Noting the Tunes of Seventeenth-Century Broadside Ballads: The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)

The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu, hosted at the University of California-Santa Barbara, was founded in 2003 to render pre-1700 English broadside ballads fully accessible as texts, art, songs, and cultural records. EBBA focuses especially on the broadside ballads of the seventeenth century because that period was the “heyday” of the genre.¹ In their heyday, ballads were printed on one side of large sheets of paper (hence “broad”-side) mostly in swirling, decorative, black-letter (or what we today call “Gothic”) typeface, embellished with many woodcuts and other ornamentation, and labeled with a tune title printed just below the song title. These alluring multimedia artifacts addressed multifarious topics—often from more than one perspective—to catch the interest of a wide audience.²

But such ballads were also the cheapest form of printed materials in the period—costing on average just a penny at the beginning of the seventeenth century and dropping to half a penny by its end—so as to ensure their affordability to all but the indigent. As cheap entertainment, they were then rather ephemeral items, printed quickly on poor quality sheets that would often be folded and carried about by their purchasers or pasted up on a wall as a poor man’s decoration. Such cheap, transferable wares would frequently be re-used as disposable “waste” paper to reinforce book bindings or as kindling, toilet paper, and so forth. Any broadsides that were pasted up would soon be painted or plastered over. Because of their transience, comparably few of the millions of copies printed have survived, and those that still remain are dispersed across the United Kingdom and the United States, carefully guarded by the libraries and museums that hold them.

Most websites, even the admirable Bodleian Library’s ballad database (http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), represent only a small sampling of the total number of extant seventeenth-century broadside ballads—estimated by EBBA to be roughly 10,000-11,000 items. EBBA’s goal, however, is to make accessible all holdings of these early broadside ballads through a single site, where they are extensively catalogued and accessible by both simple and advanced search functions. Furthermore, unlike any other site that includes printed ballads, we offer high-quality color photography and different viewings of the originals: as album sheet facsimiles (the form in which ballads were often collected—trimmed and cut apart before being pasted onto album paper), as ballad sheet facsimiles (closer to how they would have looked when they came off the press, which sometimes requires the EBBA team to reassemble the cut-apart pieces), as facsimile transcriptions (with the often difficult-to-read original typeface replaced by easy-to-read modern Times Roman, while retaining as closely as possible the formatting and ornamentation of the original), as TEI/XML text (with the metadata and words of the ballad marked up by transferable digital code), and as MARC records (for library use). Finally, again like no other website, EBBA provides recordings of all extant tunes for the ballads.³

As of this writing, EBBA has fully digitized 6,000 pre-1700 English broadside ballads. It has been difficult at times to decide whether or not to include items in our archive. Among our many deciding factors are: does the one-page poem recall the features of other more clearly recognizable ballads (often self-titled as “ballad”) and—very importantly despite the existence of broadside ballads as multimedia artifacts—is the poem meant to be sung? Though EBBA is devoted to archiving the printed, that is, published, ballad, and thus what the great folklorist Francis James Child, in an 1872 letter to Professor Sven Gruntvig, derogatively called “veritable dung-hills” (Hustvedt 1930:254, in reference to the Pepys and Roxburghe printed ballad collections), we at EBBA, like contemporaries of the seventeenth century, highly value printed ballads as songs. And just as Child in fact consulted and included texts from broadside ballads in his famous edition of “traditional” and purely “oral” ballads—as Mary Ellen Brown...