Ballads

• The word "ballad" comes from Old French "balade"
• Ballads are a form of narrative: verses set to music
• Many ballads employ quatrains (stanzas consisting of four lines) with ABCB or ABAB rhyme schemes
• Stanzas are often followed by a refrain

Lord Randall

• The ballad's text consists of dialogue between a young Lord and his mother
• Similar ballads can be found in many parts of Europe, including Italy and Germany
• The earliest known version was recorded in 1629 in Verona

Summary

• Lord Randall returns home to his mother after visiting his lover
• Randall explains that his lover gave him a dinner of boiled eels
• Randall's hunting dogs die after eating the scraps of the meal
• Randall's mother realizes his son has been poisoned
• In some variants, Randall dictates his last will, dividing his possessions among family members and wishing damnation on his lover
• The lover's motive for poisoning Randall is never explained

The Roud Folk Song Index

• The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language
• The index is recognised as important by the English Folk Dance and Song Society
• It is compiled by Steve Roud. He started working on the Index around 1970 as a personal project
• It is used as a research aid correlating versions of English-language folk song lyrics that have been independently documented over the past centuries by different collectors
• It is possible to search the database to locate many variants of a particular song
• Each song has a unique identifier