By the numbers, a brief note on Child and Roud numbers

As I compile my list of songs for this project (and possibly for work beyond this project) you'll notice some of them have little annotations after the title that say things like "Child 84" and "Roud 54."

These don't mean that the song was written by the 84th child or something weird like that, but instead refer to the song's place in one of two scholarly listings of English-language folk songs. The first is the collection of 305 songs known as the "Child Ballads." These were collected in the 1800s by Harvard professor Francis James Child, and though there are far more than 300 known traditional songs, a huge number of the ones that are still sung to this day are variations on songs from the collection.

The Roud Folk Song Index is a contemporary database, with more than 20,000 songs collected and cross-referenced by Steve Roud, a British librarian. Roud's database, which is hosted here by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library is a fantastic scholarly resource which can help both performers and academics, as well as casual listeners, track down the roots of various songs.

The reason these numbers are helpful is that many of these songs have several popular variations, and can differ greatly by region or from one performer to the next. For example, the song I mentioned at the start, "Child 84, Roud 54" is the ballad known in some texts as "Bonny Barbara Allen."

Now, the version of the songs that I play, personally, is called "Barbry Ellen," and is a variant collected in the Appalachian Mountains in the early 1900s by John Jacob Niles. The words and tune are a bit different from other takes on the song, and probably very, very different from the original Scottish ballad, but if you compare multiple versions you'll see that the story and key phrases are identical, and that they're all the same root song, which fall under the same Child/Roud numbers.

I plan on including these numbers when I have them available, first in the interest of being scholarly and sounding smart, but also in case it could help one of my listeners feed their curiousity by making it easier to track down information about a ballad.