Child Ballads help

Subject: Child Ballads help
From: John Nolan
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 08:50 AM

Could anyone think of any references to the following in Child ballads:
1. A deaf mute (violent if possible, but not essential)
2. Father vs Son in combat
3. Wife beating (The Wee Cooper of Fife excepted)
4. A drunken guard in a tower, keep or prison.
5. A thief, robber or cutpurse where a woman is the victim.
Needed for a piece I am writing and running short of research time. The ballad name or number would suffice. Greatly obliged.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Vixen
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 09:38 AM

No time for a blicky, but try this site...

in haste,
V

http://ling.lll.hawaii.edu/faculty/stampe/Oral-Lit/English/Child-Ballads/child.html [Blickified]

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: masato sakurai
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 09:45 AM

Try these sites (if you have time to spare):

(1) A Concordance to the Child Ballads (with large pdf & postscript files)

(2) Child Ballad Database

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 10:01 AM

Child ballads on CD-rom with a 'request information' link:

http://www.heritagemuse.com/

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Fay
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 12:13 PM

The one where the man kills her sisters then is going to kill her, but says I might as well steal your dress before I drown you, then she makes him turn his back and kills him instead. She would have been the victim had he succeeded. Sorry can't remember the name of it and not a chance of its number!!

There's an uncle-nephew issue in Chyld Owlett where the nephew is killed by order of the uncle.

These are the closest I can come up with, probably not what you need really but I'll keep my thinking hat on.

Love Fay xx

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: GUEST,MMario
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 12:26 PM

Child #4 Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight has the woman drowning the thief

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Don Firth
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 12:33 PM

Good info HERE.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Jeri
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 12:53 PM

Child 89: Fause Foodrage
The queen gets the four and twenty valiant knights guarding her plotzed, then squeezes her pregnant self out a narrow window.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: GUEST,MMario
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 01:22 PM

*thread drift on*

I suspect someone could do a paper just on the descriptions of various child ballads that may come out of this thread

*thread drift off*

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 01:37 PM

There is a ballad (don't know if Child or not) in which the bad knight is going to murder his pregnant girlfriend; she asks him to let her live to have the baby, and he does; the baby is born, and he kills and buries her. He raises his son, and will never tell the son about his mother. When his son is of some I suppose early to mid-teenage years, he takes the son to the gravesite, and tells him what happened. The son shoots papa with an arrow, killing him, but will not bury him but leaves the body exposed to the elements and scavengers.

I heard Peggy Seeger sing this one a couple of years ago.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 01:54 PM

Dave, that one is Jellon Graeme (Child 90).

~ Becky in Tucson

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: John Nolan
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 02:09 PM

Mario: Thanks very much, I think I can work that one in.
Jeri: Hi, thanks a lot, also. It's been too long since I've been in the Press Room on a Friday night. Fause Foodrage is a good one. I am working, incidentally, on the sixth (and final one)of a series of columns dealing with Rochester's (NH)forthcoming poet laureate. They are called Poets who Matter, and No. 6 is Anonymous. (The others, for the record were Omar Khayyam, John Keats, John Clare, Robert Garioch and Walt Whitman.) The poetic/ballad snatches tie in with anecdotal material from Blackhill, Glasgow in 1973, if any of this makes sense.
Meanwhile, any deaf mutes, wife beaters, father & son combats, (not sohrab and rustum) etc? I have the five volumes of Child, but it's 2,500 tightly packed pages and thus the plea for pointers.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: GUEST,MMario
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 02:34 PM

Little John a beggin - #142 mentions a deaf begger

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Wolfgang
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 02:35 PM

For father son combat look in the Child index and search for 'Hildebrand'. The Hildebrand saga (with a father son combat) is of course not a Child song, but it might be mentioned at the Child song. Child also has an index of songs/ballads from other languages. This too could help via 'Hildebrand'.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Folkiedave
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 03:11 PM

I can sell you a copy of the 1965 Dover Edition.

Currently listed at £300.00 - will reduce to £280+postage.

Regards,

Dave
www.collectorsfolk.co.uk

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: John Nolan
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 03:41 PM

Thanks again Mario, I'll comb through the Robin Hood ballads - on the way to your suggestion I spotted drunk beggars in stocks who could be useful.
Wolfgang - Hildebrabd, in Child's notes, got sidetracked by a swimming horse.
Dave: I own the Dover 1965 set which Dick Swain was kind enough to sell me years ago. That's what I'm leafing through, per suggestions. Thanks.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Phil Cooper
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 04:04 PM

Lord Thomas & Lady Margaret deals with domestic abuse, though the couple are not married at the beginning of the song. He chases his dogs after her on a hunt. Later she poisons him. Great song.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: John Nolan
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 05:22 PM

Thanks Phil. Found it. No 260 - Dogs chasing dame with vigor. Very workable

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Susan of DT
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 05:28 PM

Prince Heathen, Child #104 has the husband torturing his pregnant bride by such things as dragging her behind his horse. I guess that qualifies as wife beating.

There is a lot of family murder in Child, but father/son is rare. Jellon Greme was the only one I could think of. I have a mostly completed spreadsheet of who kills whom in the Child Ballads.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 06:05 PM

Do keep us posted on that spreadsheet, Susan. I can see it being rather useful and having a surprisingly wide appeal...

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Joybell
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 08:31 PM

Dave, Is that what it goes for now. I saved up on a student nurse's wages to buy it back in the 60s. Took me months. It cost $10 (Aus)per volume then. Sorry to diverge.
I take it the deaf-mute is still not spoken for. I'll try the theme index in the back. See if I can find one.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: John Nolan
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 09:27 PM

Ideally, to parallel real life, the deaf mute should beat the wife, and when arrested by the sherrif, be brought to a brand new keep where the jailer is drunk, and where the deaf mute meets a young varlet who has just cut his father's nose off in a knife fight in the pitch black - all this being the very day after a dame is robbed by a thief while watching the official opening of the keep.
A ballad by Anonymous along these exact lines being somewhat unlikely, I broke the modern anecdote into five or six parts. Thanks to everyone's suggestions. Good old Mudcat, ever reliable.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: GUEST,celtaddict
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 09:40 PM

So, adrift again, is anyone actually offering to sell an edition of Child???

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Jeri
Date: 01 Oct 03 - 10:53 PM

I only remember the one about the son who kills his father, runs off with his mother, who he marries and beats, and supports himself by stealing purses, but is caught and jailed until the jailers get drunk and ...well, he didn't get away, but what actually happened is too sordid to relate.

Good luck, John. You may have to write it yourself.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 02 Oct 03 - 01:43 AM

There's a lovely new edition of Child in progress--v. 1 and 2 are out and 3 si expected soon. It's produced by Loomis House, and has several editorial innovations: the appendices, rather than being scattered throughout the 5 volumes, follow each individual ballad. The few tunes that Child provided are presented immediately over the appropriate text. And the editors added the tunes that Child's sources had, but that old FJ didn't see fit to include.

The first two volumes are available from CAMSCO: $32 each in hard cover; $23 in soft cover.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: GUEST,Sarah T
Date: 02 Oct 03 - 11:32 PM

For the deaf person (I teach at Gallaudet, the university for deaf people, by the way, and in the US at any rate, "deaf mute" is considered a slur. Deaf people prefer to be called "deaf".), you could try A-Beggin' I Will Go. It's in the DT, but Ewan McColl sings it on Manchester Angel with another verse that's not listed:

Oh I've been deef at .... (couldn't catch the words) /
And I've been blind at shaw /
And many's the right and willing lass /
I've bedded in the straw /
And a-beggin' I will go, and a-beggin' I will go.

Apologies for the part I can't remember -- anyone else know this one?
Apparently the beggar isn't actually deaf, but maybe this is good enough for your purposes.

--Sarah

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 03 Oct 03 - 12:07 AM

For practical reasons, deaf-mute characters do not appear much in narrative ballads; they have, by definition, no dialogue. Deafness in the ballad tends to be either pretended, or the consequence of old age. Although the term "mute" is considered inappropriate nowadays, we have to remember that things were not always so. Certainly my uncle, who was born deaf, would two centuries ago have been functionally mute; not incapable, that is, of articulation (which I believe is a very rare condition) but certainly unable to speak in any intelligible fashion.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: LadyJean
Date: 03 Oct 03 - 10:22 PM

Somewhere there is a song about a man who married a dumb, as in mute, wife. I'm afraid I don't know it, but some catter, somewhere does.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Joe Offer
Date: 04 Oct 03 - 01:42 AM

John, any chance you'd like to post this piece you're writing?
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: John Nolan
Date: 04 Oct 03 - 07:23 AM

Hi Joe: You can get a flavor of what to expect from the other five pieces on my wife's website.
Omar Khayyam - http://www.stephaniepiro.com/fc285.htm
John Clare - http://www.stephaniepiro.com/fc286.htm
John Keats - http://www.stephaniepiro.com/fc287.htm
Robert Garioch - http://www.stephaniepiro.com/fc288.htm
Walt Whitman - http://www.stephaniepiro.com/fc289.htm
Anonymous will be http://www.stephaniepiro.com/fc290.htm when it is written.
I just read the Ballad of Robin Hood and Maid Marian - they go whacking at each other with swords, which gives some opportunity.
Sarah T: Thanks for the reminder - I think that song's on The Manchester Angel album, plus, I'll watch my step with "mute."
The columns, incidentally, are published in The Rochester Times (NH) whose circulation range just stops short of Jeri, Bat Goddess Carmudgeon and Barry. Ah, weel!

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Jeri
Date: 04 Oct 03 - 08:08 AM

Nope, John, it doesn't stop short - it's available in a local (Lee Circle) Market Basket. What stops short is me, in remembering to pick it up! I actually have one here with your column on John Clare.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Celtaddict
Date: 04 Oct 03 - 08:46 AM

Dick, thank you so much for the word. Off goes my order! I trust there is a CAMSCO site. I never had the Dover and my old one-volume abridged has about had it...

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: Jeri
Date: 04 Oct 03 - 08:58 AM

John I've started reading the columns (the one on Clare) and intend to keep right on going until finished. Thanks for providing the addresses so I can read all I've missed.

This is beautiful, compelling writing. Personally, I think it's of a quality that should have a much wider readership. (Although I'm getting fairly wide.)

I'm also sure you were quite popular, as a photographer, with your fellow police. I also am imagining where the 'anon' column might go, and I'm frightened. I tend to think your synopsis above is literal.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: John Nolan
Date: 04 Oct 03 - 10:51 AM

Jeri: The sleeping policemen were never aware their pictures were taken. This is the first public airing they have had in 30 years. They are kind of historic, in a way. Your fears, incidentally, are well grounded. The synopsis is indeed literal. You might also be interested in http://www.stephaniepiro.com/fc166.htm which is The Ballad of Chevy Chase. This illustrated a true event in Farmington (NH)back in 1990 involving Chevvy trucks (mudding out on the old tote roads)being pursued by a police sergeant - I still enjoy this one (and sing it to myself occasionly)having been brought up in plain view of the original Chevy Chase on the slopes of the Cheviot Hills.

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 04 Oct 03 - 05:04 PM

I've got a feeling there's at least one Child ballad where a character is under a spell that means he or she cannot speak.

And just for fun, here's a link to a modern pastiche I found looking around which has someone under a spell which is taken as indicating she is dumb. Except she isn't by a long chalk. Written by one Brandi Pastories "for an English Literature class" and not at all bad.'Ballad of the Shepherd Boy'

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: GUEST,Sarah T
Date: 06 Oct 03 - 08:56 PM

Hi McGrath -- in Thomas Rhymer, Thomas is admonished not to speak by the Elf Queen:

"But Thomas you must hold your tongue
Whatever you may hear or see
For if you speak word in fair Elfland
You'll ne'er get back to your ain country"

Of course, in many versions of the ballad, he continues to talk with the Elf Queen. I've often wondered whether the order of events in the ballad was inverted for some reason, and perhaps in some older version he really doesn't speak after this admonition. On the other hand, Ellen Kushner in her book _Thomas Rhymer_ came up with an elegant solution -- her Thomas is allowed to speak, but only to the Elf Queen.

And when it comes to just plain stubbornness about not speaking, how about "The Barring of the Door"?

"They made a pact between them twa
They made it firm and sure - o
Whoever should speak the very first word
Would rise and bar the door - o."

John, this may be too late for your column. I haven't checked out your writings yet, but I'm looking forward to reading them!

--Sarah

Subject: RE: Child Ballads help
From: John Nolan
Date: 20 Oct 03 - 07:50 PM

Just a note of sincere thanks for the help, and especially for Sarah T.'s very timely reminder of True Thomas, one of my true favorites. The reminiscence, such as it is, (part 6 of a series) is posted at http://www.stephaniepiro.com/fc290.htm   It's not quite how it was first envisaged, but such stories never are. I hope no-one is offended by using ballads in this kind of setting, but think of it as giving them fresh signigicance and reaching a new audience.