Child Ballads

Complete list of Child Ballads included in Rise Up Singing or Rise Again.

Child Ballads are traditional English and Scottish ballads collected by Francis James Child in second half of the 19th century. These were initially published as the five volume set The English & Scottish Popular Ballads. Tunes to many of these ballads were collected and published in the 1960's.

There are hundreds of known variants of some of these, often with different titles. Many travelled to the American colonies and can be found in variants in the U.S., particularly among traditional Appalachian singers as collected by John Jacob Niles, Cecil Sharp, and other folklorists.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Ballads

Complete list of the ballads (# and brief description): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_Child_Ballads

The entire five volume set has just recently been brought back into print in a newly revised and corrected edition from Loomis Press, edited by Mark & Laura Heiman. (Full disclosure: Mark has played a major role in creating the Music Box online song index on this website. He also has played a major role in creating DigiTrad.)