I would add my 2 cents' worth about the melodies!With ballads sung without accompaniment,they had to be memorable,durable because they were passed down without written music.For a lot of my older friends the melody was just a vehicle used to tell a story and it's not opera!..that kind of thing would be a distraction.. chord changes,modulations...

I missed this entire thread when we were away camping in the Northwoods of Pennsylvania. In addition to Jean Ritchies books, English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians by Cecil Sharp and Maude Karpeles and The Child Ballads by Francis James Child are excellent resources. Child's collection was originally titled The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. It contained 305 songs (lyrics only) with American variants. Tunes were added in 1960. I believe the original was 8 volumes. It is still available in print and digital editions. Sharps book was originally published in 1917 is still available in the used book market but most  scholars agree that the second and enlarged addition is the one to have. It contains 273 songs and ballads and 968 tunes. I bought a copy many years ago and paid $200 for it. I looked today and found a first printing of second edition for a mere $750. Since the copyright has expired on Sharp's work, it can be found in reprints and digital editions for a lot less. Both works are worth having for folk song researchers. Many of the individuals and groups involved in the so called folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s used songs from these works.

Ken

"The dulcimer sings a sweet song."

Those very old Anglo ballads came from a time generations before Jean Ritchie, when there was no instant source of news in rural areas... no newspaper delivery, radio, or tv.  They served useful as warnings about disasters, illness, or criminals... and taught lessons in morality and behavior.

John Knopf said "One thing I've noticed is how many of these songs dealt with disasters, death, sickness, loss of dear ones, etc."

Isn't that what a lot of current "pop" music lyrics are about? Only today it is sung in the first person, not the third.

"Today I hoed an acre of beans and split a cord of wood, I'd do the same tomorrow if the good lord said I could," isn't particularly entertaining. 

In addition to ballads, they also sang "play party songs," common hymns, etc.

Many collectors were seeking "old ballads" which "proved" connection to Elizabethan England and seldom notated the other stuff. There was political bias in the collection process.

In the spring term of 1968 I took a poetry class and while studying ballads we spent a week using a dulcimer set up in traditional, non-chromatic tunings (only one for a class of ten so we passed it around) . Our adjunct professor, a fan of Jean Ritchie, used a quill and noter but encouraged us to try that as well as “guitar style “.   It was helpful to hear subtle variations of cadence , timbre etc that might be missed when the music was absent.  Then came the summer of love and a Jimi Hendrix concert … Memories from a steel trap mind - many are rusty …

I read once about how some of the words, phrases, sentence structures, and pronunciations of what today might be considered to be a "mountain hillbilly" way of speaking... evolved directly from old Gaelic language.

Cecil Sharpe, who traveled through Appalachia over a century ago, was also struck by the number of old English ballads being sung in the region.  I do not find it surprising.

People tell stories.  Perhaps not all people, but all peoples.  Nowadays, we read books, watch TV or movies, or listen to the radio or podcasts or whatever. But before modern mass media, stories were oral, and some of those stories came in the form of songs.  A ballad is just a song that tells a story.  I don't find it surprising either that Jean Ritchie's family sang so many ballads or that so many of those ballads were ancient ones from the old world.  Old stories still have something to teach us, even stories from distant lands long ago.  Even if only implicitly, they tell us who we are and where we came from.  We still read and tell stories from the Bible, from the ancient world, from Elizabethan England, and so forth.  The ballads the Ritchie family sung were just part of the cultural repertoire they inherited, shared, and passed on.

What makes American folk music so rich, I think, is that those English ballads mixed here with other traditions: African-American field hollers and blues, work songs, native American chanting, Caribbean syncopation, spirituals, sea shanties, railroad songs, cowboy songs, etc.  And the music was not merely replicated, but expanded upon and rendered "modern" through new lyrics, new chords, new rhythms and tempos.  The Irish ballad The Wexford Girl was given new lyrics as the Knoxville Girl to tell the story of an American murder.  The Scottish song about migration to North America, The Bold Princess Royal, was given new lyrics as Sweet Betsy from Pike, the story of westward migration in the United States.  Rosin the Beau was used for the campaign song Lincoln and Liberty, the abolitionist Roll on Liberty Ball, and the song about settling in the Pacific Northwest, Acres and Acres of Clams.  But even when we add modern lyrics and chords to an old ballad, we still, as is the case with Rosin the Beau, sometimes sing the original versions as well.  Just because Bob Dylan wrote great lyrics to Fare Thee Well doesn't mean no one sings The Leaving of Liverpool anymore.  Just because Elvis made lots of cash with Love Me Tender doesn't mean people don't sing Aura Lee from time to time.

Ballads served as "entertainment," as @john-c-knopf says, but they were also news, biographies, moral fables, histories, and so much more.

I'm sure there are lots of reasons people might be drawn to older music and stories, but it is not surprising to me at all.  We still find Barbara Allen to be a compelling ballad, just as we find Antony and Cleopatra to be a compelling tragedy.

If memory serves, many songs in the Ritchie family came from "Uncle Jason" and Jean wrote of this in Singing Family of the Cumberlands .

https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2015/06/jean-ritchie-1922-2015/  

Here is a link for the Jean Ritchie group here at FOTMD: 

https://fotmd.com/strumelia/group/24/fans-of-jean-ritchie

Thanks, John, very insightful.

I listened to her rendition of Barbry Allan this morning and was taken by her ending every verse on scale step 2.  I kept thinking that perhaps she might resolve it in the final verse, but she did not, which was perhaps fitting, given the lyrics.

Alex, I think it was for family continuity and for entertainment in a time where computers, TVs and to some extent radio was non-existent.  Folks had to have entertainment of SOME kind, and this was an enjoyable way to spend some family time.

One thing I've noticed is how many of these songs dealt with disasters, death, sickness, loss of dear ones, etc.  Theirs was a hard existence in a hilly country that made farming and life in general very difficult.  The tunes often were in minor keys as well.

Hi,

A good week to you all.

I've been doing a deep dive into Jean Ritchie lately, for the dulcimer of course, but also for the words of the ballads.  What has struck me is that so many of these songs were even centuries old and from distant lands.  You all know this, of course.  But I find it so interesting that Kentucky folk would preserve lyrics that were so far removed from their day to day life.  We're all glad they did, but one must also wonder why.  (Needless to say, new songs were being composed as well.)

Does anyone who knows more about this than me have any insights they'd like to share?  That would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance and have a great week.