What's Between the Covers

Most ballad anthologies fall into one of two camps. There is the scholarly edition, heavy with apparatus, where the tunes are printed so small you need good light and a steady hand. Then there is the handy singaround collection, which gives you a melody, a handful of verses and a vague note about the song being "traditional", full stop. This collection sits firmly in the middle, and it manages that position without looking as though it has compromised. Around sixty ballads, grouped loosely by theme rather than by catalogue number, each with a full melody line, a complete text, and a headnote that actually tells you where this particular version came from.

The selection is not trying to be exhaustive. It is trying to be useful, and that distinction shapes nearly every editorial decision in the volume.

The Well-Known Ballads, Reconsidered

The famous ones are all present. Barbara Allen, The Unquiet Grave, The Cruel Sister, Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, The Daemon Lover, The Outlandish Knight. If you have sung in folk clubs for any length of time you will recognise half the contents by first line alone.

What lifts these familiar entries above the routine is the care taken with the texts. Rather than reprinting the composite versions that have circulated in print for a century and more, the editor has gone back to single-source recordings and manuscripts. The result is that Little Musgrave runs to a verse count you may not be used to, and the closing scene of The Outlandish Knight lands a little differently from the version many of us learned from a battered paperback. There are small narrative surprises throughout: a stanza restored here, an extra exchange of dialogue there. None of it feels like decoration. It sharpens the story.

The Local Variants Are the Real Prize

Where the collection earns its shelf space is in the rarities. Alongside the standards sit versions that have rarely, if ever, appeared in a general anthology.

• A Cruel Mother text from a Sussex singer, with a melodic shape quite unlike the Aberdeenshire line most of us know, sitting in a plaintive Aeolian rather than the usual Dorian.
• A Binnorie variant from the north-east of Scotland that keeps the harp of bone but drops the familiar refrain, tightening the pace considerably.
• An English Bramble Briar that resolves the murder rather differently, and which will be new to anyone raised on the better-travelled set.
• A short, blunt Two Sisters collected in Norfolk, barely half the length of the usual text and all the more chilling for it.

These are not curiosities. They are singable, performable versions, and they offer a genuine alternative to the same three texts doing the rounds at every festival and singaround.

Notes and Transcriptions

The editorial apparatus is where a collection like this either holds together or falls apart, and here it holds. Each ballad carries a headnote giving the source singer, the place and date of collection, and a short discussion of related variants and where they have previously been printed. The comparative notes are concise rather than exhaustive — a paragraph or two that tells you what you are holding and points you towards the wider tradition without burying you in it.

The transcriptions are equally sensible. Melodies are printed as single lines with the text underneath, without chord symbols forced onto them, which is the right call for a body of song that predates chordal accompaniment and very often sits more naturally unaccompanied. Where a song moves freely, the notation is left unbarred, so you can read the phrase shapes rather than having them chopped into 4/4. Metre markings appear where they help and are omitted where they would mislead. Modal labels are used sparingly and accurately.

One small frustration: a handful of headnotes refer to source recordings without quite enough detail to track them down easily. A fuller discographical appendix would have been welcome, and would have cost no more than a few pages.

Taking the Ballads to the Session

If you come to this as a singer rather than a researcher, a few practical suggestions.

• Learn the words before the tune. Ballads live or die on narrative pacing. Speak the text aloud until the story runs smoothly, then fit the melody to it.
• Pitch it low. Most printed ballad melodies sit higher than is comfortable for a long, unaccompanied narrative. Drop a fourth or a fifth and you will have room to shape the phrases properly.
• Do not rush. The temptation with a twenty-verse ballad is to accelerate. Resist it. If the story is good, the room will follow you.
• Use the notes to find a second version. If a ballad appeals, the headnote will usually point you towards a contrasting text. Learning two versions of the same song is one of the quickest ways to understand how the tradition actually works.

A Few Quibbles

The arrangement by theme is pleasant to browse but awkward to use for reference. An index by title and first line partly compensates, though one keyed to catalogue numbers as well would have helped. A dozen or so entries are presented with only a single verse of a much longer text, which is frustrating when the notes make clear that more exists. And the type, while clean, is on the small side for a book you will want open on a music stand in poor light.

None of that undermines the achievement. This is a collection that trusts its readers and its singers, and it does the two things that matter most: it gives you accurate texts and tunes, and it tells you honestly where they came from.