Child ballads

As fond as I am of Child ballads for lo these five decades or more, I don't recall hearing "Earl Richard" until this week. Possibly I'd heard other version of it that didn't suit me and so didn't stick in memory, but I quite love this Sean Garvey rendition. I wasn't familiar with him, either, and am sorry to find he died earlier this year, and also to find that his recordings mostly don't seem available for purchase. This is a slow, repetitive, pretty, sad, hypnotic tune. What a nice burr Garvey had in his lower register.

1 comment:

  1. It's an interesting fact about Scottish songs that it's just about as often that the woman murders the man in the murder ballad as otherwise.

    ReplyDelete