(Child Ballad #84)

c. 17th Century, but at least a few centuries older in oral tradition.

A classic folk ballad - life and love, drama and death, with a strong dash of moral judgement thrown in. (Perhaps the true contemporary heir to the folk ballad is the soap opera!) The morality might seem slightly archaic today, especially the very androcentric slant, but that shouldn’t preclude enjoyment of the poem.

I’ve been planning to run a Child ballad for a while, and today’s was the obvious choice, being a friend of my youth. I remember what mostly caught my fancy back then was the sound of the poem, a combination of the dialect and the rhythm; interestingly, I’d forgotten most of the poem completely, except for the last two verses, and therefore remembered it as a poem about a woman who scorned her true love, and then killed herself out of repentance. Rediscovering¹ the fact that he had slighted her first was quite a surprise.

On the Child Ballads:

Francis Child’s five-volume work, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898), is considered by many as the basis of traditional Anglo-Celtic folk music, as both the motifs like the popular characters like the mythical Tam Lin and the might have been real Robin Hood, and the actual songs still played by many a musician are contained within this work. And just as importantly, the Child Ballads are crucial to present day writers who use the old folk ballads.

[…]

So why is the English and Scottish Popular Ballads so valuable? First we need a definition of what a ballad is. Funk & Wagnall’s Online Dictionary defines a ballad thus: “short narrative folk song that fixes on the most dramatic part of a story, moving to its conclusion by means of dialogue and a series of incidents. The word ballad was first used in a general sense to mean a simple short poem. Such a poem could be narrative or lyric, sung or not sung, crude or polite, sentimental or satiric, religious or secular; it was vaguely associated with dance. The word is still commonly used in this loose fashion. In the field of folklore, however, ballad is applied specifically to the kind of narrative folk song described in the opening lines. These narrative songs represent a type of literature and music that developed across Europe in the late Middle Ages. Unlike the medieval romances and rhymed tales, ballads tend to have a tight dramatic structure that sometimes omits all preliminary material, all exposition and description, even all motivation, to focus on the climactic scene (as in the British “Lord Randall”). It is as though the ballad presented only the last act of a play, leaving the listener or reader to supply the antecedent material. When the ballad emerged, it was a new form of art and literature, distinct from anything that had gone before.”

[…]

Child’s contribution in researching, compiling, and publishing the English and Scottish Popular Ballads, was that he documented the very roots of English speaking ballads as versionthey still existed in the late Victorian period. This – and its effects on popular folk music and written literature – is why the Child Ballads (as they are most often called) remain a seminal work.

– http://www.greenmanreview.com/child_ballads.html

Follow the link and read the whole piece - it’s well worth a look.

Links

Some other versions of the lyrics (‘Barbara Allen’, like most ballads, has no ‘definitive’ text)

  - http://ingeb.org/songs/barbaraa.html
  - [broken link] http://www.contemplator.com/folk2/brballen.html

Both links contain MIDI files of the melody

Bob Blair draws an interesting parallel between ballads and urban legends:

- http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/000224.htm

An excellent page on folk music:

- http://www.contemplator.com/history/epedia.html#child

The complete catalogue of Child ballads:

- http://www.contemplator.com/child/cmpltchl.html

The androcentricity reminds me of Goldsmith’s ‘When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly’:

- http://www.bartleby.com/106/138.html

— Martin