ROUD 54: Barbara Allen
AKA Barbara Ellen, Barbary Allen, Bonnie Barbara Allen, Sir John Graham
Super-ubiquitous today, thanks to its widespread transmission during the European colonisation of the Americas. It’s not the most complex and rich story for discussion, but its enormous popularity has led to *many* recorded versions. Most of these take a familiar form, but there are plenty of striking outliers to enjoy.
Music
Here’s the non-exhaustive Youtube playlist - I honestly ran out of steam after about ninety. There are plenty more if you care to look for them - but so many follow the same familiar melody. I’ll pull out some interesting highlights below.
1. Doris Day - a rare instance of traditional folk getting the full swinging big band treatment
2. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Sarah Makem’s haunting source recording from around 1960. Recorded by Jean Ritchie - her collection is remarkable for the incredibly clear recording quality - Ritchie brought the most advanced recording equipment from America to capture her favourite songs from the British Isles in the wild, and it’s a tremendous resource.
3. Just as a demonstration that it has been truly adopted by every genre imaginable, here’s Barbara Allen as a dark prog rock anthem.
4. This remarkable body/mouth music version from young folk innovator Cosmo Sheldrake takes it in some unusual but very pleasing directions.
5. Back to 1968, this unusual two-part tune from Shirley Collins, assisted by Dolly Collins on the harmoniflute, sneaks into your brain and nests there.
6. Another bit of genre hopping as here it gets a 1950s rock and roll makeover.
7. A personal favourite. Oscar Lolang from Indonesia starts unpromisingly with his out of tune guitar, but wait until he starts singing. Amazing, and a demonstration of the global reach of Anglospheric folk culture.
8. A spine-tingling duet from brilliant modern irish traditionalists Ye Vagabonds:
9. A very different version, based on the 1950s source recording Elizabeth Cronin from County Cork by those great modern unearthers of the interesting and archaic, The Furrow Collective.
10. This gives you everything you might expect from a Lisa Knapp interpretation, a spellbindingly minimal heartstring-snapper, it sounds like it’s been recorded echoing down the halls of an ancient candlelit castle.
11. Another unusual version from Scotland that deviates from the orthodoxy.
That’s probably enough from me, I’ll leave you to seek out your own remarkable versions, there are no shortage of them.
Research
This from “Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England” by Helen Hartness Flanders (1961) is a good overview of the depth and breadth of the ballad, and helpfully outlines some of the parts where variations occur.
Lots of remarkable old American source recordings of the song on this amazing album. The tracklisting does not list the singers, but you can find that info here on Discogs (and buy a copy if you have about £15 + P&P to spare).
I found that aforementioned album in this article on Jstor, which is an interesting account of the American tradition’s effect on the ballad.
Again on Jstor, fans of music theory will want to nerd out on this extensive two part examination of the tonal structure and melody of the ballad. It’s pretty intense stuff from the outset, you have been warned.
Barbara Allen appears in this article which appeals to my interconnectedness-ophilia - it is a description and examination of ballads which use a single rhyme - in other words, the end of each verse ends with the same word, which rhymes with a different word in each verse to to give a repetitive effect. Is that the best way of explaining it? Probably not. Hopefully you get the idea.
It has long been a popular song in Ireland. Here’s a nice old source recording from the Irish Traditional Music Archive.
And from Scotland, here from the 1970s is incredible singer/scholar Dr Jean Redpath from the superb Tobhar an Dualchais archive.
I love this recording of Ethel Findlater, and her introduction, again from Tobhar an Dualchais.
I found this article interesting. It is on the significance of gender when performing ballads, including Barbara Allen, which is discussed from page 305.