The Ballads & Songs of Derbyshire: With Illustrative Notes, and Examples of the Original Music, Etc.

In the hills and valleys of Derbyshire, for generations, songs were sung in taverns, at harvest feasts, and by lonely shepherds walking the moors. Many of these melodies and verses had no written existence until Llewellyn Jewitt undertook the labor of preserving them. This volume gathers over fifty ballads drawn from oral tradition, some recorded here for the first time, capturing the voices of poachers and parsons, lovers and lunatics, the hanged and the celebrated. The original musical notations accompany the texts, allowing modern readers to hear fragments of a melody that once echoed through country lanes. Jewitt's extensive notes trace the songs' origins, connecting them to specific places, events, and folk customs unique to this corner of England. The result is more than an anthology: it is a resurrection of a vanishing world, where a county's landscape and history lived not just in monuments and documents but in the mouths of its people. For anyone drawn to the raw, unvarnished voice of English folk tradition, these ballads offer an uncannily vivid portal to the nineteenth-century countryside and the rough poetry of ordinary lives.