Anaïs Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer: Child Ballads

THE FOLKSONGS accumulated by the 19th-Century Harvard professor of rhetoric and oratory Francis Child have become an endlessly malleable core of material upon which each successive folk revival has drawn. Perhaps because he never heard them sung, but instead collected them as written texts, there is a protean, metamorphic quality to the Child Ballads which is well suited to their often supernatural themes.