Festival-Anthology recordings
Field Trip
1954 - Collector Limited Editions CLE 1201 LP
Track List:Pretty Polly - Jean Ritchie
On the Banks of Red Roses (Scotland)- Ella Ward [1]
Cuckoo's Nest (Scotland) - Jimmy MacBeath [1]
Cuckoo - Jean Ritchie
Bog Down in the Valley (Ireland) - Seamus Ennis [1]
Tree in the Valley-O - Jean Ritchie
Barbara Allen (Scotland) - Jimmy Stewart [1]
Barbara Allyn (Ireland) - Elizabeth Cronin [1]
Barbry Ellen - Jean Ritchie
Froggy Went A-Courting - Jean Ritchie
Uncle Frog Went Out to Ride (Ireland) - Seamus Ennis [1]
Orange and Lemon (England) - Dianne Endicott [1]
Needle's Eye - Jean Ritchie
Maid in Her Father's Garden - Elizabeth Cronin [1]
Pretty Fair Miss - Jean Ritchie
Bonaparte's Retreat (Ireland) - Johnny Pickering [1]
Bonaparte's Retreat - Jean Ritchie
Derry Gaol (Ireland) - Sarah Makem [1]
Hangman Song - Jean Ritchie
When My Apron It Hung Low (Scotland) - Jeannie Robertson [1]
Careless Love - Jean Ritchie
Credits
1 These field recordings were made by Jean Ritchie in 1952/53, during a Fulbright scholarship tour through Scotland, Ireland and England.
No further information currently available
Sleeve Notes
No further information currently available
Balladeers notes
"Originally released in 1954, this result of a song collecting trip, was one of the first collections to bring traditional Southern and British ballads to a wider audience. Jean Ritchie, from a musical family in Viper, Kentucky, was, moreover, not only a song collector, but a representative of the musical tradition she was studying. Traveling to the British Isles, Ritchie sought the sources of the kinds of songs that had been in her family for several generations. She gathered some of the results on Field Trip, pairing them, when possible, with her performances of American versions of the songs.
In the early '50s, when folk singer and scholar Jean Ritchie was in college, she longed to journey to the British Isles to investigate the same musical connections that Francis James Child had explored almost 100 years earlier. Like Child, Ritchie was interested in mapping the songs she knew as a child back to their original origins, and eventually earned a Fulbright grant to visit Europe and document her findings. While Child's five-volume book English and Scottish Popular Ballads was groundbreaking in its unprecedented ability to draw connections between ancient and far-reaching folksongs, Ritchie planned to record these similarly rooted ballads and present the songs in groups so that the listener could hear the similarities themselves."
Source: Merlin in Rags
Alternate release
Field Trip: 2001 - Greenhays GREEH-CD0726 CD