ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in this book. It proceeds by outlining the currency of the story of Richard and Blondel in eighteenth-century antiquarian and music scholarship. This book begins its exploration of the politics of songs. A thorough-going account of political songs in Britain during the 1790s, equivalent to Mason's, has yet to be written, the fact that songs have often featured as evidentiary material. This book argues that the history of the psalm is crucial to understanding of politics of song in this period in its 'Orphic' sense and that the psalm is an important context for the song and ballad and vice versa. It explains the ballad history of King Richard in its own right, which has received little attention from scholars, using that history as exemplary of the long durée of the politics of song, illustrating how the topical contexts in which it was revived could interact with embedded histories and continuities.
