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The Ballad Repertoire of Anna Gordon, Mrs Brown of Falkland Ed. by Sigrid Rieuwerts. Scottish Text Society, 5th ser., no. 8. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press for the Scottish Text Society, 2011. xiii + 339 pp. Music. Illus. Bibliog. Indexes. ISBN 978-1-89797-632-6. £35.00.
In the last decades of the eighteenth century a revival was under way in Scotland which led to the appearance in print of ballad collections of lasting importance, including Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03), Robert Jamieson's Popular Ballads and Songs (1806), William Motherwell's Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern (1827), Peter Buchan's Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland (1828), and others too numerous to mention. Yet, as anyone familiar with the subject will know, the publications just named, and others alluded to, remain the focus of debate - at least among those who care about such things - because their genesis is so complicated and so often opaque. Accordingly, massive importance is accorded to the survival of manuscripts that underlie at least a few of the ballads published in these collections - and none more so than the ballads of Anna Gordon, Mrs Brown of Falkland. Here we have the source material for a significant body of ballads used by Scott and Jamieson, and subsequently by Francis James Child, connected to a named individual for whom some background and context can be recovered.
Mrs Brown's lasting importance for ballad studies was assured from the moment Child wrote in the 'Advertisement' to the first part of The English and Scottish Popuhr Balhds: 'No Scottish ballads are superior in kind to those recited in the last century by Mrs Brown, of Falkland.'1 Child, of course, did not say precisely what he meant by 'superior in kind'. Neither did he have access to the full range of Mrs Brown materials. For the first time, these are brought together in Sigrid Rieuwerts's new edition, and the first thing to say is that she has done a superb job of clarifying the five different sets of ballads, distinguished as:
Brown A: a MS copy made by Robert Jamieson in 1799 from a (lost) MS of pre- 1783, containing twenty ballads originally written out by Mrs Brown's nephew Robert Eden Scott (also...