Review of SIGRID RIEUWERTS, ED. THE BALLAD REPERTOIRE OF ANNA GORDON, MRS BROWN OF FALKLAND Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011 pp. xiii + 339, isbn 978 1 89797 632 6

Abstract

The ballad repertoire of Anna Gordon, later Mrs Brown of Falkland, has interested intellectuals, folklorists and music collectors since before 1783. This was approximately the date at which a scholar and enthusiast for Scottish music, William Tytler of Woodhouselee, requested of Anna Gordon’s father, professor Thomas Gordon, that the ballads she had learned as a child be written down for him. Tytler wanted to establish a continuous Scottish musical tradition independent of Italian or English influences, and the old ballads were an important link in his argument. In the years that followed, Anna Gordon – by now Mrs Anna Brown – was appealed to several more times by antiquarians interested in the old songs, and she and her husband wrote out many more of the ballads she had stored in her memory.