Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America

In recent years, the assumption that traditional songs originated from a primarily oral tradition has been challenged by research into 'street literature' - that is, the cheap printed broadsides and chapbooks that poured from the presses of jobbing printers from the late sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. Not only are some traditional singers known to have learned songs from printed sources, but most of the songs were composed by professional writers and reached the populace in printed form. Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America engages with the long-running debate over the origin of traditional songs by examining street literature's interaction with, and influence on, oral traditions.

David Atkinson is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, UK. Steve Roud is an independent scholar in the UK.

1: Introduction; 2: Was There Really a 'Mass Extinction of Old Ballads' in the Romantic Period?; 3: Birmingham Broadsides and Oral Tradition; 4: The Newcastle Song Chapbooks; 5: Forgotten Broadsides and the Song Tradition of the Scots Travellers; 6: Welsh Balladry and Literacy; 7: Ballads and Ballad Singers: Samuel Lover's Tour of Dublin in 1830; 8: Henry J. Wehman and Cheap Print in Late Nineteenth-Century America; 9: 'I'd have you to buy it and learn it': Sabine Baring-Gould, his Fellow Collectors, and Street Literature; 10: The Popular Ballad and the Book Trade: 'Bateman's Tragedy' versus 'The Demon Lover'; 11: Mediating Maria Marten: Comparative and Contextual Studies of the Red Barn Ballads; 12: 'Old Brown's Daughter': Re-contextualizing a 'Locally' Composed Newfoundland Folk Song