Francis James Child

People sang them from memory, and each singer changed them a little along the way.

In the 1800s, a scholar named Francis James Child collected hundreds of these ballads in print and studied them as literature.

They held up on the page for a simple reason.

They were poems first, set to whatever tune the singer happened to know.

The idea that mourning too long can hurt the deceased in some way can be found in multiple cultures.

In Francis Child's introduction to the song, he references many similar superstitions from India, Greece, the Slavic nations, Scandinavia, and all over the Celtic world.

For example, in a similar Norwegian folk song, Aga Og Elsa, which seems to be based on a story from the Elder Edda, one line has been translated to, "For each single tear that you happen to shed, my tomb will start filling with blood that's bright red." In some versions of that song, when the lover is happy, the deceased's grave fills with flower petals, but it's been argued that that's a later addition.

Here's a little bit of Holly Clarke's English adaptation of Aga Og Elsa.

And his picture's in the book.

But he was singing like a British, a ballad that's in Francis James Child's collection.

Okay, what's going on there? I mean, and he was doing it in a style that wasn't dictated by blues tonalities.

I mean, so they were seeing something else.

Interestingly, an English folklorist who came to America and traveled through the mountain country with his assistant, Maud Karpeles, on muleback, collecting ballads and old songs, um, here.

A- a- almost in a flip from the earlier work by Sir Francis Child, where he had attempted to collect every ballad in, in, um, the British Isles and document them.

Cecil Sharp did something of the same thing in the mountains, in the Appalachian Mountains, basically, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

And, um, they were writing these tunes down, um, by ear or using wax cylinders sometimes to record them.

Well, I think so anyway.

It's Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer from Child Ballads, and it's their version of Willie of Winsbury.

There's a film of them performing this at the BBC Folk Awards many years ago, along with Martin Green and Aidan O'Rourke from Lau, which I assume will still be on YouTube somewhere.

It's just a perfect few minutes of music.

Anais Mitchell and Jeff Siennnaimer with their version of Willie O'Winsbury.

Now, I was listening to the In the Round podcast the other day, where they discuss a folk song at a time, going through the round index of folk songs.

That particular song is number 64 in that index, and it's number 100 in the Child collection of ballads.

And I think most of us know it with that tune, but it was actually Andy Irvine that took the tune from another song, Faust Food Rage, in 1968 and added it to Willie O'Winsbury.