| Contents |
Introduction -- Abbreviations -- The British broadside ballads (alphabetical, by tune name) -- Index of authors, composers, publishers, and collectors -- Index of titles, first lines, tune names, and refrains. |
| Abstract |
"A monumental work of twentieth-century scholarship, this book relates a large number of British broadside ballads to the tunes for which they were designed. The broadside ballad was essentially an urban form. London was its headquarters, and its most influential period extended from the middle of the sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Broadsides were a medium of mass communication, and one explanation of their popularity and influence is that they were written to familiar music. Much of this music has become dissociated from the texts. In his detecting work, besides notation occasionally printed on the actual broadsides, Mr. Simpson has made use of virginal, lute, and harpsichord pieces based on ballad tunes, collections of country dances, books of music instruction, folio vocal collections, poetical miscellanies with music, and ballad operas. Claude M. Simpson has built upon the nineteenth-century researches of William Chappell, published in A Collection of National English Airs (1838-1840) and Popular Music of the Olden Time (1855-1859). Using Chappell's work on the broadside ballad as a starting point, Mr. Simpson has both corrected and amplified the original research, producing an entirely new work based on contemporary evidence, rather than attempting a mere revision of Chappell. Thanks to recent discoveries of manuscripts and tablatures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Mr. Simpson has doubled the number of tunes printed in Popular Music. Five hundred and forty tunes are reproduced in the present work. The text traces the history of their use for broadsides and contains a mine of information about the instrumental pieces and ballad opera songs connected with the music. A list of sources and indexes of tune names, titles, first lines, and refrains of the ballads, plus an index of composers, poets, and publishers mentioned, make the book a long-awaited reference tool for researchers and students of English literature, music, and history, as well as for those interested in folk music and the broadside tradition. This volume is the result of more than two decades of research, during which time Mr. Simpson worked at the Huntington, Folger, Yale, and New York Public Libraries, and the Library of Congress in this country, and at the British Museum, the Bodleian, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Glasgow University Libraries, the National Library of Scotland, and the private library of the Earl of Crawford. He held a Dexter Fellowship in 1941, a Fulbright Award in 1950-51, and a Folger Library Fellowships in 1955."--Dust jacket. |
| Biographical note | "Mr. Simpson, who holds both arts and music degrees from Southern Methodist University, received the Ph.D. from Harvard, and is presently Professor of English at Stanford University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on music, and has brought out editions of classical and folk music. In the field of literature, he collaborated with Allan Nevins on An American Reader (1941) and with Leon Edel, T. H. Johnson, and Sherman Paul on Masters of American Literature (1959)."--Dust jacket. |
