ABSTRACT
Child's access to broadside collections was enormously aided not only by the publications of William Chappell, author of Popular Music of the Olden Time and initial editor of the Roxburghe Ballads, but also by their correspondence about ballads and broadsides. Child's selection represents a slice of a tradition of ephemeral song or as Patricia Fumerton might say, a fragmentation or dismembering, one view of a much larger and more diverse lived reality of occasional verse, widely circulated orally and in print. In that very conundrum are the seeds of a more accurate, catholic perspective on the ballad as ephemeral literature, whether performed at a given moment in time or circulated in cheap print. Each might be popular, but popularity need not be limited to the oral. Child sought to amass a collection of ballads he deemed traditional; and one of his ruling assumptions seems to have been that the oral versions were prior, then manuscript, and finally print.
