ABSTRACT
The ballads of Anna Gordon, better known as Mrs Brown of Falkland, constitute the oldest extant corpus (repertoire of one singer) in Anglo-Scottish balladry. They were mostly learned before 1759, at a time when the Northeast was still largely nonliterate, and the old conditions of life had not yet been disrupted by social upheaval. For Child, these ballads provided a touchstone of quality: ‘No Scottish ballads are superior in kind to those recited in the last century by Mrs Brown of Falkland.’ 1 That they are among the oldest and best of ballad texts provides warrant enough for a study of the corpus, but their age and quality are of secondary, though related, importance to their major distinction: they exemplify the traditional mode of oral composition by which ballads were once created and transmitted. Anna Gordon’s ballads, wrote her father, ‘proceded upon a system of manners, and in a stile of composition, both words and music, very peculiar, and of which we could recollect nothing similar’. 2
