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In 1847, Southampton's Philip Klitz (1805–1854) added two 'blackface' ballads to a cultural craze reflecting that year's British tour by the white American minstrel troupe, the 'Ethiopian Serenaders', and their imitators, the 'Ethiopian Harmonists'. I show how Klitz and his fellow composers reflected and fed a potent stereotype, circulating songs in the bourgeois home that adversely affected the British perception of African Americans by sustaining racist themes and images in the popular-cultural imagination. Notwithstanding the negative impacts for black residents and visitors in Britain at the time, minstrelsy is also widely understood to have exerted considerable cultural influence throughout the nineteenth century. Among investigations of how the Victorian arts constructed race, few give music the significance it holds in this interpretation of how black caricature functioned in a post-abolition British context through the medium of music and musical orientalism in Victorian drawing-room ballads. This case study of previously neglected musical repertoire details an important episode in the history of 'blackface' minstrelsy, showing how racial attitudes formed within British domestic spaces during the late 1840s were affected by those of the popular stage in ante-bellum America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early modern ballads supplied tools for managing information, allowing audiences to compare stories, handle variants and sort through multiple interpretations. These activities revised how and what people learn when they come together, a transformation of social life similarly explored in Macbeth, where this technology takes shape in the messenger Ross. Ross dispenses information but also disrupts and sometimes shuts down lines of communication, connecting courts with battlefields, inventorying the dead and preparing bodies for slaughter. Drawing on scholarship about ballad reception, cognitive ecology and Shakespearean surveillance, I consider Ross's communications within a larger early modern social world which deactivates its members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on song collection by musician Cecil Sharp and Charles Marson from retired sea-captains in Minehead, England which includes "Franklin" by Captain James Vickery relating to Sir John Franklin's attempt to find the long-sought route across the northern coast of America linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It mentions collection of Captain Vickery's ballad; and also mentions fate of Franklin's expedition in the 1850s and later described in poems.

Resurrection, sacrifice and incest as motifs can be found in the literatures of all nations. Even though, they are at the root of any creation of folk cultures, in each culture, these motifs appear with special features. The aim of this paper is through examples to show how these three motifs were treated in ballads of two different literatures, the English and the Albanian. Our objective is through a comparative approach to find the similarities and differences between them. We decided to analyze at least two ballads for each of the motives, coming from English and the Albanian literatures. The concrete research has three main steps: a) to show the particular characteristics of each ballad, b) to find the meeting points between them, and, c) to find what makes them different. After all the analysis we did we concluded that there are some differences between them and that they have some specific characteristics. But the most specific thing is that although these ballads belong to two different nations and cultures they have some meeting points. The main method of research will be the comparative method because we explore songs of two different literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides the first sustained overview and analysis of the reception of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" in sixteenth-century English ballad culture. It highlights a significant tradition of translating materials from this ancient Roman source into the stuff of vernacular song—a phenomenon that can be traced back as far as 1552. Positing that popular music must have played a crucial role in shaping Tudor ideas about the "Metamorphoses," this study draws attention to the textual, visual, aural, and kinetic dimensions of the Ovidiana that was regularly read, seen, heard, sung, and even danced to by early modern consumers of mythological ballads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note presents a deposition from the time of Henry VIII found among the papers of the scholar and forger John Payne Collier. It illustrates the extent of seditious ballad making during the Pilgrimage of Grace and furnishes evidence of the interactions between loyalist gentlemen during the rebellion. The note concludes with a full transcript. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents a criticism of the English play "Love's Labour's Lost" by William Shakespeare. She mentions the tale of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, presents several allusions to the ballad that appear in the play, and the performance of the ballad in the play.

The article examines historical references to the Hannington Ghost, an apparition that allegedly appeared in Hannington, England in 1674. It notes the work of scholar David George in discovering a letter by Francis Morgan in 1675 discussing the ghost before covering similar references in a 1675 pamphlet titled "The Rest-Less Ghost, or Wonderful News From Northamptonshire and Southwark" and balled titled "Strange and Wonderful News From Northampton-shire, or the Disconnected Spirit."

In his monumental 1662 history of the drainage of the fens, the antiquarian William Dugdale reports that outraged locals composed “libellous songs” to protest the theft of their commons. Preserving a rare specimen of this genre, Dugdale printed an anonymous ballad entitled “The Powtes Complaint.” The song adopts a non-human point of view to bewail the destruction of both the wetlands ecology and the fen-dwellers’ economy. This essay examines four different manuscripts of the ballad in the British Library, documenting their variants and commenting on their significance. It also seeks for answers to some pressing questions: when was the song written and where? What did it sound like? What socio-historical and environmental circumstances prompted its composition? How does the ballad portray the fenland ecology, and how does it compare with other seventeenth-century literary representations of the fens? What exactly is a pout? What is the nature of its complaint? And who was the person behind the song? [T.A.B. and C.E.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]