Hot off the Press

This post celebrates the 46,000th unique title Distributed Proofreaders has posted to Project Gutenberg: the fifth and final volume of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads by Francis James Child. Congratulations and thanks to all the Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg volunteers who worked on these interesting and complex projects!

The 19th Century saw a great resurgence of interest in old English and Scottish folk songs. Fearing that these songs might be forgotten, a number of scholars, amateur and professional, sought to preserve them as best they could. Today we celebrate these efforts in our 46,000th title, the final volume of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, a monumental five-volume study edited by Harvard professor Francis James Child, collectively known as the Child Ballads.

Published from 1882 to 1898, the Child Ballads are a fascinating collection of 305 traditional English and Scottish ballads that Child compiled along with their American variants. These ballads contain the roots of much of English-language folk music, and many have inspired and been recorded by modern folk artists.

Child, being a specialist in English poetry, focused primarily on the lyrics of the ballads. But he did include, in the fifth volume, an index of published ballad music, along with an appendix containing the tunes of 55 of the ballads. (You can play these tunes as mp3 files in the HTML version of the e-book at Project Gutenberg.) Child also drew on the work of English musicologists, acknowledging his debt to the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, who famously compiled both the music and the lyrics of songs from Devon and Cornwall in Songs of the West.

Child’s scholarly work introduces and thoroughly annotates each ballad, closely examining textual variations in the various sources. Famous ballads include “Sir Patrick Spens” (Ballad 58, 18 versions) and “Bonny Barbara Allan” (Ballad 84, three versions). Several dozen of the ballads concern the adventures of the legendary Robin Hood.

Many Distributed Proofreaders volunteers have worked hard since 2007 on the varied challenges of the Child Ballad volumes. We are proud to celebrate the concluding volume of this important work as our 46,000th title posted to Project Gutenberg.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

The Child Ballads at Project Gutenberg

Volume I (Ballads 1-53)
Volume II (Ballads 54-113)
Volume III (Ballads 114-188)
Volume IV (Ballads 189-265)
Volume V (Ballads 266-305, plus indices and appendices)

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