Ballads!

[regshoe]

I have learnt that the Bodleian Library have an entire huge searchable collection of scanned broadside ballads available on the internet—what a fantastic resource! You can search by title, first line or Roud number, or browse by a massive range of themes and subjects. I envision spending a lot of time on this site in future :D

Interesting things I've found so far: this comic song about a 'gent reduced by railway speculations' who tries to live a London gentleman's life as cheaply as possible, with some very fun rhyming—and in the column next to it a song exhorting England to remember the great economic and military value of 'the labouring man' (so you'd better not treat working people with contempt or underpay them, right!). And here's one of my favourite Steeleye Span bops, 'Hard Times of Old England', here titled more prosaically 'The Tradesman's Complaint'.

...I didn't manage to find what I was actually looking for, which was the song recorded by Kate Rusby as 'The Youthful Boy'—her lyrics are credited 'trad., Kate Rusby' and I wanted to check my guesses as to which bits were traditional. I've looked up its Roud number and found this distantly related American version of the same song (on page 131/158 of the scan), but apart from the first line and the general gist of the plot they don't have a great deal in common, and I don't think this version has quite the appeal of Rusby's. I'm sure it's in some obscure ballad book somewhere...!

Comments

[theseatheseatheopensea]

Ahhh, obscure ballads! I feel you! I think the last time I used the Bodleian's site was when I was trying to find one of Broster's epigraphs! ;) (Have you ever used the Traditional Ballad Index? It doesn't offer scans, but you can search by full text, and it has lots of info and you might find something!)

[regshoe]

Haha, I'm sure it must be useful for those references :D Ooh, no, I'd not seen that site either—unfortunately it doesn't seem to have the song I was looking for, but it looks very useful generally!

[luzula]

Very cool! One thing I love about ballads, especially the older ones, is playing "connect the dots" between ballads from the British isles and the Scandinavian ballads. There really are a lot of connections. The Twa Sisters ballad exists in many versions here, for example.

[regshoe]

Oh, nice! Tracing out those folkloric connections is great fun, and it's even more impressive to find so many links across wide areas and between languages. Thinking of Scandinavian connections, do you know 'King Orfeo'?—it's a Scottish ballad that has some lyrics in the Nordic language that used to be spoken in the Shetlands (and the story actually comes all the way from Greek mythology). I don't know if there are versions from Scandinavia itself!

[luzula]

Not exactly the same, I suppose, but there's an Orpheus motif in 'Harpans kraft' (the power of the harp) which is a Scandinavian ballad where a man goes to fetch his betrothed home to marry her, but finds that she is unhappy. He has various theories as to why this is so, but finally she tells him that her sisters have been taken by 'Näcken' who is a supernatural creature living in a stream, and she's afraid that when they cross the stream, she too will be taken. In the event, this comes true, but her husband-to-be plays his harp so well that Näcken lets all the women go. There's some haunting imagery around the harp-playing (he played the bark from the hardest tree, he played the water from the stream, he played the child from the mother's lap, etc). And it ends with the pronouncement that the sisters were happy with their brother-in-law. *g*

[regshoe]

Aww, that's a cool one. 'King Orfeo' similarly has Orfeo playing the pipes so beautifully that the fairies let his wife go.

There's some haunting imagery around the harp-playing (he played the bark from the hardest tree, he played the water from the stream, he played the child from the mother's lap, etc)

That is some especially lovely ballad-ish imagery!