Top Pop Songs of the 1600s

What were the top musical hits of Shakespeare’s England? What lyrics were stuck in people’s heads? What stories did they sing on repeat?

The 100 Ballads project is a deep dive into the hits of early modern England—a kind of 17th-century Billboard Hot 100. Drawing from thousands of surviving printed ballads, researchers Angela McShane and Christopher Marsh have ranked the most popular songs of the period. These broadsides—cheaply printed sheets sold for a penny—offer surprising insight into the period’s interests, humor, and even news headlines.

McShane and Marsh discuss what these ballads tell us about moral norms, sensationalism, and everyday life. Some are instructive, some are bawdy, and some are unexpectedly feminist.

This episode brings to life the soundscape of Shakespeare’s world with clips from newly recorded versions of the most popular ballads and a look at how the team developed their ranking system.

>> Explore the 100 Ballads project and hear the songs yourself

>> View the Titus Andronicus ballad broadsheet in the Folger collection

>> Listen to the Titus Andronicus ballad and learn more on 100 Ballads

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

Christopher Marsh is Professor of Cultural History at Queen’s University, Belfast. He has published extensively on various aspects of society and culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. His most relevant book in relation to the 100 Ballads project is Music and society in early modern England (Cambridge, 2010). This is an overview of music-making in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it includes chapters on musicians, dancing, bell-ringing, psalm-singing and, of course, ballads.

Angela McShane is an Honorary Reader in History at the University of Warwick. She is a social and cultural historian, researching the political world of the broadside ballad and the political and material histories of intoxicants and the everyday. She has published widely on political balladry, including numerous book chapters, and journal articles in Past and Present, Renaissance Studies, Journal of British Studies, Journal of Early Modern History, Popular Music Journal and Media History. She is also the author of a reference work, Political Broadside Ballads in Seventeenth Century England: A Critical Bibliography (2011). A monograph on the broadside ballad trade and its politics in seventeenth-century Britain is forthcoming with Boydell and Brewer. She is also a Co-Investigator for a related website and book project: “Our Subversive Voice: The history and politics of protest music 1600-2020.”

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 6, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: Can you name the top hit on the pop charts right now?

At the time I’m recording this, number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 is “Luther” by Kendrick Lamar and SZA.

[CLIP: “Luther” by Kendrick Lamar and SZA]

LAMAR AND SZA:
If it was up to me

I wouldn’t give these nobodies no sympathy

I’d take away the pain, I’d give you everything

KARIM-COOPER: Maybe you’d do better with the top hits from when you were 25, or 15? You don’t have to tell me how long ago that was.

[Music fades in under Karim-Cooper’s voiceover.]

Here’s one that will definitely make you feel less old. The hottest single from… four hundred years ago?

[CLIP:] “A proper new Ballad, intituled, The wandring Prince of Troy.”

To the tune of “Queene Dido.” Performed by Andy Watts, Giles Lewin, and Raph Mizrake.]

SINGER:
When Troy towne for ten yeeres wars
withstood the Greeks in manfull wise,
Yet did their foes increase so fast,
that to resist none could suffice.
Wast lye those walls that were so good,
And corne now growes where Troy Towne stood.
Eneas wandring Prince of Troy,
when he for land long time had fought,
At length arrived with great joy,
to mighty Carthage walls was brought:

KARIM-COOPER: A project called 100 Ballads has attempted to figure out which songs were most popular in Early Modern England.

This is number one on their chart, a proper new ballad entitled “The Wandring Prince of Troy.” Catchy.

[Music fades]

You can find the project online at 100ballads.org. There, you can see images of the broadsides—sheets of paper with the lyrics printed on them, often with illustrations.

The site also has recordings of artists singing the top 120 hits on the chart.

To find out more about 100 Ballads, we reached out to two of the project’s organizers, Angela McShane of the University of Warwick, and Christopher Marsh of Queen’s University, Belfast.

Here’s Barbara Bogaev in conversation with Chris Marsh and Angela McShane.

____________

BARBARA BOGAEV: Maybe you could explain because there are many collections of these starting from way back when, from the dawn of ballads probably—I mean, Samuel Pepys had a collection of ballads. Why, what possessed you to think, “Oh, we need a website of this? Something’s missing.”

CHRISTOPHER MARSH: Ballads are heavily used by scholars in cultural history and in literary scholarship, but they have tended not to think of the ballads as songs. They’ve tended to think of them as texts rather than songs with tunes and with pictures.

Also, no attempt had previously been made to identify a list of bestsellers. You know there are thousands of ballads that survive from the period. So, it seemed worth trying to devise a methodology that would enable us to say “These are a hundred or 120 of the most successful songs” because it seems to me that the more successful a collection of songs was the more you can learn lessons about commonplace tastes at the time and what they were interested in. So, it was a kind of “Top of the Pops” or a “Hot 100” for the 17th century is what drove us, I think.

BOGAEV: So, that was the missing, the secret sauce that you were missing. Angela, you folks write also that ballads were once an important part of news media. Do you mean that in the sense of like sensationalist tabloids or political analysis or what?

ANGELA MCSHANE: One of the things to bear in mind is that there’s no song on the website unless it has been a hit. That means to say that it’s been republished several times, often over a fairly long period, which suggests that when we think about news we need to ask, you know, “What do we mean by that?” Do we mean it’s something like a newspaper that’s telling you about what happened yesterday? Well, obviously if a song’s been reprinted over the last 50, 75 years, it’s clearly not telling you about what happened yesterday. It is telling you about something that’s more essential than that. It’s telling you something about what we always find interesting, what we always find important.

BOGAEV: Well, when you say that what I think of is ripped from the headlines.

MCSHANE: Well, some of them set a tone of morality—what’s right, what’s wrong, and so on—but one of my favorites, which is called “The Crafty Miss” doesn’t at all stick with any of the rules.

[CLIP: “The Crafty MISS:/ Or, An Excise man well fitted.” To the tune of “Moggie’s Jealousie.” Performed by Emily Portman.]

EMILY PORTMAN:
There was an Excise-Man so fine,
rode into the county of Kent,
And there he received much corn,
for that very purpose he went:
He met with a jolly brave miss,
her beauty was fair to behold,
But she gave a Judas kiss,
and shew’d a him trick for his Gold.

MCSHANE: The crafty miss is a thief. She is supposed to be being seduced by an excise man, but what she actually does is steal his horse, steal his money, leave him to be put in prison, and she’s unquestionably the heroine of her song. So, yeah, I’m not sure how ultimately moral all songs were.

BOGAEV: Well, it sounds like it tells you a lot about gender roles in the early modern period and apparently women did sing and hawk these ballads as well, so that’s interesting.

MARSH: Certainly, I mean, there were lots of ballads have a sort of what seems to be a sort of female interest line going on. There were women singing. There were definitely lots of women purchasing them, as well. Lots of them are about gender relations, often taking quite a sympathetic view of the woman’s position, which is interesting because people have tended to view sort of ballads of this period as kind of misogynistic. There is misogynistic matter in lots of ballads, but it kind of seems like the ones who are really successful don’t have a huge amount of that material. So, that’s kind of interesting and I think it tips me towards thinking that actually female purchases of these songs were a really kind of hefty and important part of the market.

BOGAEV: Maybe we should get some basics down, too, and define some terms: for instance, what’s the definition of a ballad? And did all ballads originate from the oral tradition, which would make sense that it would be so hard to pin down who wrote them. Or did the oral tradition ballads and the later print versions coexist and kind of reinforce each other?

MARSH: Early modernists think of a ballad as a sheet song. So, it was a sheet with the lyrics of the song printed on it—often from the early 17th century onwards, with a picture as well and a nominated tune. So, you went into a marketplace, and you bought one of these for usually a penny, seems to have being the going rate. They really are the kind of pop music of the early modern period. It’s a sort of early commercially organized venture to put songs out as widely as you possibly can.

In terms of the oral roots of them, it is very, very difficult to know because until a song is written down in a form that we can look at it you don’t know it existed. So, I mean, there may well be a lot of songs that were circulating and then somebody decided this would go well as a printed item, but often we can’t be sure. I think certainly there are lots of them that are sort of thought up and composed on the spot as new songs.

There are also lots of broadside ballads which emerge out of plays in the theater. So, if a play was particularly successful, there might be a spinoff ballad. The ballad on the site about Titus Andronicus is a really good example of that, where in the 1590s Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus was staged, was successful, and within a year there was also a ballad, which sort of condensed it, set it to a tune.

So, there are lots of different sources for the songs.

BOGAEV: And where did the tunes come from? Because there’s not notation on the broadsides, right? So, where did the tunes come from and how did people who bought them know how to sing them from having seen the plays or heard them on the street?

MARSH: Yeah, well, I mean, one of the ways around that problem was that the same tunes tend to be used for many, many different ballads. Some ballads have a new tune, in which case the idea was that you would learn it from the ballad seller—the ballad seller would sing the ballad out in the marketplace. Often, it would be a tune you already knew; if it wasn’t, you’d have to try and remember it. It must be quite difficult. I suspect that musicians were quite heavily involved in the dissemination of the tunes as well. But again, as with the origins of the ballads, the origins of the tunes are very hard to establish. They just sort of appear, and they’re used again and again.

BOGAEV: It’s so interesting to see this glimpse of the early music industry, because I’m picturing musicians being hired on by these people or maybe they’re working together, and they sing in the marketplace these ballads as a kind of ad for the broadsides. Is that right, Angela?

MCSHANE: Well, if you’re going to have instruments with you then the chances are, number one, you’re not in the marketplace, and number two, you’re indoors and what you’re selling is the whole song and you’re going to perform it.

There’s probably a bit of a difference between people who are mostly selling broadsides—and usually books as well just like they do in the shops—because those people are probably just singing the beginning of a song, as you’ve just said, you know, advertising a song really, and then, people who are singers who might well be selling songs, they might write them too, and they, you know, pick them up and they have them as part of their repertoire.

There’s actually a pamphlet, Chris might remember what it is, where it draws a distinction for a ballad singer that, you know, he’s nothing but a vagrant if he’s on his own but when he joins in with a couple of instrumentalists then suddenly, they’re a musical company. And that’s pretty much how it works, you know, they’re all freelancing, and they join up with other people, or they sing alone, depending on what the gigs are.

BOGAEV: And so, since these were so varied, these songs and the performance venues are so varied, this is how different classes are encountering them. They’re like high and low brow, some people are performing at court, and some people are just performing on the street and in taverns.

MCSHANE: Yes, I mean, I don’t think the people who perform at court tend to be certainly on the streets, but you will get people who might play at court who might well play in taverns. And people who might play in the theaters who might then play in taverns and inns—which are quite posh places. Because, you know, the theaters get closed, and in the post-Restoration, there aren’t any tier two theaters, so it means that, you know, there’s lots of musicians and they want work.

BOGAEV: So, getting back to the seminal question I wanted to ask, how do you figure out what the top of the charts was? Is it that there are so many references to them or that they lasted so long?

MARSH: It’s a combination of things. There are no sales figures and very, very little information on print runs, for example, you don’t really know how many of these were being printed. But what you do have is a publication record. We count the number of editions of a ballad that were published. Obviously, if a ballad was published in multiple editions, it was selling out and being reprinted.

We also looked at songs which had a long, long, long life, many editions, but spread over sometimes a century, even two centuries.

But we also looked—this is Angela’s specialty—for songs which may be produced in two or three editions in a short period of time, indicating that they were, you know, hits of the moment.

We also looked at evidence of registration. If the publishers felt that they had a hit on their hands they’re much more likely to register the ballad with the Stationers’ Company.

We also looked at whether the particular songs using a tune sometimes generated new names for the tune. So, if a song was very, very successful, set to a named tune, the tune might after that take on a new name that was based on the words of the song that had been successful.

And just one other to mention, the ballads are often illustrated. We also looked at whether publishers commissioned new artwork for the ballads. Most of the woodcut pictures, like the tunes, were recycled from ballad to ballad. But, as a publisher, it seems that if you felt you had a really successful song on your hands, you might go to the extra expense of commissioning a picture which was specific to that ballad.

So, although we have no sales figures, the six or seven different kinds of indicators, they do all tend to point towards the same ballads, which is sort of  reassuring. So, we don’t make any claim that this is the top hundred of the 17th century, but we’re pretty confident that these are very successful ballads.

BOGAEV: Okay, I’m appreciating the detective work that went into this.

MARSH: Yeah, it took much longer than we thought it would. It sort of ate us alive for about five years—

MCSHANE: —10 years, Chris.

MARSH: 10 years, 10 years, yeah.

BOGAEV: Well, you mentioned Shakespeare, Chris, earlier so let’s get to that one. As you pointed out, it was inspired by the play Titus Andronicus, and it’s called “The Lamentable and Tragical History of Titus Andronicus.”

[CLIP]: “The Lamentable and Tragical History of Titus Andronicus.” To the tune of “Fortune My Foe.” Performed by Giles Lewin, Vivien Ellis, Steno Vitale, and Steve Banks.]

VIVIEN ELLIS:
You noble minds and famous martial wights
That in defence of Native Country fights:
Give ere to me that ten years fought for Rome,
Yet reapt disgrace at my returning home.

In Rome I liv’d in fame full threescore years

[Music fades.]

BOGAEV: Wow, this song is more than 17 minutes long, so we can’t play the whole thing, but is it more or less gory than Shakespeare’s Titus?

MARSH: Well, that’s quite a contest. I do think, actually, that in the ballad, although it’s 17 minutes long, the action is so concentrated because the action from the play is condensed, and it’s almost all there. So, I mean, the body count is enormous. I think 32 out of 34 people mentioned in the ballad are dead by the end. There’s blood everywhere, there’s mutilation with Lavinia having her hands cut off, and all the blood from the play is kind of concentrated in the sheet.

The fact that this was a kind of hit song of the 1590s, and was still issued, you know, many, many decades later, I think it does tell us something about the kind of tastes of the early modern population. I mean, they did lap up horror and gore in some of these ballads. I mean, it’s not the only one. There’s an awful lot of death and violence in the songs as a whole.

BOGAEV: Yes, you tally up the body count in these 120 songs and it’s shocking.

MARSH: Yes, I did at some point. I think, I can’t remember exactly, but I think it’s over three thousand. There are a few battle ballads, so, of course, they push the numbers up a bit. But it’s all much blacker and much darker than I think, a kind of mainstream top 100 of any sort today would be.

I know you can find, you know, dark and dismal music in the deeper corners of our culture. But stuff that was best-selling then was full of death, I mean there are more lively songs, but a lot of it is very bloody. So, I think that’s actually one of the revelations of the website because I think before people had tended to think of early modern songs as, kind of, you know, light and lascivious. The phrase bawdy ballads is one that we’ve all heard—

BOGAEV: —Dirty diddies.

MARSH: Yeah, that tends to be the assumption, and that tends to be what musicians want to play in concerts and on CDs, but this exercise—looking at the actual evidence and seeing what were the most, you know, what were seriously successful songs—it reveals a few of those ballads but an awful lot that are much more serious, much more weighty than we perhaps imagined.

BOGAEV: It was a dark and violent time, I mean, there’s a lot of political violence, for sure, a lot of wars and death, and Titus was a very popular play, so I can see why the ballad would be really popular. And, of course, ballads showed up in Shakespeare performance. Are there any examples among your list?

MARSH: There are references. There’s a reference to a ballad about the biblical figure Susanna. So, in Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch sings, he’s drunk and he sings a line which goes “There dwelt a man in Babylon, lady, lady” and that is the sort of slightly garbled version of the first line of one of the hit ballads.

[CLIP]:

“An Excellent Ballad, intituled, The Constancy of Susanna.” To an excellent New tune. Performed by Andy Watts, Giles Lewin, Vivien Ellis, and Steno Vitale.]

VIVIEN ELLIS:
There was a man in Babylon,
of reputation great by fame,
He took to wife a fair woman
Susanna was she cal’d by name

[Music fades.]

MARSH: So yes, there are references to some of the songs in Shakespeare, but more broadly, Shakespeare clearly knew ballad culture very intimately. There are lots of references to ballads in his plays, not necessarily just to the ones that made it onto our website, but, you know, the famous Desdemona’s “Willow Song” in Othello. She says, “The song tonight will not go from my mind.” I think we’ve all had experience of a song that won’t shift. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom wakes from a vision and says he’s going to get Peter Quince to write a ballad about it. So, the idea of writing ballads about funny things that have happened is very much part of Shakespeare’s world, and I think he’s really tapped into it. He was clearly very musical. He knows that ballads are happening and that they’re developing, and he clearly follows this closely, I think.

BOGAEV: I wonder if he would’ve been a Swiftie [laughter].

Did it go both ways? I think the play Arden of Faversham was inspired by a broadside ballad, wasn’t it?

MARSH: Yes, it does happen both ways. We said with Titus Andronicus that the play clearly came first, and then the ballad, but there are several other cases, particularly in the 1590s, there are some lost plays—our number six ballad is called The English Merchant, and there was a play that was a spinoff from that ballad called The Merchant of Emden, it’s a lost play, unfortunately. A really interesting example is Thomas Heywood’s play, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, in the late 1590s, because I’m pretty sure that what he imagined himself doing in that play was tapping into the success of two of our hit ballads, one called “Edward IV and the Tanner of Tamworth,” and the other about Jane Shaw, Edward IV’s mistress, which were both really successful songs that had come out recently. I think that what Heywood is doing then is picking up on the success of these ballads and then writing a play around them. So yeah, it definitely goes both ways and quite frequently you can’t really be sure which one came first. It’s definitely a symbiotic relationship between balladry and the theater.

BOGAEV: Well, another big category you point out is, and you’ve said already, is romantic betrayal for these ballads—and it’s still a popular theme in pop music, in all music. One of the most popular of this ilk is on your list, and it’s called “A Godly Warning for all Maidens.”

[CLIP: “A Godly Warning for all Maidens.” To the tune of “The Ladies Fall.” Performed by Andy Watts.]

ANDY WATTS:
You dainty Dames so finely fram’d,
of beauties chiefest mold,
And you that trip it up and down,
Like Lambs in Cupid’s fold:
Here is a Lesson to be learn’d,
a lesson in my mind,
For such as will prove false in love,
and bear a faithless mind.

BOGAEV: So, that’s a taste of it. It’s a pretty, singable, memorable tune. Is that why it was so popular?

MARSH: I think that’s one of the reasons it was so popular. I think it’s got lots going on. It’s got the supernatural abduction. It’s got the breach of promise, which was something which really upset people at the time. It’s got a great tune.

I think one of the things that strikes me about these super songs, these kinda really successful songs, is the way they kind of dramatize and exaggerate everyday experiences or common experiences or common fears. So, the fear of betrayal, the fear of not being able to cope with betrayal, the fear of what happens if you are the betrayer—

BOGAEV: Fear of haunting.

MARSH: Fear of haunting, yes. That’s all in there. There’s suicide in that song as well. So, it really ticks a whole load of dark boxes in terms of people’s anxieties. I think lots of the ballads do that. They’re kind of working with people’s fears and anxieties and preoccupations. They’re often sort of dramatizing, exaggerating, them, but also perhaps helping by doing that. Helping people to think through their own dilemmas and their own difficulties in relationships, you know. So, it’s kind of like it’s stuff to think with in a way as you face your hopefully slightly more mundane daily difficulties.

BOGAEV: Well, Angela, these morality tales like this song, are they kind of like social engineering? Or like Grimms’ folk tales? Are we meant to learn from the darkness, and they instill fear and train listeners to follow a saintly path?

MCSHANE: There’s very obviously, if we look at ballads overall, if you look through all the different categories of topic area, then morality does play a big part, in particular the older ones that keep going for a very long time. They become kind of learning tools, often perhaps for young children I think. They’re used as a way of frightening them as a way of teaching them particular kinds of lessons. One of them is the woman who’s lying in bed leaving her hundred lessons to her children.

[CLIP: “An Hundred Godly Lessons.”To the tune of “Dying Christians Exhortation.” Performed by Vivien Ellis and Steno Vitale.]

VIVIEN ELLIS:
The gain is great which shall ensue,
good counsel doth direct,
Their ways and actions for the best,
that do it not neglect.

[Music fades.]

MCSHANE: It all seems a bit grim to us, but it was an easily digestible way to understand what’s right and what’s wrong, I guess. But you do wonder whether by the end of the century some people found them a bit of a joke? Because there’s a lot of new kinds of songs coming out and so on. I mean, certainly things like Robin Hood get used as a joke in discourse amongst, you know, more learned people, although they also love a Robin Hood song.

BOGAEV: Oh, I feel a little less bad. Every time I hear one of these ballads I think of Monty Python and the manwith the coconuts.

MCSHANE: Absolutely! I mean, some of them, you do wonder whether actually this has got to be funny. I was at a conference, and somebody was singing one of the particularly long, lugubrious ones and eventually after about seven “woe is me” verses everybody started cracking up laughing, you know, it was just so funny. And of course—

BOGAEV: You want to kill the troubadour.

MCSHANE: It is quite possible that that was intentional, or that it became intentional over time, and that’s the other—Chris won’t like this—[laughter]

MARSH: [Laughing] No. Well, I think a song like An Hundred Godly Lessons, I don’t know, I don’t think that was ever comedy really. I mean, I can see how it’s comedy now but I don’t really think it was comedy in the early modern period.

BOGAEV: Well, I love you bickering, that’s great [laughter]. But this a kind of a question in a different direction. You also make the point on the website that many of these early modern ballads survive in folk songs in later periods. So, they were foundational, not only for folk songs, but you all argue that these ballads are foundational for pop songs now. So, trace that throughline for us.

MARSH: Yeah, I think in terms of the folk songs, yes, quite a lot of them are, as far as we know, the originators of really widely dispersed modern folk songs like “The Norfolke Gentleman,” which is the tale of orphans, children, being abandoned in the woods—

[CLIP: “The Norfolke Gentleman his last Will and Testament.” To the tune of “Rogero.” Performed by Vivien Ellis and Steno Vitale.]

VIVIEN ELLIS:
Now ponder well you parents deare,
the words which I shall write,
A dolefull story you shall hear,
which time hath brought to light.

[Music fades.]

MARSH: Became the “Babes in the Wood” folk song, which was widely collected by folk song collectors in England and in America.

[CLIP: “Babes in the Wood.”]

SINGERS:
O, don’t you remember
A long time ago
Those two little babies
Their names I don’t know
They strayed away
One bright summer day

[Music fades.]

MARSH: In terms of pop singing, I do think it’s the first time when, you know, a real big business, a sort of commercial operation to sell songs as widely as possible with kind of shifting as many sheets as you possibly can being the economic bottom line, it’s the first time that really happened on this scale.

BOGAEV: So, in terms of the business of the music industry that’s where you see the throughline as opposed to the structural building of a song.

MARSH: Yes. I think in terms of actual songs I think it’s hard to see—I mean, you can see these direct lines from ballads to folk songs but I don’t think you can see these direct lines from early modern ballads into specific modern pop songs. But just the preoccupation with love and relationships that dominated early modern balladry is still what dominates pop today. Other things have changed a bit—we don’t listen to many hit songs about executions.

BOGAEV: No, or songs like, what was the one about the battle between two clans?

MARSH: Oh, that would be the “Chevy Chase Ballad.” Yeah, massive, massive hit.

BOGAEV: Massive hit, and it was about these two clans fighting, also body count all over the place.

[CLIP“A Memorable Song on the unhappy hunting in Chevy-Chase.”To the tune of “Flying Fame.” Performed by Ian Giles.]

IAN GILES:
God prosper long our Noble King,
our lives and safties all,
A woful hunting once there did
in Chevy Chase befall:
To drive the Deer with hound & horn
Earl Piercy took his way,

[Music fades.]

MCSHANE: The tune is the thing that really lasts for that one. So, the tune gets used forever, some of the time you know. The song may not be being printed, but the tune is continually used.

BOGAEV: So, the tune of a memorable song on the unhappy hunting in Chevy Chase about the battle between two clans in the Scottish Borderlands in 1388 lasted for centuries.

MCSHANE: Yeah, yeah, well, it was used a lot, but that’s the thing, the tune name is Chevy Chase which is a catchy title and it’s used all the time because absolutely everybody knows it.

MARSH: It’s interesting, though, the 17^th-century tunes don’t really survive beyond the 19th century. Most collected folk song isn’t using the original tunes, you know, the tunes have changed. The other thing I was just going to comment on is pure folk song aficionados like to think of the songs originating organically within a culture and never being written down. But one of the really striking things is the continual interplay between the oral tradition and the printed tradition. If you look across the centuries, quite often there’s a shortened Victorian broadside which takes the original song, you know, sort of reduces it drastically, and then that’s clearly the source for the folk song, which then maybe reduces and edits it further. There’s a dance between print and orality that’s just going on continuously through the ages which I think is fascinating.

BOGAEV: It is! All of this stuff about the early modern music industry and how it worked is so interesting. I noticed that when you listen to these ballads there’s lots of very clear kinds of advertising or sales pitches in them, like in the beginning they’ll be singing, “Come on over here and listen closely” kind of things or warnings that you have to keep listening to the end of the song.

MARSH: Yeah, they’re skillfully set up for performance, you know. They’re skillfully set up to aid the ballad singer as he or she is trying to shift his or her wares in the marketplace. I think that’s often why you get the long titles, which to us look like, you know, terrible spoilers because it tells you exactly who’s going to die and how in the beginning, but it’s so that the ballad singer can ring that out right at the start loudly and gather people in who then want to hear the song. Often the opening verses are kind of, you know, come gather around people wherever you are. Gathering lines at the beginning are very kind of widely distributed.

BOGAEV: I have to ask you both where you find these ballads, and what kinds of ballad collections are there out there?

MCSHANE: So, the biggest collections that we have were assembled out of smaller collections. So, smaller 17th century collections get massed into enormous 19th and early 20th century collections that are held in places like Harvard, the Beinecke, the Huntington, the British Library, of course, and the National Library of Scotland. So, these are owned ultimately by big 19th-century and early 20^th-century collectors.

BOGAEV: You write often in the essays about how the collections, for instance, Samuel Pepys, say something about the person, what they were attracted to. It seems like Pepys was a very paranoid husband, worried about his wife’s strength. Is that what he tended towards, the Betrayed Love collection?

MCSHANE: Yeah, he had a strained kind of marriage relationship with his wife. His wife employed a dancing master to come into the house, and Samuel Pepys would check that she was wearing underwear before she went for her dancing lessons.

He didn’t have any children. He was clearly worried about being cuckolded, and he actually collected, you could actually prove it statistically, he collected a higher proportion of cuckold ballads than any other collector. So, it clearly was kind of influencing his musical tastes somewhat. Because he was a naval administrator, he also buys a lot of songs about the sea, and about seafarers and sailors, and so on. So, you can, to a degree, read something of the collector through the nature of the collection.

We are totally dependent as modern scholars on these collectors because ballads were normally regarded as a sort of ephemeral, throwaway form. You pinned them up till they fell to pieces, and then you used them for toilet paper or for lining a cake tin or whatever it might be. So, where you don’t have collectors, you don’t have the resources that you can look at, so, although Samuel Pepys might be a slightly questionable individual in some ways, we are incredibly grateful that he took the trouble to collect so many broadside ballads.

BOGAEV: I’m feeling kind of sorry for him, or actually for his wife right now. Some of these top songs were kind of speaking the news of the day, or doing political analysis, or battle recounting of the day, or a kind of history lesson. What do you see as a modern-day equivalent? I was thinking, were they kind of like the TikToks of their time, or TikToks are like this now? Or musical parody? Or Broadway like Hamilton?

MARSH: I guess musical theater, although when you ask that question, my mind went immediately to Game of Thrones because lots of the really successful ballads are set in a slightly mysterious, distant past. There is violence and there are dragons and there are heroic men fighting each other, or kings with mistresses. So, it’s a fascination with a sort of vague, violent, romanticized sort of past.

MCSHANE: But I think also there’s a link to, you know, people who are out singing satirical songs outside political meetings, probably town halls as we speak, where they are indeed satirizing all the people that are doing politics, making their opinions known, and these sorts of songs are there. They’re not really wanting to tell you what happened, they’re kind of expecting you to know that, but they are making you feel big things about it, to feel angry or to feel like you want to have change, and stuff like that. So, quite a lot of the songs that we have on the website are indeed songs that were campaigning or protesting, and they became hugely popular. One of the songs, which is probably the most successful protest song of all time, which a lot of people would know is “Lilliburlero.” It was called “A New Irish Song”. It was credited with singing James II off his throne.

[CLIP: “A New Song.” To the tune of “Lilliburlero.” Performed by Andy Watts, Giles Lewin, Jub Davis, Ian Craigan, and Christopher Marsh.]

SINGERS:
Ho, Brother Teague, dost hear de Decree,
Lil-li Burlero Bullen a–la;
Dat we shall have a new Debittie,
Lili-li Burlero Bullen a–la:
Lero, lero, lero, lero, Lilli burlero bullen a–la;
Lero, lero, lero, lero, Lilli burlero bullen a–la.

MCSHANE: The power of some of these songs is really quite extraordinary.

MARSH: Just in terms of modern resonances, Barbara, I just thought of karaoke as well, because in a way broadside ballads are sort of do-it-yourself pop music. You take the sheet, you learn the tune, then you give it a go for yourself. But I think you do have a difference. If you go to a karaoke bar and sing a Taylor Swift song, you’ve got Taylor Swift’s rendition in your mind, and you’re probably trying to get somewhere as close to that as you can, whereas in the 17th century, they just didn’t have that sort of model performance upon which to base their own. They had to make up their own performance.

BOGAEV: You know, we’ve been playing clips all throughout this, but who are we listening to? Who are the people performing?

MARSH: Yes, very good and important question. We have lots, lots of people.. We say particular thank you to Andy Watts and the Carnival Band who did an enormous amount of work in the recordings. But then we also have all sorts of other singers: Vivian Ellis, Benny Graham, Nancy Kerr, Maddy Prior, John Kirkpatrick. I think we have 20 to 30 performers, all told.

BOGAEV: Are these professional singers who love ballads or you tapped them because—

MARSH: It’s a mixture. Some of them are specialists in early music, others are modern folk singers. But then there’s also the “Lilliburlero” song that Angela was mentioning a minute ago. It’s sung by a kind of street singer from Oxford with an absolutely enormous voice. So, we have a full range. We really didn’t want to nail down a definitive style of performance. So, we tried to cover the full range, so there are trained voices, untrained voices, some of the songs were accompanied, lots of them are unaccompanied. We tried to open up as many possibilities for performance rather than sort of implying there’s one way of doing these.

BOGAEV: So wonderful to talk with you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

MCSHANE: Thank you.

MARSH: It was a great pleasure. Thank you very much, Barbara.

KARIM-COOPER: That was Christopher Marsh and Angela McShane, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

You can check out their top ballads, view images of the broadsheets themselves, and hear audio of performances at one-hundred-ballads-dot-org

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Louis Nash in London, Dan Quick in Belfast, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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