:43 AM

'Reed' of course, Mike - bloody double tasking
Jim Carroll