This blog is undergoing essential maintenance

Just a note that I’m doing some work on the blog over the next few weeks, so if some things stop working that will be me, not quite getting it right…

The work has been prompted – nay, forced on me – by Dropbox’s decision to discontinue their Public Folder feature. The MP3 files embedded in each week’s blog post are all stored in a Dropbox Public Folder. And, unless I do something about it, all of those audio files will stop working after March 15th this year. In fact, I’ve paid for a bit of extra web space, have copied the MP3 files to it, and yesterday started editing all of the existing links on the blog. It’s not difficult – just a tedious copy and paste job – but it will take me a while: I have to fix 274 links in all.

When I’ve done that, I’ll have a look at fixing some of the broken images, which are quite common on the early blog posts. Mostly they’re broken because, since I started this blog in August 2011, the EFDSS Take Six Archive became the Full English, while the Bodleian’s Broadside archive is now Broadside Ballads Online. Those moves led to new URLs, so images being pulled in from the old sites no longer display. And then of course there are other sites which have been reorganised, and some, I suspect, that have just disappeared. Anyway I’m going to try to restore as much as I can.

If you do find a page where the audio doesn’t work, or images are missing, or links are broken, do a leave a comment so I know to have a look.

thanks
Andy

Week 265 – The Cruel Mother

Another week, another lady living in the North country, and once again things do not end well for her. This, of course, is much less to do with the fact that she lives in the North, than that she finds herself a character in a Child Ballad – and not many of those have a happy ending.

This very concise version of what is usually a much longer ballad was collected by Cecil Sharp from Mrs Eliza Woodberry of Ash Priors in Somerset (also the source of the version of ‘Come all you worthy Christian men’ in the Oxford Book of Carols). Sharp included it in his Folk Songs from Somerset, Series 4, and Sharp’s tireless assistant and evangelist Maud Karpeles printed it in her 2-volume collection, The Crystal Spring, which is where I learned it.

The Cruel Mother, as collected from Mrs Eliza Woodberry, from the Full English.

The Cruel Mother