All information about the Martin Carthy Boxset „Along the road forever“ All songs in alphabetical order, music, videos and links to more song information

Here’s a 30-category taxonomy of traditional English folk-song subjects, drawing on recurring themes found in broadside ballads, oral-tradition songs, and major collections such as those indexed by Roud and Child. # Category Typical Motifs 1 Courtship Wooing, persuasion, romantic pursuit 2 Faithful Lovers Separation, constancy, reunion 3 Unfaithful Lovers Betrayal, abandonment, broken promises 4 Love […]

Below is a 30-category taxonomy with representative English folk songs. I’ve chosen titles that are widely collected in English oral tradition and that regularly appear in the Roud and Child canons. # Category Representative Songs 1 Courtship The Seeds of Love, Bushes and Briars, The Sweet Nightingale 2 Faithful Lovers The Loyal Lover, The Constant […]

This 100-category system closely resembles how a folklorist might construct a topical index to the English repertoire. At an even finer level, one could expand this into 300-500 recurrent narrative motifs, aligning many of the categories with specific Child Ballads or Roud-index song families. Such a taxonomy becomes useful for comparative studies, showing, for example, […]

Here are some excellent folk and traditional songs: For traditional British and Irish folk song, wings most often appear through birds as messengers, symbols of freedom, omens, or transformed lovers rather than as literal winged flight. Here are some notable examples: Irish The Lark in the Morning She’s Like the Swallow (Newfoundland, but derived from […]