We start this week off in eighteenth century Scotland with "Burd Ellen," an exemplery ballad by Anna Gordon Brown (transcribed by her nephew, Robert Scott), which you can find on our PennSound Classics page.
In a 2011 Jacket2 commentary post, Al Filreis discusses the origins of the new recording and how it came to PennSound:
Ruth Perry of MIT [shown at right] has written a chapter for a volume being edited by Ellen Pollak, A Cultural History of Women in the Age of Enlightenment, to be published by Berg/Palgrave. This work will be part of an illustrated, six-volume Cultural History of Women being assembled with a general audience in mind. Ruth Perry's topic is Anna Gordon Brown, whose repertoire of English ballads was the first to be tapped and written down by antiquarians and literary scholars in the eighteenth century, at a time when scholars feared that the oral tradition was in danger of disappearing forever. It turns out that Ruth Perry, aside from being an eminent scholar of the ballad tradition in English, is a talented ballad singer herself. As of today, PennSound has added to its "Classics" page a studio recording of Perry performing "Burd Ellen," generally deemed to be one of the most beautiful of Brown's ballads. Ruth transcribes "Burd Ellen" in her forthcoming chapter, and discusses it as well. It is the hope of Ellen Pollak that the published book will refer to the PennSound URL so that readers can have easy permanent access to the recording, without the need of a CD inserted into the book. We at PennSound are happy to help with this project and any similar endeavor.
You can read more about the history of the piece in Filreis' J2 commentary and listen to Perry's performance here. "Burd Ellen" and many more interpretations of poetry that predates recording technology — from the ancient Greeks to Walt Whitman — can be found at PennSound Classics.
