An extremely brief guide to Child ballads.
What even is a ballad? Who is this ‘child’ and why are you capitalizing that word? What are all these numbers?
This post is a short and sweet introduction to traditional ballads and Child’s 305-song collection. It’s under a cut so you’re guaranteed the most up-to-date version!
WHAT IS A BALLAD?
Broadly speaking, ballads are narrative songs with a simple, repeating melody and rhyme scheme.
While there are many variants, traditional ballads sung in the British Isles and North America are often in quatrains (four-line stanzas) where the second and fourth lines rhyme.
The first and third lines are often in iambic tetrameter, with the second and fourth lines in trimeter. "Iambic" means an emphasized syllable follows an unemphasized one: dah DAH. Lines in tetrameter have eight syllables, while lines in trimeter have six.
Here's a stanza from Tam Lin (Child #39c):
She let her seam fall to her foot, The needle to her toe, And she has gone to Chaster's wood, As fast as she could go.
WHO WROTE 'EM? WHERE'D THEY COME FROM?
The people did! The original authors of ballads are lost to history, and the songs appear in so many variants that there's almost never an identifiable "original" version.
Many of these ballads came to America with English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants who settled in Appalachia. Various traditions mingled, new ballads were written, and old ballads were passed on in new contexts.
SO WHO'S THE CHILD?
While researchers had been anthologizing traditional ballads since the late 1700s, Francis James Child's work in collecting and organizing ballads was foundational.
The "Child Ballads" are the 305 ballads collected and analyzed in Child's 'The English and Scottish Popular Ballads'. Each ballad has a number. Variants of ballads are collected under the same number and indicated with letters (ie, Child Ballad 39c).
WHY ARE PEOPLE INTERESTED? WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
Many of Child's ballads are dark, sad, and strange. They deal frankly with dark topics including murder, rape, and incest. There are appearances by strange men who may be serial killers or devils or fairies, depending on the variant. They're like a sprawling, strange, musical collection of fairy tales you never heard when you were in kindergarten.
SO WHERE DO I START?
OPTION A: Start with what seems interesting Start with our intro posts tag for highlights and suggested listening, then go from there. Also check out Tumblr's favorite Child ballad -- Tam Lin, #39. It's weird, it's spooky, it's got a spirited lady protagonist rescuing her lover, it's got a lot of wonderful recordings available (and at least two novel-length adaptations). It is also our best-populated tag and has a dedicated website.
OPTION B: Start listening Listen to Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer's album Child Ballads, put any number of the Child Ballad playlists available on Spotify on shuffle, or see if your favorite artists have recorded any of the Child ballads.
WHERE DO I LEARN MORE?
Wikipedia had a convenient table that lists each ballad by name, number, and summary. Many of the ballads also have their own Wikipedia pages, which are linked from the table.
A useful intro essay on Child Ballads and the ballads in fantasy writing by Terry Windling: part one, part two.
Child was not terribly interested in the music of ballads. Bertrand Harris Bronson wrote about and cataloged many of the traditional tunes.
Child Ballad Recordings catalogs many recordings of the songs, neatly organized.
You're likely to run into the Roud Folk Song Index, a sprawling, modern index of folk songs.
Mainly Norfolk is an accessible, easy-to-browse resource. While not Child Ballad focused, they do have a Child Ballad Index.
Here’s a Spotify playlist of most of the ballads, in order.
The Center for Computer Research in the Humanities at the University of Colorado Boulder has a massive concordance available for any highly specific research purposes.
