Borders
The Borders incorporates southern regions of Scotland and northern regions of England that bound the Anglo-Scottish border. Areas within the Borders historically bore the brunt of Anglo-Scottish military conflict, as well as the antics of the Border Reivers, who performed armed raids from the late 13th century to the beginning of the 17th century. As a result, across the region are to be seen the ruins of many castles, abbeys and even towns, and the songs of the area are rich with incident!
Ballads
When we discuss ballads in the context of Scottish traditional music we are referring to the group of songs sometimes called ‘the classic ballads’ or simply ‘the big ballads’.
What defines a ballad? In a ballad, the story is told through a mixture of narrative and dialogue. We get to know the different characters in the story and follow their fortunes as events unfold. Ballads are often very long in comparison with other songs and require sustained listening. Stanzas usually contain two or four lines and there may be a refrain. Sometimes this is a repetition of the last line of each verse. Presumably refrains and repeating lines are there to allow participation by the audience – an endorsement of the performance as the tale unfolds. We don’t know who composed ballads, many are centuries old and tell of a historical event, or perhaps a supernatural happening. Versions of the same ballad story can often be found in oral tradition in many parts of the world.
Until the late 19th Century it was possible to buy a ‘chapbook’ or ‘broadsheet’ of ballads which might tell of some terrible disaster such as a murder or the loss of a ship, conveying the kind of information we get from popular newspapers today. Only the words were printed and an appropriate, well-known tune suggested, or else supplied by individuals as they pleased.
The American scholar, Francis James Child, spent many years collecting versions of ballads and organising them for publication in the late 19th century. He identified over 300 ballad ‘types’, or distinct tales, and relied heavily on the help of a number of Scottish collectors such as William Macmath of Galloway in gathering many versions from oral and manuscript sources. In his great work The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 vols.) F J Child gave each ballad a number, so that it could be easily recognised, and today these are often quoted along with the title of the ballad.
Unfortunately, Child concentrated mainly on gathering the texts of ballads, not their tunes. This work has since been done, however, by another American, Bertrand Harris Bronson, who has published many of Child’s ballads with their tunes in his Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (4 vols.) and the one-volume collection, The Singing Tradition of Child’s Popular Ballads.
Of the border ballads, which deal with incidents from that part of Scotland, one of the most famous is ‘The Dowie Dens of Yarrow’.
