Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published in ten parts from 1882 to 1893, contained the texts and variants of 305 extant themes written down between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unsurpassed in its presentation of texts this exhaustive collection devoted little attention to the ballad music, a want that was filled by Bertrand Harris Bronson in his four volume Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads.
In 1972, Bertrand Bronson published the fourth and final volume of The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, the culmination of decades of work gathering and organizing all of the available tunes for Child’s ballad texts.
The collection, nearly 2,200 pages of tunes and texts with notation for 4,120 tunes, was hailed as a milestone in ballad scholarship and has never been surpassed.
Loomis House Press, in collaboration with mudcat.org, CAMSCO Music and Princeton University Press, is pleased to make Bronson’s masterwork available to a new generation of scholars and musicians, and at 1970’s prices. The original volumes sold for $40 each; our facsimile edition is $40 per volume for paperback, and only $50 each for a durable library/textbook binding.
Reviews of The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads:
“The greatest single contribution to the scholarship of the ballad in this century” -The Times Literary Supplement
“One can safely say that this monumental work will be indispensable to all who would study the traditional ballad from any point of view ” -Journal of the American Musicological Society
“The uniquely inclusive and indispensable modern study of the traditional ballad tune and text in English. We have nothing at all like it and it is as unlikely to be superseded as Child’s magnum opus itself.” -The Musical Quarterly
Softcover: $40 per volume
Hardcover: $50 per volume
S&H (4 volumes) $10 (in US)
Email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or call 800/548-FOLK {3655} to Order.
sorry if this seems like a shameless plug, but it really is a good product made by good people
