From 2019 to 2023, the Folklore & Fiction dispatches and podcasts brought the principles of folkloristics to storytellers of all kinds. They were recommended by the American Folklore Society as a trusted source of folkloristic scholarship, they were the topic of peer-reviewed ethnographic research, and they were adopted as an aid to creative writing in several college and university classrooms. They were also an opportunity for me to sing several ballads in the English and Scottish tradition. Many of these Child Ballads, so named because Francis James Child collected them in the 19th century, were also categorized in The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. This made them ideal candidates for rich discussion of sung folk narrative traditions, so I made projects of them whenever possible by researching the lyrics and music of the ballads, often with the help of Bertrand Harris Bronson’s The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. I included the rough mixes that resulted from this research in the dispatch and podcast editions where I discussed the ballads in question, but my renditions were popular in their own right, so I promised that I would someday gather them into an EP. Here they are along with my deepest gratitude for every reader and listener who has ever supported my work.
The Folklore & Fiction Ballads
MacCath, C.S. The Folklore & Fiction Ballads. Triskele Media Press, 2025, Bandcamp.
Last week, C.S. MacCath released an EP called The Folklore & Fiction Ballads that already has its hooks in me. She is a Doctor of Folklore, and her “approach to musical storytelling is rooted in Western and Northern European Paganisms, which are her spiritual touchstones.”
She provides sparse musical accompaniment via simple percussion and the drone of a shruti box. This provides plenty of room for her character-oriented vocals, whose melodies contain surprising pitches that draw my ear to the lyrics.
~ Matt Thompson on Critical Hit Parader