Folk & Traditional Music of the Western Continents
The folk & traditional music of Europe, Africa & the Americas explored.
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58 THE GERMANIC PEOPLES |
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low, low, low, Sail___ ing the Low - lands low.
example 4-2. English folk song, "The Little Cabin Boy," from Phillips Barry, Fannie H. Eckstrom and Mary W. Smyth, British Ballads from Maine (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1929), p. xxxiii.
Balkan area, but its tunes are largely national in provenience, and the tunes used with the English versions are evidently not related to those used in Dutch, Scandinavian, German, or other versions. On the other hand, a tune used for one ballad in the English repertory may be found in other English ballads or songs. |
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Broadside ballads
Besides the Child ballads, for which no written original can usually be found, the English-language repertory possesses other types, particularly a group of later origin, the broadside ballads. This type, so named because it appeared printed on large sheets of paper called broadsides, became popular throughout Western EuÂrope. Written frequently by professional song writers, the broadside ballads tend to deal with historical events more than do the popular ballads, and they contrast with the Child ballads also in their concern for detail, in their more complex plots, and in the involvement of the narrator, who frequently appends a moral. The words are often shamelessly sentimental and usually do not have the literary value of the older ballads. But the broadside ballads (which were still being |
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