The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (review)

Ballad and folk song scholars recognize The English and Scottish Popular Ballads as the foundational document of their discipline, and folklorists at large acknowledge its seminal importance. Its republication, therefore, is an occasion not only to be noted, but applauded.

This digital edition of the full text of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads is not a facsimile but has been completely reset in a font chosen to closely resemble the original and at the same time to give the best possible definition on a computer screen. The pages are presented in PDF format, viewed using Adobe Reader. Live links facilitate navigation around the volumes, for instance, to the Additions and Corrections, from the Index of Matters and Literature to the pages referenced, to words in the glossary, and so on. And, of course, the entire text is fully searchable—one area in which a computer-readable edition should always outclass a printed work, although as the guide on searching points out, results can be constrained by the vagaries of Adobe Acrobat and Reader, and it is advisable to have some familiarity with these programs. The display is clear and readable (notwithstanding Adobe Reader's habit of resizing images), the links quick and effective. There is always a link back to the table of contents when one's route through the pages becomes confused.

This is not the place to argue in detail the pros and cons of digital versus print editions: in an ideal world, the scholar would probably want both. There is nothing like a book on the shelf. Nevertheless, the PDF files have been designed to allow printing (on U.S. 8.5 x 11 inch paper) of any part of the Child volumes, and the results are pleasing. The ability to copy and paste text should save time and help promote accuracy. The other huge benefit of the digital edition is that embedded audio files make it possible to hear the melodies, as played on the piano, of the sample tunes Child included in volume 5. Moreover, there are links to Heritage Muse's scheduled digital edition of Bronson and other ballad collections, which will work in the same way and provide a much greater range of tunes to go with the ballad texts.

The digital edition also contains a considerable amount of additional material not in Child's original text. These include some immensely useful maps, marking places mentioned in ballads and some of those referred to in Child's notes, and an index of place names, which link to and from the ballad texts. Other research aids include a lexicon of fairly basic terms that may nonetheless be unfamiliar to the modern student. There are summaries of such things as Old and Middle English letters and pronunciation, Roman numerals, currency, and calendar festivals. All of this is produced concisely and thoughtfully to enhance the usability of the Child ballads for students and singers alike. Prefatory material provides convenient hints and draws attention to the various features, as well as explaining how the edition has been designed and produced, with a chart to display the process of production, including three stages of proofreading. The impression is one of transparency, which is welcome to the scholar more interested in Child and ballads than in computers. Within an hour of installing the program, I was able to navigate it effectively and produce useful results.

There is also a new appreciation of the Child ballads by Michael Taft, who addresses some of the mystique that has attached to the corpus since its first publication. Taft emphasizes the dynamic interplay of ballad singing with printed sources, including Child's volumes and, especially, the 1904 single-volume abridgement, as well as with the modern sources of recordings, radio, the folksong revival, and the Internet. This is a very timely embracing of the constantly changing nature of the performance and reception of ballads and folksongs...