Origins: Ballad Index 7.1 Released

Subject: Origins: Ballad Index 7.1 Released
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 28 Oct 25 - 07:43 AM

Balladeers --

It is with perhaps a bit of sadness that I announce the release of Ballad Index 7.1. You can find it in the usual place:

https://balladindex.org/.

The reason I announce this with sadness is that this version contains several items that were indexed by Ben Schwartz, and it is possible that these will be his last contributions to the Ballad Index. In honor of his many contributions -- as indexer, advisor, and programmer -- David Engle and I are dedicating this release to Ben.

At this point, all files should be ready to go except the downloadable PC runtime version, which I hope to have ready in a day or two.

This version sets a sort of record: 51 different books and recordings were added, although most of them were cheap nineteenth century songsters.

And with that, I'll stop and let you read the release notes....


Materials Added in this Edition

The following books were fully indexed in Version 7.1:
* John Moulden, Thousands Are Sailing
* Martin Pegler, Soldiers' Songs and Slang of the Great War
* George Rice, Weaving Songs and Games: Collected from Here and There
* Peggy Seeger, Seeger-FolkSongsOfPeggySeeger
* Bill Scott, with illustrations by Pro Hart, Bushranger Ballads

The following items were partially indexed in Version 7.1:
* Jerry Silverman, Ballads and Songs of WWI
* And a whole pile of mid-nineteenth-century songsters (for these, I generally indexed the songs which have a Roud Number):
The Beautiful Bells Songster, J. S. Berry's Flying Trapeze Songster, Bryant's "Put Me In My Little Bed" Songster, The Chapman Sisters' Songster, The Clown's Shoo Fly Songster, The Old Clown's "W-H-O-A January" Songster, Jerry Cohan's "Dublin Jarvey" Songster, The Driven From Home Songster, Jennie Engel's Dear Little Shamrock Songster, Owen Fawcett's Paul Pry Songster, Tim Finigan's Wake Songster, Archy Hughes' George the Charmer Songster, Jim, the Carter Lad Songster, Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye, Irish Comic Songster, Jule Keen's Love Among der Sweitzer Songster, Kelly and Leon's Ching-Chow-Hi! Songster, The Little Maggie May Songster, The Love Among the Roses Songster, The Mabel Waltz Songster, Meet Me in the Lane Songster, The 'Oh, How Is That for High?' Songster, The Paddle Your Own Canoe Songster, Paddy's the Boy Songster, Harry Richmond's My Young Wife and I Songster, The Rocky Road to Dublin Songster, Rootle-Tum Tootle-Tum Tay Songster, The Shamus O'Brien Songster, That's the Style for Me Songster, The Lydia Thompson Songster, The Up in a Balloon Songster, The Velocipede Songster, Waiting for a Broadway Stage Songster, The Walking Down Broadway Songster, Jennie Wallace's Vocal Gems Songster, The Wandering Refugee Songster, The Wearing of the Green Songster, We Parted by the River Side Songster, The Who's Been Here Since I've Been Gone Songster, Johnny Wild's What Am I Doing Songster, Gus. Williams' Love Among Big Nozes Songster

This brings the total number of books indexed fully or partially to 561 (383 of them indexed in their entirety), plus three journals (two of them fully indexed) and four electronic resources, with hundreds of other books cited in ADDITIONAL entries or the SAME TUNE field.

We now have 18,167 different songs (226 more than in the last edition, which had 17,941), under 33012 titles. At least 1181 songs were added or had their entries updated in version 7.0.

The Supplemental Tradition now contains full or partial texts for 1143 songs.

There are 927 songs for which the NOTES exceed 500 words; 410 with at least 1000 words of notes; 64 with at least 5000 words of notes.

884 songs have enough data in the notes to call for a bibliography of at least three items.

Fun statistics:
The five most popular songs:
1. Bonny Barbara Allan (190 references)
2. The Golden Vanity (146 references)
3. The Gypsy Laddie (143 references)
4. Lord Thomas and Fair Annet (124 references)
5T. The Daemon Lover/The House Carpenter (123 references)
5T. Frog Went A-Courting (123 references)
As you can see, the most popular non-Child Ballad is Frog Went A-Courting; this is the highest a non-Child ballad has ever been ranked. Next down the list, among non-Child Ballads, is Pretty Fair Maid (The Maiden in the Garden; The Broken Token) [Laws N42], with 94 references, followed by John Henry [Laws I1], with 93; they're #15 and #16.

We currently have 33 keywords that have been used on at least 500 songs; 13 of them have been used on at least 1000 songs. The 13, with the number of times they are used: nonballad (5255), love (2500), death (2428), courting (2346), religious (1744), humorous (1703), separation (1357), drink (1269), work (1153), marriage (1088), food (1078), travel (1074), ship (1045).

8497 songs -- somewhat less than half the song in the database -- have only one reference (or, in a few cases, none), meaning that 9670 have at least two.
13973 songs are listed as having unknown authors, meaning that 4194 songs have an author listed (not always with certainty).
17289 songs have at least one book reference
4105 songs have at least one recording reference
1539 songs have at least one reference to a broadside in a major collection (Bodleian, etc.)
190 songs have at least one manuscript reference

7570 songs have been found somewhere in the United States
4427 songs have been found in Britain (2043 in England, 2601 in Scotland; in other cases, it's not clear where in Britain)
2332 have been found in Ireland (including Northern Ireland)
2074 have been found in Canada
429 have been found in Australia
402 have been found somewhere in the West Indies
265 have been found in New Zealand (though many of these New Zealand collections are dubious)

New substantial articles in this edition include:
* Aimee McPherson: Did Aimee Semple McPherson have a tryst -- or did the newspapers dream it?
* The Baltimore Fire: Just what it sounds like. Too bad the song has very little to do with the 1904 disaster.
* The Battle of Antietam Creek: A brother on one side in the battle finds his brother dying on the other side.
* The Battle of Stonington: The British attack a Connecticut town, mostly because it's there.
* The Bludy Serk: Claimed by some as the Earliest English Ballad even though it's not the earliest and isn't really a ballad anyway.
* Capture of New Orleans: The crew of the Brooklyn tells of how they, with some help, captured New Orleans
* The Hanging of Eva Dugan: Hanging's too good for her; let's behead her too!
* Humbug Steamship Companies: If the Yankee Blade's food isn't bad enough when she's above water, wait until she sinks!
* Let's All Go Down the Strand: In case it wasn't enough fun already, in 1909, you could also harass Ernest Shackleton.
* Superintendent Barratt: Who knew so many people would want to get their hands on a stone?
* Thursday in the Morn: Admiral Russell defeats the French at La Hougue -- and then starts fighting his own administration.
* Tibbie Fowler (I): Tibbie has a dowry. Does Logan of Restalrig want it because James VI stole his inheritance?

I suppose the most interesting thing on this list is yet ANOTHER song that someone has claimed as "the earliest English ballad" that cannot possibly be the earliest English ballad (in this case, the "ballad" being "The Bludy Serk," which fails of being the Earliest English Ballad because it isn't the earliest, isn't a ballad, and isn't even a song. Pretty good work, whoever came up with that idea).

I admit that most of the other songs on that list are equally obscure, but some of you may have heard "Aimee McPherson" (not very accurate, or at least provable) and "Humbug Steamship Companies," which does a bit better.

Subject: RE: Origins: Ballad Index 7.1 Released
From: cnd
Date: 28 Oct 25 - 03:09 PM

Congrats on the new release!

Subject: RE: Origins: Ballad Index 7.1 Released
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 28 Oct 25 - 03:31 PM

cnd wrote: Congrats on the new release!

Thank you!

Subject: RE: Origins: Ballad Index 7.1 Released
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 28 Oct 25 - 04:38 PM

Sorry to hear about Ben. Keep up the good work. I ought to investigate those songsters when I have time.

Subject: RE: Origins: Ballad Index 7.1 Released
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 28 Oct 25 - 06:46 PM

Steve Gardham wrote: I ought to investigate those songsters when I have time.

FYI, they're all from the Robert Winslow Gordon collection at the Library of Congress, so they're publicly accessible. And a good chunk of the ones I indexed are not in the Roud Index. But they're all from about 1860 to 1870, and most of them are by R. M. de Witt and have a very high degree of overlap. (For instance, de Witt seems to have had only about a dozen pieces of typeset sheet music, and to have dropped the plates of a random eight or so in every book he did, so that he could claim exclusive arrangements.) They won't give you much in the way of earliest dates, and they largely pile up instances of the same song. E.g. the TBI now has more instances of "Little Maggie May," a stupid song about a too-nice girl, than "Maggie May," about a not-too-nice girl, even though the latter is obviously more common in tradition.

https://www.loc.gov/collections/robert-winslow-gordon-songsters/about-this-collection/

Subject: RE: Origins: Ballad Index 7.1 Released
From: Joe Offer
Date: 28 Oct 25 - 08:58 PM

Congratulations, Bob! It's nice to follow the growth of each edition toward publication, even though there's not much I can do other than give "customer comments."

There are many ways to access the Traditional Ballad Index. I use the "Short Contents" page, http://balladindex.org/ShortContents.html, and then I use CTRL-F to find what I'm looking for. There are other, more sophisticated ways to search the Ballad Index, but this is the method that suits my needs best.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Origins: Ballad Index 7.1 Released
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 28 Oct 25 - 09:17 PM

Joe Offer wrote: There are many ways to access the Traditional Ballad Index. I use the "Short Contents" page, http://balladindex.org/ShortContents.html, and then I use CTRL-F to find what I'm looking for. There are other, more sophisticated ways to search the Ballad Index, but this is the method that suits my needs best.

That's actually the best method if you know the title of what you're looking for. It's fastest, and the worst that can happen is that you have to look through a bunch of different songs with the same title (such as the fifteen or so songs known as "The Titanic"!). The other search methods are for the case where you don't know the title, or are trying for something different.

An example of the latter is a group of people on the LibraryThing book cataloging site, who had a small thread about songs they learned at camp. I encouraged the group, and before they ran down, they contributed 93 songs! (Of course, it helped that one user, John5918, had 43 songs, some of them quite interesting -- e.g. he had one of the few versions of "The D-Day Dodgers" to come from oral tradition, as well as a few rugby songs and parodies and music hall songs.) The only real way to find all of those is to use the "Custom Search" option and search for LibraryThingCampSongsThread. But that's for researchers, not for people who want to know the background to a particular song.