Riddles Wisely Expounded
Celebrating the bicentennial birthday of Francis James Child
305 Ballads, Thousands of Versions
"Hundreds Of Years Old, These Songs Tour Like New." That's how NPR headlined a 2013 story about a new album by Anaïs Mitchell, likening the Child ballads to Shakespeare's plays and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm as stories that stand the test of time.
What are these ballads? Are they for children? No, not these days at least. They contain raw adult themes of murder, rape, incest, war, tragic violence, and ribald humor. They also contain evergreen virtues of love, honor, pride, loyalty, faith, hope, and justice. They are a river of song and story into which each generation dives in turn.
Lynn Noel and Lynn Feingold will take you back to the days before television and the internet, when ballad singing was an evening's entertainment and a deep-rooted custom. These two masters of traditional unaccompanied singing style have deep repertoires of dozens of Child ballads from Scotland, England, and North America, many learned in the oral tradition "knee to knee" with tradition-bearers like Ewan MacColl and Anita Best.
Francis James Child (1825-1896) was a Harvard professor whose life's work was the ten-volume collection of 305 themes and variations on "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads." FIrst intended as a scholarly resource, the Child ballads have become a sourcebook for rock stars and folksingers alike. Celebrate the bicentennial of Child's birth with this bouquet of ballads for Child's 200th birthday, wisely expounded by two of New England's finest ballad singers.
Lynn Noel
Lynn has studied and sung traditional ballads since childhood, inspired by Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Maddy Prior, June Tabor, Shirley Collins, Anita Best, and source singers from collections by Edith Fowke, Helen Creighton, and Helen Hartness Flanders. She has more than 30 Child ballads by heart, and loves to sing them back to back on long car rides as well as at festivals and folk clubs. For forty years, every Halloween at midnight by candlelight, Lynn sings the 44-verse shapeshifter ballad of Tam Lin, learned from the great Ewan MacColl and since passed on to young ballad singer and collector Nora Rodes.
In hundreds of monthly sessions since 2020, Lynn has gathered ballad singers from the West Coast to the UK and Europe in her online folk club, The Mermaid's Tavern, to sing the old ballads that still ring true with raw stories of human life. Each year in February, the Mermaid's Tavern celebrates the birthday of Francis James Child with a special session devoted to the many versions and variations of the 305 Child ballads.
Lynn Feingold
A former president of the Folk Song Society of Greater Boston, Lynn Feingold frequently organizes ballad circles, trad swaps, and the occasional “Ballads Around the Firepit.” She loves to host late-night ballad sings to hear older performers share the songs of their youth, working knee to knee with celebrated tradition bearers like Anita Best of Newfoundland. She performed traditional music of the colonial days for 27 years at Blanchard's Tavern in Avon, MA, with a repertoire ranging from Child ballads to tender love songs and hearty drinking songs.
Lynn and her sister Karen Haffner are co-organizers of the Traditional Ballad Singing Competition for Students held in Kingston, MA. The goal of the contest is to expose young people to traditional ballads and encourage their research, learning, and performance of a traditional ballad at the contest -- for cash prizes. Everyone who stands at the mic and delivers a ballad gets a modest cash prize, and every young person in the hall gets exposed to all the other ballads being performed by the contestants. The hall is packed with adoring fans of the young performers.