The Folklore & Fiction Ballads
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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.
Shatter and Rise
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A young woman braves the wrath of a winter goddess to learn a lost magic. Another throws the tarot for an unrequited love and finds only a mirror in the cards. Two sisters make a terrible choice to preserve one of them from harm. Shatter and Rise brings together three ballads from C.S. MacCath's repertoire of original songs to address the resilience, the heartache, and the power of magical women. Hit "play," curl your hands around a tisane, and be transported.