Ballads offer one of the most fascinating and revealing records of humankind—our deepest feelings and most profound experiences, our laughter and joys, our troubles and sorrows. There is no battle, no romance, no escapade, no tragedy recorded in song which is not rich both in historical significance and in contemporary experience. A ballad is a link with past generations, traditions, and the basic character traits of a people, a region, or a country. The associations formed, the recollections stirred make the study of this form of music a rewarding experience. The first printed collection of ballads was made in 1723-25 and entitled simply Old Ballads. That it met with warm approval is indicated by the fact that a third edition was published as soon as 1727. Since the publication of that first collection, interest in the ballad and demand for ballad texts have grown constantly. During the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, several hundred collections were published. Many of these collections have become classics in the field of balladry. With the publication of this fourth and final volume of the Ancient Ballads series, the Helen Hartness Flanders Collection took its place with the other classics in the field. Volume IV contains child ballads 250-295 with thirty-six versions of "The Sweet Trinity," or "The Golden Vanity," alone. This is representative of the completeness of the series and reflects the years of scholarship that went into the collecting, interviewing, scoring, and editing of the collection. With analyses by Tristram P. Coffin and musical annotations by Bruno Netti, Helen Hartness Flanders's work constitutes an invaluable source for the student of the ballad, as well as those interested in the related studies of musicology, literature, history, social sciences, and ethnology. Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England provides endless opportunity for both scholarly study and sheer fascination.

With this volume, incorporating Ballads 244-305, Bertrand Harris Bronson completes his epic task of providing the musical counterpart to Francis James Child's collection of English and Scottish ballads. As in the previous volumes, the texts are linked with their proper traditional tunes, systematically ordered and grouped to show melodic kinship and characteristic variations developed during the course of oral transmission. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Seventy- nine tales that show how riddles pervade storytelling worldwide

The murder of the popular Earle of Moray in 1592 near Edinburgh was the stuff of which legends are made. This inviting volume explores that legend, relates details of the Huntly-Moray (Catholic-Protestant) feud, and traces the ballad of the slain ''Bonny Earl'' through its four centuries of growth and change.''A romp! A fine book that will be welcomed by literature students, folklorists, and those interested in Scottish history.'' -- Roger D. Abrahams, author of Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South''A graceful and gripping account by a scholar whose love of scholarship, music, and teaching is obvious throughout.'' -- Marta Weigle, coeditor of The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railroad

This book of interdisciplinary readings on Gypsies is sensitive to the Romani point of view and avoids exoticizing or patronizing the Gypsies and their culture. Recurrent themes in the readings include: the historical oppression of the Gypsies including contemporary xenophobia and violence; the nonstatic, heterogeneous nature of Gypsy cultures; the persistence of racist stereotypes; and personal and institutional Gypsy/non-Gypsy relationships. Nearly all of the classic essays updated for this volume tell stories of the persistance of the Roma in the face of savage atrocities and appalling living conditions.

Much has been written about the songs gathered in North America in the first half of the 20th century. However, there is scant information on those individuals responsible for gathering these songs. The Ballad Collectors of North America: How Gathering Folksongs Transformed Academic Thought and American Identity fills this gap, documenting the efforts of those who transcribed and recorded North American folk songs. Both biographical and topical, this book chronicles not only the most influential of these "song catchers" but also examines the main schools of thought on the collection process, the leading proponents of those schools, and the projects that they shaped. Contributors also consider the role of technology--especially the phonograph--in the collection efforts. Chapters organized by region cover such areas as Appalachia, the West, and Canada, while others devoted to specialized topics from the cowboy tune and occupational song to the commercialization of folk music through song collections and anthologies. Ballad Collectors investigates the larger role of the ballad in the development of American identity, from the national appreciation of cowboy songs in popular culture to the use of Appalachian song forms in radio broadcasts to the role of dustbowl ballads in the urban folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, this collection assesses the changing role of songs and song texts in the academic fields of folklore, anthropology, musicology, and ethnomusicology. Scholars and students of American cultural and social history, as well as fans of North American folk and popular music, will find The Ballad Collectors of North America a fascinating story of how the American folk tradition gained greater visibility, fueling the revolutions that would follow in the writing and performance of American music.

Tristram Potter Coffin’s The British Traditional Ballad in North America, published in 1950, became recognized as the standard reference to the published material on the Child ballad in North America. Centering on the theme of story variation, the book examines ballad variation in general, treats the development of the traditional ballad into an art form, and provides a bibliographical guide to story variation as well as a general bibliography of titles referred to in the guide. Roger deV. Renwick’s supplement to The British Traditional Ballad in North America provides a thorough review of all sources of North American ballad materials published from 1963, the date of the last revision of the original volume, to 1977. The references, which include published text fragments and published title lists of items in archival collections, are arranged according to each ballad’s story variations. Textual and thematic comparisons among ballads in the British and American tradition are made throughout. In his introductory essay Renwick synthesizes the various theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of variation that have appeared in scholarly publications since 1963 and provides examples from texts referred to in the bibliographical guide itself. The supplement, like its parent work, is an invaluable reference tool for the study of variation in ballad form, content, and style. Together with the reprinted text of the 1963 edition, the supplement provides an exhaustive bibliography to the literature on the British traditional ballad in North America.