I was asked to be a judge in a ballad singing competition for teenagers and young adults. I have mixed feelings about this "competition" thing, but the end result is to get people singing, which I like. I promised I would do "Kemp Owyne," with which I have intense emotional connection dating back to early childhood. Apart from anything else, you ( Read more... )

I've been to Youth Traditional Song Weekend, and enjoyed it very much. Now I see what people were making a fuss about. I feel revived. It was a big deal for me: to sit and sing for hours on end with a big group of people, everybody bringing something different and important, and barely ever repeating a song. (And on the occasions we did, it was ( Read more... )

One day late for Saint Stephen's Day, a slightly rewritten ballad.  Now to find a good tune and learn it by heart--there aren't many people singing this one, even among ballad buffs.

Saint Stephen was a clerk once
In King Herod's hall,
He served him best at bread and cloth
As ever did befall.

( Read more... )

The Child Ballads: discuss.  Are they songs?  Stories?  Jacobean tragedies?  Poems?  Horror/SF/fantasy for a pre-cinema society?  As far as I'm concerned the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes, and YEAH for anybody who wants to sing me one.  Francis James Child (who was a Harvard professor and not the Englishman most people think him) did the ( Read more... )

Dear f'list,

Every time I've posted here about a problem that I face, you've helped me in some way.

Currently, I'm trying to decide where to go to graduate school.  Although my undergraduate degree will be in history, folklore interests me more than any other form of study.  Songs and ballads, most of all, but traditional stories, fairy tales, epics ( Read more... )

This is the first writing I ever had published. It ran in The Living Tradition, back in 2002. It was up online for a while at the magazine's website, but now that it's gone and I have my very own LJ, I feel a rampaging need to share it with everyone once again. (Coincidentally, James D. MacDonald recently wrote a humorous article called something ( Read more... )