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Jean Ritchie learned the old ballads the old way - at home in eastern Kentucky, from her own family, songs that had come down through generations. She may have been the last important singer who did. And the folklorist Maud Karpeles ruled that she could not be called a folk singer. Her offense? She went to college.
Host Nate Wilcox talks with Dave Thompson, author of “An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock Music,” in a conversation first released in 2025 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by subject matter. This is the moment the old ballads stopped passing from grandparent to grandchild and started arriving by record, radio and movie soundtrack - the run-up to the first folk revival.
It starts with Alan Lomax: 17,000 recordings, fifty years in the field, and a CBS radio show for schoolchildren, for which he got the modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger - Pete Seeger’s stepmother - to set folk tunes for orchestra years before anyone else thought to. His two-volume set of Child ballads sung by the people he found in the fields was the first time the general public could buy them. Then Ewan MacColl, the left-wing enforcer of the British folk clubs: ballads were to be sung unaccompanied, by someone from the culture that made them - a rule that meant his American partner, Peggy Seeger, could not sing English songs in his club. Plus the ballad that shocked Professor Child himself, and Peter Kennedy, the BBC collector who, the stories go, had the singers he recorded sign their songs away.
Also: Jean Ritchie’s scholarship to trace her family’s songs back to Britain, and why the woman who helped create the folk boom was already old-fashioned by the time it arrived; Josh White singing a Child ballad in a Randolph Scott western; Ritchie Blackmore first hearing “Barbara Allen” in Tom Brown’s School Days; a teenage Judy Collins, who bought the 78 of “The Whistling Gypsy” and sat on it the same day; Jo Stafford’s 1948 album of American folk songs; and Pete Seeger, the axe, and Newport.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* “Rissolty, Rossolty,” Ruth Crawford Seeger - the Schoenberg Ensemble, conducted by Oliver Knussen
* “The Keach in the Creel,” Ewan MacColl
* “The Little Devils,” Jean Ritchie
* “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” Josh White
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.
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