A Biography of Anna Gordon Brown: 18th-Century Traditional Ballad Singer

FAIN: FA-52803-06

Ruth Perry
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA 02139-4307)

My project is a biography of Anna Gordon Brown, an eighteenth-century Scotswoman whose ballads formed the aesthetic core of Francis James Child’s magisterial The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1886-1898). Who she was and how she became the conduit for our common literary and musical heritage—our “best” ballads—is the story of a woman’s life during the Scottish enlightenment and the golden age of collecting folk songs at the end of the eighteenth century.