Or try this inexpensive collection of Childs ballads, the title of which features the famous death-by-poisoning ballad "Lord Randall", from the good folks at Dover Publications:
are from English and Scottish Popular Ballads edited from the Collection of Francis James Child by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904). Punctuation, case, and spelling are reproduced as in the originals; not all variants of each ballad are presented here, stanza numbers have been removed, and explanatory headnotes may have been edited for brevity. Definitions (via hypertext link) are taken from the Glossary of this edition. Texts from other sources may not conform to these criteria.
| For more on the Child ballads, see the Francis J. Child Ballads website, loaded with information on ballads, on Child, and with etexts. Part of Lesley Nelson's Folk Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and America site. Highly recommended
Or try this inexpensive collection of Childs ballads, the title of which features the famous death-by-poisoning ballad "Lord Randall", from the good folks at Dover Publications: |
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The
Sargent/Kittredge text of the ballad, with headnote.
Child's original 5-volume collection of ballads presents a number of variants of each work, sometimes more than twenty; the Sargent/Kittredge "reader's edition" used here presents just a few variants of each ballad, sometimes only one. This site presents only one variant of each ballad, although other variants available elsewhere on the Web may be listed; the boldface capital letter preceeding each text indicates which of the Child variants is used. All headnote text for each ballad is from the Sargent/Kittredge edition.